It’s been a long time coming, but I know a change gon’ come.

From Low Impact Living:

You’ve probably seen the commercials – actually, they’re sort of impossible to miss.  T. Boone Pickens, looking folksy in his chambray shirt, talking about how he has been an Oil Man for over 50 years and how he’s got a real plan to break our dependence on foreign oil.  I love these ads because I want to believe Mr. Pickens with all my heart.  I want to believe that the answer to our oil addiction might be as simple as switching our cars over to clean natural gas to buy us time to develop renewable alternatives that will eventually get us off of oil completely.  But I’m skeptical.  We’ve been fooled before.  So I decided to take a deeper look at this man and his plan…

Is The Pickens Plan really as good as it seems?

The Man

T. Boone Pickens is indeed a former oil man – in fact, he is worth at least 3 billion dollars and made most of that fortune in the oil business. He started as a geologist for Phillips Petroleum in the early 1950’s, and then went on to create Mesa Petroleum and Petroleum Exploration. Pickens’ belief in acquisition rather than further exploration in the 1980s, lead to his notoriety as a take-over giant and his ranking as Forbes 117th-richest person in America. Pickens was also known for his hefty financial support of George W. Bush, the Republican Party and the 2004 Swift boat ads that helped derail John Kerry’s bid for the presidency.

But today, T. Boone is all about clean tech energy and he has renounced his Republican affiliations in order to pursue his passion for changing the hearts and minds of Americans to the belief that natural gas and renewable sources like wind and solar are our best and most possible hope for a better future.

The Washington Post verbally scratched its head at Pickens new persona: “The billionaire speculator as energy wise man, an oil-and-gas magnate as champion of wind power, and a lifetime Republican who has become a fellow traveler among environmentally minded Democrats.” I say, good for you T. Boone!  Now let’s look at the Plan.

The Plan

Mr. Pickens feels that world oil production has reached its peak and can no longer meet the demands of global consumption.  In fact, he feels that it is on the decline and we’ll be out of oil before we have an alternative if we don’t do something now.  The Plan proposes that we replace the natural gas currently being used for grid power (electricity) with wind power (which he has invested heavily in) and then take the excess natural gas and use that for transportation fuel, replacing gasoline wherever possible until technology catches up with a renewable fuel source for our cars.

Pickens believes that by doing this, we can reduce our yearly foreign oil imports from $700 billion down to $400 billion in the next ten years.  That sounds pretty good.  Another thing that raises my hopes is that the Plan has been endorsed by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, who is usually quite vocal about things that are bad for the environment.  To read the entire plan: The Pickens Plan

The Verdict

Pickens has been criticized for creating a plan from which he might stand to gain quite a bit, having already invested nearly 12 billion dollars in wind technology.  His standard rebuttal to this accusation is: “I’m 80 years old, and I’m worth $4 billion. I have plenty of money.  I think it shows leadership that I’m putting my money into the wind business, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”  He testified in front of congress in July of this year that his plan would not only reduce our foreign oil consumption by switching cars to natural gas, it would create new jobs in clean technology throughout the wind corridor of the United States, an area in the middle of the country that stretches from the Canadian border, through the Great Plains and into Texas.

The biggest impediment to the Plan, however, seems to be the number of hurdles that need to be gotten over in order for the Plan to succeed.  They include:

+  The monetary and environmental costs of building enough wind turbines to meet our power needs
+  The assumption that wind power will adequately replace the natural gas proposed for transportation fuel
+  Connecting that power to large cities through approximately 40,000 miles of transmission lines
+  Switching millions of drivers over to natural gas vehicles
+  Creating enough natural gas filling stations to support all of those cars
+  Over-coming a gridlocked political system
+  Navigating a severely weakened economy

Mr. Pickens is quick to point out that his plan isn’t a complete solution, it is “a bridge to the future — a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives, and buy us time to develop even greater new technologies.”  With gas prices so high and the economy teetering on the edge, the Plan does seem like a real challenge and yet better than some other ideas floating around out there.  We all know that something has to change and it might mean that we have to make some short-term sacrifices to gain long-term benefits.

If Mr. Pickens has enough energy at 80 to commit to an idea that will take that much money, hard work and tenacity, then I say let him try.  Maybe it’s just the Game Changer we need to take a serious step in the right direction.

(Almost) Free Solar!!! Tax credit/rebate madness!!!

Attached to the latest bailout plan passed by the Fine Folks on Capitol Hill, was an extension and amendment of the federal solar tax credit.  The tax credit is extended for an additional 8 years.  Before this renewal, there was a cap at $2000 for the tax credit.  No more!  The federal tax credit is now up to 30% and can be applied alongside other state and local incentives to go solar.

San Francisco is leading the way by encouraging homeowners and landlords to go solar.  In additon to being the first city to pass stringent green building ordinances, Gavin championed this little number below.

From dsireusa.org:

“The City and County of San Francisco, through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), are providing rebates to residents and businesses who install photovoltaic (PV) systems on their properties. Systems must be at least one kilowatt (kW) in capacity, and there is no maximum size limit to participate. There are four distinct funding levels for residential installations. First, basic installations of systems are eligible for rebates of $3,000. Residential systems installed by a local installer qualify for a higher incentive of $4,000. Residential installations in lower income and racially diverse neighborhoods considered “environmental justice districts” because of their proximity to industrial sites and major highways are eligible for an even higher incentive of $5,000. Systems installed by individuals trained through the city’s workforce development system can receive an incentive of $6,000.

Commercial, non-profit and industrial installations receive a capacity-based incentive of $1,500 per kW, up to a maximum amount of $10,000. Multi-unit residential buildings that are operated by a non-profit may receive up to $4,500 per kW (depending on the number of units) up to a maximum of $30,000.

The San Francisco rebates can be combined with the state-level California Solar Initiative, in addition to the federal tax credit. To simplify the application process, San Francisco will approve of any system which qualifies for the California Solar Initiative.

The San Francisco Solar Energy Incentive Pilot Program is funded with $3 million from the SFPUC renewable energy fund, which comes from the sale of power generated by the Hetch Hetchy dam. The renewable energy funds previously provided funding just for solar installations on city buildings, which is expected to continue with a portion of the fund.”

So, if the Fed, Sacramento, and The City are all willing to pitch in, why wouldn’t you go solar?  It increases the value of your home, decreases your dependence on carbon-emitting fossil fuels, and give your home the certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ of cool, green cache.

I happen to know a few solar outfits here in The Bay.  If you’re curious about solar for your home or office, give me a call and I can set you up with the right folks to get the ball rolling.

Moon Powered!

World’s Largest Tidal Turbine to be Installed in Northern Ireland.  I just wonder about the fate of sea critters when pitted against this physical challenge…

From Treehugger:

A company called Marine Current Turbines will be installing a 1.2 megawatt tidal turbine in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough in August. The SeaGen turbine will be the world’s largest ever tidal current device by a significant margin. It will generate clean electricity for approximately 1000 homes. The turbine is a prototype to be replicated on a large scale over the next few years. The rotors on the SeaGen turbine turn slowly: about 10 to 20 revolutions per minute. A ship’s propellers, by comparison, typically run 10 times as fast. The risk of impact from SeaGen rotor blades is small, because the marine creatures that swim in strong currents tend to be agile, and can avoid slow-moving underwater obstructions.

Future turbines will generally be rated at from 750 to 1500 kilowatts (kW), and will be grouped under the sea, at places with high currents, in much the same way that wind turbines in a wind farm are set out in rows to catch the wind.

Commenting on the future prospects for tidal current energy, Martin Wright, Managing Director of Marine Current Turbines said: “We will build on the success of SeaGen to develop a commercial tidal farm, of up to 10MW in UK waters, within the next three years. With the right funding and regulatory framework, we believe we can realistically achieve up to 500MW of tidal capacity by 2015 based on this new SeaGen technology.”

The buffalo were a gift. The wind is a gift.

From the NY Times:

ROSEBUD, S.D. — The wind blows incessantly here in the high plains; screen doors do not last. Wind is to South Dakota what forests are to Maine or beaches are to Florida: a natural bounty and a valuable inheritance.

Rodney M. Bordeaux, the Rosebud Sioux tribal council president, said that with the proposed 30-megawatt wind farm, “We can become a major player in wind in South Dakota.”

Native American tribes like the Rosebud Sioux now seek to claim that inheritance. If they succeed in building turbine farms to harness some of the country’s strongest and most reliable winds, tribal officials like Ken Haukaas believe, they could create a new economic underpinning for the 29,000 tribal members whose per capita annual income is about $7,700, less than a third the national average.

“We’re broke here,” Mr. Haukaas said. “We’re poor.” But, he added: “The wind is free. There’s energy here all the time.”

Mr. Haukaas believes that “the same thing that brought the buffalo brings the wind.”

“The buffalo were a gift,” he continued. “The wind is a gift.”

In 2003, after erecting a 750-kilowatt turbine that powers the Rosebud Casino near the Nebraska border, the Rosebud Sioux tribal council set its sights on building the Owl Feather War Bonnet wind farm, a 30-megawatt project that could power about 12,000 homes, each about 1,200 square feet.

After five years of negotiations with a non-Indian developer, Distributed Generation Systems Inc. of Colorado, the tribal council president, Rodney M. Bordeaux, said Thursday that he expected to sign a construction deal that would bring in some $5 million to the tribe over 20 years. The total is about $1.7 million less than the developer’s original offer because of an acrimonious last-minute dispute with the tribe.

The idea of hitching tribal fortunes to the wind has gained momentum with the growth of the wind industry, which is expanding so fast that turbines are in short supply worldwide.

Half the states now require utilities to add renewable energy to their portfolios. The oilman T. Boone Pickens is proselytizing about the value of wind, and thousands of turbines have sprouted on the Texas plains.

If Native Americans can get into the business, some federal officials say, the hope is that wind, like casino gaming, could reshape their economies.

“It could be huge,” said Lizana Pierce, the project manager with the tribal energy program at the Department of Energy.

Here in the wind-rich Indian country, turbines are few, and deals to build them often do not come easily. Unpredictable cultural boundaries sometimes separate Indian tribal leaders, who have access to the wind, and non-Indian business executives, who raise the money to buy and install turbines, make deals to transmit the electricity to market and find buyers for it.

With just one significant wind farm operating on Indian land — a 50-megawatt project on the Campo reservation near San Diego — the Energy Department has been hoping for another to prove to wind developers that successful projects are possible.

Sandra Begay-Campbell, the principal member of the technical staff at the department’s Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said, “People have been waiting for something to happen so you can point to the success and say, ‘Look at this model.’ ”

Other projects are in the offing; the Lower Brule Sioux tribe, to the northeast of Rosebud, recently struck a deal with Iberdrola Renewables, a subsidiary of the Spanish utility Iberdrola S.A., to build a 225-megawatt wind farm.

But only the Rosebud Sioux, Ms. Begay-Campbell said, “are poised and ready to move toward the actual development and hardware.”

The Energy Department has invested nearly $450,000 in the development of the Owl Feather War Bonnet wind farm, to be built on 50 acres in the western part of the Rosebud reservation. The department also recommended Distributed Generation Systems and its president, Dale Osborn, a seasoned hand in the wind-energy industry who has built small-scale projects in Colorado, Spain and China.

But it took the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs 18 months to sign off on the original deal, approved by the tribal council in 2006, under which the tribe would receive $280,000 in royalties the first year of the wind farm’s operation. The amount would have grown each year, with the 20-year total topping $7 million.

Mr. Haukaas, who is the tribe’s project manager, said that from a landowner’s standpoint, the offer was the most lucrative he could find. “This is a $58.6 million project,” he told the tribal council. “We do not put up a dime. All we put up is the land.”

During those 18 months, a tribal election was held, and the new council objected to the terms of the deal.

After tribal tax authorities recently decided that tribal sovereignty was at risk if a $1.17 million employment tax, the maximum possible, was not paid up front, Mr. Osborn complained bitterly to the tribe and to the reservation’s Congressional overseers.

“I am frustrated beyond belief,” Mr. Osborn said in a recent interview, adding that his deal with investors cannot bear the weight of the unexpected upfront costs unless royalty payments are lowered.

But some of the council’s 20 members were suspicious of Mr. Osborn and angry at his outbursts about the tax.

“The people for these companies come and wave a couple of dollars in front of us, and we fall for it,” a council member, Leonard Wright, said at a meeting on Oct. 2.

Another member, Robert D. Moore, said of Mr. Osborn: “He questions our mentality. I question his.”

A few years ago, a hog-farm company received an easement from the Rosebud Sioux in return for a percentage of net profits — then showed little or no profit. Mr. Bordeaux, the tribal council president, said he had taken care to make certain that whoever developed the wind farm did not “take advantage of us like the hog farm did.”

Mr. Osborn emphasized that the tribe’s royalty share would be taken from revenues, not profits. On Wednesday, he sent back to the tribe a revised deal that reduced the total payout over 20 years by $1.7 million, to a little more than $5 million, to accommodate the upfront tax payment.

Despite the rancorous back and forth, Mr. Bordeaux said Thursday that he would sign off on the new arrangement. “The main idea is we got that initiative going,” he said. “We can become a major player in wind in South Dakota.”

Patricia Nelson Limerick, a history professor who is board chairwoman of the Center of the American West, at the University of Colorado, pointed to the “several hundred years of mistrust between white folks and Indians” in discussing the “tangled” process that led to the Rosebud Sioux’s wind deal. “If you average out the zigzags,” Dr. Limerick said, “it’s moving in the right direction.”

Mr. Osborn was less sanguine. “Doing business on a reservation,” he said, “is more difficult than doing business in China.”