Entirely Cool!

  

We’re pushing forward with electric cars – California has even banned the sale of all electric cars starting in 2025 – and soaring temperatures accompanied by expanding warmer polar air redirecting colder air into the lower 48 has added new pressures for greater electric power generation. We back-slid a bit in 2022 from the “greener” pre-pandemic numbers, above left, as America returned to near-full operation after COVID slipped from “out-of-control” to “manageable and containable.” Even as the Reduction of Inflation Act of 2022 (setting aside $369 billion for climate and clean energy projects) supplements the Build Back Better Act of 2021, time is not on our side, as never-ending drought, flooding and wildfires attest.

But we do have amazing resources if only we could move the electricity where it is easy generate to those areas that need that extra power. We might even be able to counter the loss of hydroelectric power capacity as dammed reservoirs, the driving force behind hydropower, for example, along the Colorado River, drop to levels below what is needed to drive the necessary turbines. While the technology and the energy capacity is certainly able to make climate change more tolerable, resistance from incumbent petrochemical giants (and the states that rely on taxing coal, oil and gas extraction), is still a massive break on necessary change. While it should be a scientific and not a political challenge, “green” has become blue while fossil fuels have become red. Dems vs Republicans. Very sad.

But there are a few interesting developments that I would like to discuss today, adding to my discussion of the promising research with solid state batteries in my recent Electric Cars… Not Quite Yet blog: new investment opportunities in the long-distance movement of electrical power combined with building the next generation of super-efficient air conditioners. It is ironic that a major coal state, one which ousted a very conservative member of Congress because she could not support Donald Trump, offered one of the greenest solutions to a state that represents the polar opposite political view on almost everything. Yup, Wyoming may just come to the rescue for energy impaired California! Particularly Southern California, a hotbed of liberalism.

Writing for the August 27th Los Angeles Times, Sammy Roth tells us: “Solar and wind farms can create jobs and tax revenues, reduce deadly air pollution and slow rising temperatures. But they can also disrupt wildlife habitat and destroy sacred Indigenous sites. Some small-town residents consider them industrial eyesores.

“Those tensions have come to define Wyoming’s Carbon County — a place named for coal… To understand why, look at a wind resource map of the United States. Most of the West is rendered in pale shades of green and light blue, meaning average wind speeds of 10 to 15 mph at best. But this part of southern Wyoming — where the Rocky Mountains drop down in elevation, creating a funnel-like effect — is streaked with thick veins of dark blue… For wind energy developers, that’s the really good stuff: speeds of 20 mph and above…

“Before wind energy took off, there wasn’t much going on in this corner of Wyoming cattle country, says Laine Anderson, director of wind operations at PacifiCorp, the company owned by billionaire investor Warren Buffett that built [a massive wind turbine farm]… Buffett isn’t the only ultra-wealthy investor looking to cash in.

“Not far from the Oracle of Omaha’s clean energy kingdom, the reclusive billionaire Phil Anschutz — who owns the Coachella music festival, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team and L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena [and made his fortune laying fiberoptic cable along railway lines] — is preparing to build the nation’s largest wind farm [3,000 megawatts]… After nearly 15 years of planning, crews are constructing gravel roads. Pads are being cleared for roughly 600 turbines.

“Wyoming’s half-million residents don’t need all that energy. California’s 40 million residents do. So Anschutz is [also] getting ready to construct a 732-mile power line across Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Nevada, to ship electricity to the Golden State.” It is a massively expensive undertaking. According to UltilityDive.com, this $3 billion venture will construct a “1,500 MW of capacity on a transmission line slated to run from Wyoming to southern Nevada, where power can reach California markets, according to a [December 21st filing] at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.”

Parallel with that development is a recent technological advance in air conditioning, pioneered by a Harvard research team, to deal with the soaring demand for ways to cool human beings without increasing reliance on fossil fuels. FastCompany.com’s Adele Peter explains (in the August 26th edition) the backdrop and the technology: “In China, a searing heat wave has lasted for more than two months, and the power grid is straining as people crank up their air-conditioning. The country is one of the places where AC use has been growing the fastest, with a five-fold jump between 2000 and 2017. But as the planet keeps getting hotter, and more people around the world are able to afford air-conditioning, its use is growing everywhere. By the middle of the century, there are likely to be about 5.6 billion of the appliances, and nearly triple the energy demand of cooling today.

“‘I think the numbers come out to about 10 new air conditioners every second for the next 30 years,’ says Jack Alvarenga, a research scientist at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, and part of a team working on redesigning how homes can be cooled. ‘That’s an unbelievable number. Just to fathom the amount of cooling demand that’s about to come online in the next couple of decades is concerning.’

“The problem is significant both because of the amount of energy that air conditioners require and the fact that current refrigerants, the chemicals that absorb the heat in your AC, are also potent greenhouse gases. (Thanks to the global Kigali Agreement, the worst refrigerants are being phased out, but that will take time.) The more AC is used, the hotter it will get outside. Then people need to use even more air-conditioning, and the cycle continues…

“Jonathan Grinham, an architecture professor at the university’s Graduate School of Design and one of the partners on the project, [describes the results]. ‘We call it a technology push. . . . Okay, I have something that has super-unique behavior. So how does it benefit society? Where do we apply this type of technology?’

“In this case, the coating repels liquids, inspired by the way duck feathers stay dry. The team realized that if it selectively applied this coating to certain places on ceramic—a material that naturally absorbs moisture—they could use it in a new type of evaporative cooler. Sometimes called swamp coolers, the devices usually only work in dry climates. The basic concept is simple: If you put hot air in contact with water, the water absorbs heat as it evaporates. It uses 75% less energy than typical air conditioners. But the process of evaporative cooling also creates humidity, and so doesn’t work well in, say, Florida. In the new device, when water evaporates to cool the air, a heat-exchange component made with the coating traps the humidity, and the air flowing into the room is more comfortable.” It is a question of priorities: time, commitment and effort by all of us. Now!

I’m Peter Dekom, and we can and must face this huge problem even if we literally have to shove those who deny the threat out of the way.