This was announced last night by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a Commonwealth club meeting. Here are more details.

Our proposal - “Clean Energy 2030” - provides a potential path to weaning the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 (with some remaining use of natural gas as well as nuclear), and cutting oil use for cars by 38%.

The financial bottom line: Although the cost of the Clean Energy 2030 proposal is significant (about $4.4 trillion in undiscounted 2008 dollars), savings are even greater ($5.4 trillion), returning a net savings of $1.0 trillion over the 22-year life of the plan.

Going renewable will save money over time. That’s one of the crucial points, and something Schmidt emphasized at his talk. Yes, this will help stop global warming, but it also is a good financial investment. And that’s how it needs to be approached when trying to get businesses onboard with the plan.

From the Google Foundation blog

To get there we need immediate action on three fronts:

(1) Reduce demand by doing more with less

(2) Develop renewable energy that is cheaper than coal

(3) Electrify transportation and re-invent our electric grid

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Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, spoke at a Commonwealth Club meeting last night in S.F.

“We have seen a total and complete failure of leadership in the political parties of the United States. We’ve been working on a plan to help solve this problem,” he said.

Schmidt was inspirational, practical too. Based on what they’ve done at Google, he says renewable energy is not only the best way to combat global warming, it is also cost-effective. They installed solar in the parking lots at their headquarters for $5 million and it paid for itself in 2 1/2 years. They get 20% of their power from that solar now. Other large companies watched that happen and are doing the same. That’s real leadership.

Some points he made.

- Plugin hybrids are next. Once everyone cuts back on the amount of oil being used, guess what, the price of oil drops, resulting in even more savings.

- The US needs a massive stimulus package. He says, put most of that into rebuilding the national electric grid and renewable energy and huge numbers of new jobs, with resulting tax revenue, will be created. Many of them will be in rural areas where they really need jobs too.

- Solar and wind power is cheaper than nuclear. He ran the numbers and can prove it.

- Geothermal can be installed anywhere and the current research is to make it scale to huge commercial levels.

- Conservation is the best way to save energy.

- Solar thermal projects are being installed big time in California and the West now. They’ll be powering “a couple of San Franciscos ” in a few years, with lots more coming after that.

- The electric grid needs a huge upgrade. Make it “smart, big, and in the right places.”

- A 100 mile by 100 mile area with solar and wind power in the southwest could produce enough electricity to power the nation.

- Again, the grid needs to be smart. So does does the plugin hybrid. Then it can take more power in when consumption and rates are low. It could even feed into the grid if there’s a shortage. The technology to do this exists now.

- Smart grids can tell people about their usage. “Give information to people and they’ll make smart decisions.”

The current Congress and Administration have been perhaps the most inept in history. It’s good to see a company like Google playing a major role in getting the country to move to cleantech.

Greentech has more.

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Once again, our little friends from the algae kingdom show they can do astonishing things!

Right now, this pilot project at an Oregon coal plant is minuscule, but when it goes commercial, it could reduce emissions as much as 60% during the day and produce 20 million gallons of biodiesel per year.

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These solar tubes provide more than just a circular skylight. The light is consistent, as the tube is engineered to capture early and late day sun and to reflects too-hot mid day sun. Also, the light is diffused the light once in the house.

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From Solve Climate

Co-generation takes energy that is wasted or dissipated by heavy industry and uses it to generate power.

We think we could make about 19 to 20 percent of U.S. electricity with heat that is currently thrown away by industry.

Tom Casten, chairman, Recycled Energy Development

One major barrier to widespread adoption of co-generation is the same as that facing home solar. It’s difficult and sometimes impossible to sell the power back into the grid. But imagine the savings, both in dollars and greenhouses gases, if all that wasted energy was turned into electricity.

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The ESL (electron-stimulated luminescence) light bulb is coming.

So why is the ESL bulb any better than CFLs or LEDs?

Vu1 claims that their bulbs do not have the trace amounts of mercury that CFLs contain, and they do not require the manufacturing energy of LEDs. The ESL bulbs, which will cost $12, are about the same as dimmable CFLs. We can expect to see these on the market fairly soon—Vu1 says the first screw-in models could be available as early as September 2008.

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An excellent idea. May more states follow.

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Cheap electricity from waste heat

Hospital to be heated and cooled by artificial geothermal lake

Instead of putting the airbag in the car, put the car in the airbag.

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Not only is it the right thing to do, greening your business can save money, as Qualcomm has found. They use waste heat from servers to create power, built floors that cut down on cooling costs, use virtualization instead of buying more servers - and more.

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All the cooling is done passively. It has tinted, heat resistant windows and a central courtyard provides ventilation into interior windows.

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Vacuum-insulated glass being developed by Guardian Industries will deliver a startling R-12 insulation level, making it equal to walls. The price is expected to be reasonable and here’s the kicker.

“This performance level would convert most windows in heating climates into net energy suppliers, providing more energy to the home via passive solar gain (even facing north) than the window loses”

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The Oil Drum points out that while coal is falling into disfavor in the US, it is widely used by developing countries because it is freely available and cheap.

The reality is that many of the nations that are switching to coal to provide the power for the next 20 years or more are doing so in part to bring their people closer to the living standard of the West. When villages have no power, we do not have the right to tell their government that they cannot provide it, even if coal is the only power source available.

If we don’t want hundreds if not thousands of new coal plants in the coming decades then alternatives need to be planned for now. Renewables like wind, solar, hydro, and wave can certainly play major roles, as can an emphasis on smart electronics and appliances that conserve energy. But what if spent nuclear rods could be reused? GE thinks this is economically feasible and is working on it. And yes, only a deep-pockets company like GE can fund something like this.

The market opportunity to recover the vast amount of useful energy in spent nuclear fuel remains available if a firm, such as General Electric, can develop the technologies to safety recover it without the environmental issues associated with aqueous recycling methods.

Maybe one day the government will be funding research into cleantech and cheap power. The fast developing Third World will be requiring vast amounts of power, and they will do it either with cleantech or with coal. If the developed countries make the right choices now and provide the technology for developing countries to produce clean power at a reasonable cost, then they won’t have to use coal. If not, then they have little or no choice.

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Hmm, maybe flying strawberries from New Zealand to New England in January isn’t the best of all possible use of resources.

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Exxon Mobil technology is already used in cellphone batteries. They hope to do the same for nextgen lithium-ion hybrid car batteries.

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OLEDs are even more energy efficient than regular LEDs. And now GE, after four years, has invented a way to print them newspaper style, quickly and inexpensively too.

This could be a paradigm shift, a whole new way of doing light. It often takes a huge corporation with immense deep pockets to do the R&D necessary to develop products like this. GE is also an industry leader in wind turbines.

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The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

Yet in Britain, the government plans new “clean coal” projects because they say it’s the only way to keep the lights on. Doesn’t sound like they’re even trying to encourage energy conservation and renewables, does it?

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The FuelMeister creates biodiesel out of used cooking oil, methanol, lye, electricity and tap water. With these ingredients properly blended the FuelMeister can kick out 80 gallons of clean-burning fuel every day. This fuel can be used to power your vehicle or even your home or both.

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Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber has been criss-crossing the world in support of Abu Dhabi’s $15 billion Masdar Initiative, which aims to build a zero-carbon, zero-waste city with a population of 50,000 in hopes it can “re-engineer the way cities are built.”

Meanwhile, in that apparent cleantech backwater called the United States, reactionary forces continue their losing battle to fight for their right to despoil the atmosphere and deplete resources.

Yes, there are plenty of highly progressive cleantech initiatives in the US, often championed by huge corporations like Wal-Mart, and lots of venture capital and funding for cleantech too. But on the political level, the US remains an anachronism, stuck in the past, almost proudly refusing to change.

Maybe the next U.S. president will change all that. Let’s hope so.

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Private sector pumping hundreds of billions into cleantech

Key quote, referring to a UN report

“Increasingly, combating climate change is being perceived as an opportunity rather than a burden and a path to a new kind of prosperity as opposed to a brake on profits and employment,” said the report, which credits the emerging “green” economy with “driving invention and innovation on a scale not seen since perhaps the industrial revolution.”

Yes! The fear and the resistance to change is becoming a thing of the past. The companies that get it will invest big time in cleantech and some will become the next ExxonMobil. (It’s a given that the reactionary dinosaur that is ExxonMobil will not be the next ExxonMobil. But rather that some upstart cleantech company will dethrone them. Heck, it might even be the spawn of Google.org that does it…)

Equally important is that business now sees global warming and cleantech this as opportunity, and indeed, an entire new economic structure for the planet may result because of this. Locally-produced decentralized power will be a large part of the solution, and as that happens, political structures will become decentralized too.

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Tata is planning hybrid, EV, and hydrogen versions for the Tata Nano, their newly announced $2500 ultra low cost car for India. Good! Low cost, low/no emission vehicles is precisely what the planet needs.

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From Greenpeace UK comes the absolutely dazzling and informative EfficienCity, a Flash animation of how a town could be designed to create renewable, clean energy. You can drill down to various sections of town, see how the grids work, then view videos detailing specific methods of power generation and more. Bravo!

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The philanthropic arm of Google plans to invest hundreds of million in cleantech development with a key goal of making renewable energy cheaper than coal.

Sergey Brin says they are concentrating on three energy sources: solar-thermal, deep geothermal, and high-altitude wind; if he had to add one, it would be photovoltaic. He says that windmills are on a par with coal but are intermittent and they think it can be even cheaper by using high-altitude wind, through kites, which are cheaper to make than metal windmills. They’ve invested in this and solar-thermal. Deep geothermal is a bit farther off because it requires more fundamental research to get to scale.

Solar thermal converts solar power to heat first, rather than directly to electricity as in photovoltaics. Deep geothermal uses heat and steam from within the earth. High altitude wind power uses tethered airborne wind turbines. The big advantage here is that the wind is always blowing up in the jetstream and they are portable and thus can be set up anywhere.

Key quote:

“You can’t succeed just out of conservation because then you won’t have economic development,” [Google Foundation’s Larry] Brilliant explains. “Find a way to make electricity — not to cut back on it but to have more of it than you ever dreamed of.”

Smart grids and more efficient appliances and engines are coming. An emphasis on conservation is certainly important, after all, why waste energy? But the real answer is cheap, renewable energy and clean transportation. While I can admire the Jim Kunstler’s of the world for sounding the alarm on global warming and peak oil, they too often seem fatalistic about what’s coming, something which stands in sharp contrast with the Google Foundation’s determination to find solutions.

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Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) speaks to Focus The Nation on] how we can turn the potential hard hit of climate change into the “triple play of another American century” by cleaning the air, creating jobs, and reducing oil dependency for national security. The real surprise was his likening of EPA regulations to biblical law in their mutual support for stewardship of the earth.

Such a triple play would create a good century for the planet not just America. But it would certainly help us too.

I think Inglis is pioneering new ground and has caught on to a bigger idea here about how the US can revitalize its leadership potential — even if we are waving goodbye to hegemony — when he suggests we can no longer afford to look like “the fat cats who really don’t care.”

This guy gets it way better than most Democrats… Global warming can be a catalyst to create serious, long-lasting, and needed change.

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John Couzin in Scotland commented in our recent post about nuclear power that it is problematic in the UK. I emailed him asking for more information. Here’s his reply.

All nuclear power stations have leaks of some kind, some internal some external, some pass without comment others create news. They also have “glitches” which don’t result in a leak but a shutdown, which in a normal power station is a nuisance but in a nuclear it could be the start of a disaster. The Sellafield problem is two fold it is a nuclear reprocessing plant as well as a power station, hence the big problem with the clean up there. It has had several leaks over a long period of time, at least one rather nasty fire. Several areas of the beaches around it are contaminated. Even the water that they discharge into is contaminated, Norway and Ireland have complained to the British government about the radio active contamination of their waters. The very use of radio active material means that what it comes in contact with also becomes radio active this in turn creates problems in containment and decommissioning.

I don’t have any information on the French situation but going by historical evidence in every other country they must have had leaks and/or problems of some sort and nobody has said they have found the answer to the decommissioning problem or surely we would be doing something similar. Don’t be fooled by thinking that you can run a nuclear power station for years and not have a radio active problem on the site. Everything man made breaks down, aircraft fall from the sky, ships sink, bridges collapse but we are suppose to believe that it won’t happen in a nuclear power station, (Three Mile Island). All of these other accidents are a tragedy, in a nuclear case it can be a catastrophe for years and/or generations to come over an incredible distance, (blowing in the wind).

All the information that I have is easy available from the British broadsheets The Independent, Guardian, Herald, The Times, etc. all on line now, and what I can find on the web.

While nukes could keep the lights on until we figure out what comes next, an alternative is energy conservation coupled with massive renewable energy development. We can certainly do both. Conservation doesn’t mean we all have to live by candlelight, but with smart grids, use of CFLs and LEDs, and other such measures, we could probably cut energy consumption 10-20% without much noticeable difference in our lifestyles.

The question is, can renewables provide enough clean non-carbon-emitting power to keep the grid going? Keep in mind that China and India are developing fast and will use coal if other low-cost alternatives aren’t available. Even an industrialized country like South Africa says they need up to twelve new nuclear plants because their electrical production is woefully short of what’s needed, causing ongoing rolling blackouts everywhere.

There are no easy answers here.

PS Apropos to the discussion: Rolling blackouts for mid-Atlantic states and the coming State of New York energy shortage.

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What, you’re still using those archaic CFLs? LEDs are the future!

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