Occassional Dimes

RFID enabled credit cards are easy to hack: I met Pablos at ETech earlier this year, he gave a fantastic talk on credit card (in)security and other topics.

Alternative Energy: Boom or Bust?

James Speth: The co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council in an hour-long interview on KQED's Forum.

Pico Iyer on the Dalai Lama: One of my favorite travel writers has a new book on Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, I'm really looking forward to reading it. In the meantime, enjoy this recent Fresh Air interview.

Weak Dollar Hurts Poor in the Philippines: Asian economies may be less dependent on the U.S., but in many countries, dollar remittances are an important source of income for the poorer segments of their populations.

Phillip Moffitt: Former editor/publisher of Esquire, emerges as a dharma teacher.

Previous Dimes can be found here.

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Leadership, Home Sizes, and Buy Nothing Day

We live in an age of excess, and nothing better captures this point than the average size of new homes. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average new home went from 1,100 square feet in the 1950's to 2,340 square feet in 2002. In the 1950's new homes averaged 290 square feet per family member, by 2003, new homes constructed averaged 893 square feet per family member! I'm proud to report that at about 450 square feet per family member, my 2-person household is way below the national average.

A large house, no matter how green and energy efficient, is hard to justify in a world plagued with homelessness and crushing poverty. I tend to see this less as an environmental and more as a social justice issue. In the SF Bay Area, one frequently encounters well-meaning Liberals with strong environmental credentials, who are ensconced in large homes in trendy hillsides and neighborhoods. While the green movement is slowly going mainstream, social justice and simplicity have yet to be embraced by most Liberals.

Home contractor friends have told me that 2500 square foot homes are way too big for most families. I suspect that a family of 4 can live comfortably in a 1500 square foot residence. So why do environmentally-conscious and well-meaning Liberals continue to live in large residences, located in affluent neighborhoods?

One clue is to look at the primary residences of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for President. Edwards, Gore, Clinton and Obama, frequently champion anti-poverty and environmental issues, certainly more than their Republican counterparts. I'm not claiming that anyone who passionately fights for anti-poverty programs should take the vow of poverty, but these home sizes are incredible:


(To enlarge an image, click on it.) To put the home sizes in perspective, I included the square footage of a regulation-size basketball court. Anyone who has walked around a basketball court knows that even a "half court" takes quite a bit of space. These home sizes are for their primary residences: Clinton, Gore, and Edwards own multiple homes. The Clintons have another 5000+ square foot residence in Georgetown, and the Gores have a luxury apartment in SF, and at least one other house in Tennessee. Obama's home sits on a 7500 square foot lot, and since I was unable to track down the size of his home, I used aerial photos to give a conservative estimate. The Clintons applied to have their home expanded, the above estimate takes into account the proposed thousand square foot expansion.

People claim they need larger homes for when they have parties or events. My response is that they should rent out a ballroom on the rare occasions that they need to accommodate a large number of guests.

Friends in the SF Bay Area constantly talk of the "strong field" of candidates, and I definitely sense a lot of excitement among Liberal professionals. I too will end up voting for the Democratic nominee, but based on the lifestyles they maintain, I am not hopeful that they can truly push through meaningful anti-poverty agendas. John Edwards' talk of the "two Americas" rings hollow -- does he really need such a mega house!

Ironically President Bush, regarded as being pro Big Oil and pro rich, has a smaller residence than most of the leading Democrats. Clearly, home size is not a strong indicator for enlightened leadership! But shouldn't Democrats expects more (in this case less, is desirable) out of their leaders? Seriously, I look forward to the day when we elect leaders who not only promote social justice and simplicity, but have lives consistent with those values. (And no, I'm not voting for Kucinich.)

As we celebrate Buy Nothing Day this Friday, my hope is that we take its message and try to practice it as best we can, throughout the year. With an economy heavily dependent on consumption and consumer spending, no politician will advocate and, based on the chart above, maintain a simple lifestyle. Change will have to come from American consumers.

I remember being in a Clean Energy meeting at Google a few months back, and Googlers were emphasizing that by embracing renewable and efficient energy sources, "sacrifice" or the lowering of lifestyles, was not only unnecessary it was undesirable. I suppose if your main source of revenue is advertising, consumer spending/consumption is a natural consequence.

Buy. Less. Stuff.

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Externalities: Coal and Wind Energy

In a recent post, I highlighted mining and extraction costs ("externalities") associated with coal mining. In most countries coal is the dominant source of electricity. To effectively compete with the de facto source of electricity, supporters of renewable energy need to understand some of the externalities that are usually omitted when calculating the average cost of electricity from coal.


"Clean coal" initiatives do address emissions, but as I argued in my earlier post, mining and extraction have not been accounted for in a systematic manner.

On the emissions side, the most famous study on particulates was the decade-long EU study, ExternE ("the external costs of energy"):

Human activities like electricity generation or transport cause substantial environmental and human health damages, which vary widely depending on how and where electricity was generated. The damages caused are for the most part not integrated into the pricing system. Borrowing a concept adopted from welfare economics, environmental policy calls these damage costs externalities or external costs. By societal welfare principles, policy should aim to ensure that prices reflect total costs of an activity, incorporating the cost of damages caused by employing taxes, subsidies, or other economic instruments. This internalisation of external costs is intended as a strategy to rebalance the social and environmental dimension with the purely economic one, accordingly leading to greater environmental sustainability.

Thanks to the EU! Given the current level of influence of energy industry lobbyists in Washington, it is hard to imagine an equivalent Federal study being funded in the US. Nevertheless, US scientists have used the results of ExternE to estimate additional costs in the US.

Coal and Air Pollution
In what follows, we examine the costs due to particulates and air pollution ONLY: we do not include Mining (Environmental) and CO2 (Global Warming) costs. First an overview of the public health problems associated with particulates and air pollution (Williams, 2004):

... In recent years health damages, especially from chronic exposure to small particle air pollutants has been a focal concern about air pollution. Recent epidemiological research indicates major mortality impacts from long-term, low-level exposure to particulates — both particles emitted directly in combustion and sulfate and nitrate particles formed in the atmosphere from gaseous precursor emissions of SO2 and NOx. Lippman and Schlesinger (2000) survey the recent literature, concluding that the correlation of ambient particulate exposure levels commonly found in U.S. cities with increased human mortality and morbidity remains robust to all attempts to identify possible confounding variables.

... It is estimated that those in the US who have died from exposure to PM2.5 air pollution particles had their lives shortened, on average, by 14 years. ... the EPA projects that the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 will reduce the US death rate in 2010 by 23,000/y (EPA, 1999). But even with these laws in place, the premature death rate associated with residual small particle air pollution is significant. For example, Abt (2002) projects 6,000 premature deaths from emissions from 80 U.S. coal-fired power plants in the year 2007 (even accounting for new control technologies mandated by that year). These recent findings translate into much higher costs for air pollution damages than was the case for studies before chronic mortality impacts were taken into account.

Williams takes the ExternE results, and adapts them to regions in the US. In the graph below, he compares different typed of coal generation plants to Natural Gas Combined Cycle (NGCC) plants:


What the graphs says is that a clean coal plant is 50% more expensive than a comparable NGCC plant: for an NGCC plant the approximate cost for these externalities are about 40 cents/MWH. For the average coal plant, the externalities were 84 times more than an NGCC plant. Assuming coal is here to stay, at least for a long while, the public health implications of not switching to cleaner plants are immense! If the market were to price in the cost of these externalities, these older coal plants would be so much more expensive than renewables, they would have to be shut down.

In the US, the reality is sadly as follows: The older coal plants were built years ago so their construction costs are fully paid for. Utilities who own these plants know that newer, cleaner plants would be much more expensive to build. Similarly, retrofitting older plants would cost serious money. A few million dollars spent on lobbying against clean air standards is peanuts, so the industry seems intent on devoting more resources to lobbying.

ExternE and Wind Energy
How does wind energy score on the ExternE study?


Wind was the cheapest on both greenhouse gas and air pollution costs. Deployed clean coal technologies are still costly when it comes to greenhouse gas impacts. How does this translate into the cost (per KWH) of electricity?


Graphing the results for the UK and for Denmark:




reveals a different economic picture from what I portrayed in a previous post. In a future post, I will readjust those earlier cost graphs.

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The True Cost of Coal

As far as electricity generation is concerned, Coal is the benchmark against which all renewable energy sources are compared with. In a previous post, I compared the cost per kilowatt hour (KWH) from a variety of renewables and concluded that coal is still much cheaper. In this post we will evaluate coal using the Triple Bottom Line and conclude that it is clearly a lot more expensive than it seems. It is important to evaluate the cost of coal more realistically before the developing world builds even more coal-powered generation plants.

In thinking about coal, it is useful to separate the problem into two pieces: mining and extraction, and electricity generation. In a previous post, I examined technologies for coal-powered electric plants that use sequestration to ensure that emissions are captured and stored underground. None of the touted "carbon sequestration" or "clean coal" technologies have been deployed in a commercial plant and doing so would naturally add to the cost per KWH.

The cost of mining and extraction is where traditional accounting falls short. First off, how is coal extracted?

... Early coal mining was almost exclusively done in deep shafts that led to thick (5-10 feet) coal seams, which were blasted and picked out and loaded on rail cars to be drawn out of the mine by mules. Miners worked in dark, dusty conditions always at the risk of fatal roof falls and methane gas explosions. Beyond the risk of sudden death or serious injury, miners also faced the prospect of black-lung disease if they spent years in the profession.

Deep mining has indeed come a long way. Today, miners use a technique called long-wall mining, which involves a long (up to a mile) face of an underground coal seam which is dislodged by a saw that runs on tracks along the face. This method is much more efficient at removing thick coal seams than the old blast-and-pick method, and accounts for half to two-thirds of current Appalachian coal production. While some dangers are now less, current underground mining still results in fatal roof fall and explosion accidents.

Surface mining, or strip mining, has become more and more popular in recent decades, especially in removing thinner seams of coal (as little as a foot thick). The most recent innovation in strip mining is known as mountaintop removal. It peels back a mountain, layer by layer, by alternately blasting the thick layers of rock away from the coal seams and then scraping the coal seam out and hauling it away in huge dump trucks. Much of the “overburden” rock (the non-coal layers) is pushed off into adjacent valleys. As much as 500- to 1,000-vertical feet of a mountain may be removed in the process and valleys are filled in to depths of as much as 500 feet by the rubble.

The current approaches involve either removing entire mountain tops or dislodging mile-long underground seams! Unless the mining companies are voluntarily estimating the cost of these forms of environmental degradation, the cost of electricity from coal as quoted in media reports, is not accurate. The list of environmental problems associated with coal mining is depressing. Here is one I ran across from the Union of Concerned Scientists:

MINING
Altered landscapes. Surface mining in Appalachia often removes entire mountaintops and dumps the wastes into valleys and streams; between 1985 and 2001, more than seven percent of the region's forests were cut down and more than 1,200 miles of its streams buried or polluted. In addition, waste materials from underground mining are placed in large piles above ground, which can also scar the landscape and alter stream flow.

Water contamination. Acids and toxic metals can contaminate surface and groundwater, harming aquatic life and rendering water supplies undrinkable.

Safety hazards. Underground mining accidents result in many deaths and injuries, and coal dust inhalation causes chronic health problems. Black lung disease still kills about 1,000 former coal miners in the United States each year.

PREPARATION
Water contamination. Impurities such as acids and heavy metals removed from coal and stored in slurry reservoirs canleach into surface and groundwater.

Safety hazards. Slurry reservoir dams can fail, flooding local waterways and putting both wildlife and downstream communities at risk.

The main problem with both mountain top removal and long-wall mining is that landscapes are permanently altered as a result of coal mining:

... The coal in the Appalachian Mountains is hard to extract because it is buried under layers of shale and sandstone hundreds of feet thick. A few decades ago, strip miners would cut along the edge of a ridge side, then auger into a coal seam. But today, with bigger machines and little moral or regulatory constraint, coal operators simply blast away the entire mountaintop -- its forests, capstones, and topsoil -- so they can scrape out thin seams of low-sulfur coal. Nearly everything else is dumped into the valleys below, often burying pristine headwater streams. The resulting "valley fills" create the largest man-made earthen structures in the country -- huge treeless funnels that let mud and rainwater wash unimpeded through low-lying communities all across central Appalachia. The town of McRoberts, Kentucky, recently endured three "100-year floods" in 10 days. The water filled homes and carried away carports. When TECO Energy of Tampa, Florida, had leveled every peak around the community, it took the coal, took the profits, and left the people of McRoberts with crumbling homes, terrible roads, and a constant fear of being washed away in one’s sleep.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in addition to the more than 700 miles of streams buried by valley fills, thousands more miles have been contaminated with sediment, heavy metals, and acid mine drainage, a toxic orange syrup that kills everything in its path. And these are headwaters, so their contamination affects all life downstream. In Letcher County, Kentucky, children suffer extremely high rates of diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, and shortness of breath, all of which can be tied to dissolved minerals in nearby streams. Presumably the Clean Water Act was established to prevent such degradation. But early in the Bush administration, coal lobbyist Steven Griles was named a deputy secretary at the Department of Interior. Officials changed one word of the act -- replacing "waste" with "fill" -- so that toxic mining debris could be dumped into rivers as benign fill material.

There will soon be enough flattened mountaintops in Appalachia -- 1.4 million acres -- to set down the state of Delaware on former summits. Try driving across the 10,000-acre wasteland that surrounds Larry Gibson’s home on Kayford Mountain, West Virginia. Hundreds of people, like the photographer J. Henry Fair, make that trip every year to see, in Gibson’s words, "what hell looks like." Kayford Mountain, more than any place I know, illustrates the power and the willingness of some human beings to convert the natural world into money and "cheap energy" as quickly as possible. If that means the total destruction of an entire region, its people, and its culture, so be it.

And yet the majority of Americans have never heard of mountaintop removal.

One may be able to clean up coal-powered plants, but can one mine for coal without destroying the environment? Coal isn't as cheap as it appears, if anything the true cost of mining it probably makes it one of the most expensive energy sources. Using the Triple Bottom Line (People, Planet, Profits), coal costs a heck of a lot more than renewable energy sources.

Summary
Coal is touted as the cheapest source of (abundant) energy around, and in this post I argue that coal is actually quite expensive. From a power generation and emissions perspective, will "clean coal" and "carbon sequestration" be as cost-effective as current renewable energy sources? No commercial plants have been deployed so cost estimates are mere guesses at this point. Given the growth in coal usage in China and India, developing "clean coal" power plants is extremely important.

More importantly, Coal is cheap because the environmental costs of mining and extraction are more or less ignored. How cheap would coal mining be if it were held to the standard that it should be?

Hopefully the current excitement surrounding renewable energy, plus a heavy dose of energy efficiency and conservation will lead to less coal in the future.

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