Workers at the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry in Cleveland

Worker-Owners of America, Unite!

By GAR ALPEROVITZ
SolidarityEconomy.net via NYT Op-Ed

Dec 14, 2011, College Park, Md.- THE Occupy Wall Street protests have come and mostly gone, and whether they continue to have an impact or not, they have brought an astounding fact to the public’s attention: a mere 1 percent of Americans own just under half of the country’s financial assets and other investments. America, it would seem, is less equitable than ever, thanks to our no-holds-barred capitalist system.

But at another level, something different has been quietly brewing in recent decades: more and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to the traditional capitalist model. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.

Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the ownership of co-op businesses and credit unions. More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions.

And worker-owned companies make a difference. In Cleveland, for instance, an integrated group of worker-owned companies, supported in part by the purchasing power of large hospitals and universities, has taken the lead in local solar-panel installation, “green” institutional laundry services and a commercial hydroponic greenhouse capable of producing more than three million heads of lettuce a year.

Local and state governments are likewise changing the nature of American capitalism. Almost half the states manage venture capital efforts, taking partial ownership in new businesses. Calpers, California’s public pension authority, helps finance local development projects; in Alaska, state oil revenues provide each resident with dividends from public investment strategies as a matter of right; in Alabama, public pension investing has long focused on state economic development.

Moreover, this year some 14 states began to consider legislation to create public banks similar to the longstanding Bank of North Dakota; 15 more began to consider some form of single-payer or public-option health care plan.

Some of these developments, like rural co-ops and credit unions, have their origins in the New Deal era; some go back even further, to the Grange movement of the 1880s. The most widespread form of worker ownership stems from 1970s legislation that provided tax benefits to owners of small businesses who sold to their employees when they retired. Reagan-era domestic-spending cuts spurred nonprofits to form social enterprises that used profits to help finance their missions.

Recently, growing economic pain has provided a further catalyst. The Cleveland cooperatives are an answer to urban decay that traditional job training, small-business and other development strategies simply do not touch. They also build on a 30-year history of Ohio employee-ownership experiments traceable to the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and ’80s.

Further policy changes are likely. In Indiana, the Republican state treasurer, Richard Mourdock, is using state deposits to lower interest costs to employee-owned companies, a precedent others states could easily follow. Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, is developing legislation to support worker-owned strategies like that of Cleveland in other cities. And several policy analysts have proposed expanding existing government “set aside” procurement programs for small businesses to include co-ops and other democratized enterprises.

If such cooperative efforts continue to increase in number, scale and sophistication, they may suggest the outlines, however tentative, of something very different from both traditional, corporate-dominated capitalism and traditional socialism.

It’s easy to overestimate the possibilities of a new system. These efforts are minor compared with the power of Wall Street banks and the other giants of the American economy. On the other hand, it is precisely these institutions that have created enormous economic problems and fueled public anger.

During the populist and progressive eras, a decades-long buildup of public anger led to major policy shifts, many of which simply took existing ideas from local and state efforts to the national stage. Furthermore, we have already seen how, in moments of crisis, the nationalization of auto giants like General Motors and Chrysler can suddenly become a reality. When the next financial breakdown occurs, huge injections of public money may well lead to de facto takeovers of major banks.

And while the American public has long supported the capitalist model, that, too, may be changing. In 2009 a Rasmussen poll reported that Americans under 30 years old were “essentially evenly divided” as to whether they preferred “capitalism” or “socialism.”

A long era of economic stagnation could well lead to a profound national debate about an America that is dominated neither by giant corporations nor by socialist bureaucrats. It would be a fitting next direction for a troubled nation that has long styled itself as of, by and for the people.

Gar Alperovitz, a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and a founder of the Democracy Collaborative, is the author of “America Beyond Capitalism.”

War: The Wrong Jobs Program

By Mark Engler
SolidarityEconomy.net via Foreign Policy in Focus

More than 40 years ago, long before anyone had ever heard of Barack Obama, before the collapse of Bear Stearns, and before contemporary debates about bailouts and debt ceilings, two authors, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, considered a tricky problem. In times of downturn, the government must spend to stimulate the economy. Yet getting the political establishment to agree on one particular program of spending seemed nearly impossible.

Baran and Sweezy phrased the conundrum as a question: "On what could the government spend enough to keep the system from sinking into the mire of stagnation?"

After assessing the political realities that steer America's power elite, they could find only one response. It was not what typically comes to mind when we think of economic stimulus or government-led job creation.

Their answer: "On arms, more arms, and ever more arms."

The authors did not approve of military spending as a strategy of economic development.

But, even at the very outset of the Cold War, they saw the deep hold that it had on decision-makers in Washington, DC.

We can see the continuing hold it has today. This fall, responding to high and persistent unemployment, President Obama called for a federal jobs act. Among its measures, the act proposed investment in schools and infrastructure. Conservative opponents responded with cries of derision. The critics charged that the plan "doubles down on a failed government stimulus strategy." It means "adding more money to the same broken system" they said. Finally, they insisted, “It comes to a point that you can’t keep borrowing in a futile attempt to stimulate the economy when the increased debt itself is weakening the economy.”

Obama's proposals were considered political non-starters, certain to be stonewalled by the Republican Congressional majority. But for all the right-wing insistence that government should end stimulus spending, cut federal budgets in order to reduce the deficit, and generally leave the market to its own devices, our country already has a massive spending program, and it enjoys strong bipartisan support. America's jobs program is its military—and the immense industry that provides the military with services and armaments.

Our country's existing jobs program goes by many names: The Permanent War Economy, Military Keynesianism, The Iron Triangle, Perpetual War. The real question it raises is not whether the government should spend. It is whether the government has been spending well.

Thanking the Russians for Making Capitalism Work

Scholars have long debated whether massive outlays on the armed forces can pull a country from a recession, or whether ongoing spending of this type is a drain on private enterprise. The views of two thinkers, an economist and an engineer, have come to define opposite poles in the discussion.

Michal Kalecki was a Polish economist, influenced by Marx, who saw Hitler's plunder of Europe from his post at the Oxford Institute of Statistics. Kalecki spent much of the 1930s studying capitalist business cycles and observing the way in which government spending could influence them. In doing so, he arrived at conclusions quite similar to his more-often-remembered contemporary, John Maynard Keynes. In fact, some argue that, based on priority of publication, Keynesianism should not be called Keynesianism, but “Kaleckianism.”

Following World War II, Kalecki sought to understand Nazi Germany's successful rise from the depths of the Great Depression to achieve full employment by the late 1930s. Theories popular at the time—and embraced by many U.S. Republicans of the era—held that military spending necessarily occurred at the expense of other sectors of the economy. The Wall Street Journal would later express this position, stating in 1980 that "'Defense spending…. is the worst kind of government outlay, since it eats up materials and other resources that otherwise could be used to produce consumer goods.''

Countering such ideas, Kalecki examined how military buildup could actually serve as a stimulus to other industry. Starting with his 1943 essay, “The Political Aspects of Full Employment,” he began to theorize what has become known as “Military Keynesianism.” Kalecki argued that private capital preferred military spending over other forms of government investment because it contributed to private profits without competing with business activity in more conventional economic markets.

This would prove an influential proposition. Baran and Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and other Marxist writers from the 1960s on elaborated on Kalecki's ideas. Conventional economists had regarded war and militarism as aberrations, phenomena external to their models for how commerce should normally function. ("Peace reigns supreme in the realm of neoclassical economics," Magdoff noted in 1970.) But such assumptions did not square with a reality in which war was almost constant. The Marxists showed how vast arms spending, even during "peacetime," had become an essential state support for the economy. As one pair of writers working in this tradition wrote in 1972, "Without militarism the whole economy would return to a state of collapse from which it was rescued by the Second World War."

It was not just voices on the left stating this position. Business leaders themselves acknowledged the advantages of military buildup. In a speech given by Harvard economist Sumner Slichter to a convention of bankers in October 1949 (and cited more recently by authors John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert McChesney), the speaker contended that Cold War arms spending made severe depression "difficult to conceive." The prolonged conflict, Slichter said

increases the demand for goods, helps sustain a high level of employment, accelerates technological progress and thus helps the country to raise its standard of living…. So we may thank the Russians for helping make capitalism in the United States work better than ever.

Elevating Inefficiency to a National Purpose

Although Kalecki would influence many with his economic theories, a contrary view would come from an industrial engineer and longtime Columbia University professor. Seymour Melman was raised in the Bronx during the Great Depression. That downturn, he would later say, "made a deep impression on me then and to the present day because whole neighborhoods were clearly made impoverished. Unemployment was rampant, and almost any day if you walked out on the street you'd see, in one or another side street, the belongings of a family out on the sidewalk."

Melman put himself through college by working 15-hour overnight shifts in his uncle's knitting factory. He lived briefly on a kibbutz in Israel as a young man, and he also served two years in the military, getting a first-hand look at the workings an institution he would later criticize in detail. Initially interested in the social sciences, he ended up pursuing graduate studies in industrial engineering at Columbia, where he went on to teach for many decades.

Skilled at examining the industrial operations of different sectors of the economy, Melman became involved in the 1950s in analyzing a newly emerging realm: the Military-Industrial Complex. Subsequently, for more than 40 years, Melman would serve as an outspoken critic of massive public investment in the military, charging it with producing a growing weakness in America's civilian manufacturing capabilities. He would also become a leading proponent of "economic conversion," the idea that defense assets and infrastructure should be converted to more productive non-military uses.

In 2003, near the end of his long career, Melman wrote: "[A]t the start of the twenty-first century, every major aspect of American life is being shaped by our Permanent War Economy." Because he used language similar to that employed by analysts of Military Keynesianism, Melman might seem as if he were part of a similar school of thought. But, in fact, he considered himself staunchly opposed to their line of thinking. The theorists of Military Keynesianism examined how arms spending had been deeply integrated into the economy, providing a government support for business; Melman, in contrast, regarded military expenditures as a crippling drain on the country's economic health.

In a 1991 article in The Nation, he stood by his 1974 assessment of the "economic consequences of military state capitalism":

Traditional economic competence of every sort is being eroded by the state capitalist directorate that elevates inefficiency into a national purpose…. Industrial productivity, the foundation of every nation's economic growth, is eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy.

In his analysis, Melman emphasized both the opportunity costs of military spending and the manner in which defense industries take up "economic space," depleting the resources available to the rest of the economy. In 1995, he argued, "The Cold War has bled our civilian economy by preempting capital resources, taking the lion's share of top scientific talent as well as federal research and development funds, and appropriating government funds that would otherwise have been available for the development of our infrastructure."

In an interview from the same period, Melman noted that approximately 30 percent of the country's scientists and engineers worked for the military, directly or indirectly. "The loss to the civilian economy," he said, "is incalculable.”

In 2006, historian Thomas Woods, writing for the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute, penned a fascinating tribute to the late engineer. In Woods' view, "Melman’s normative conclusions"—that government should undertake a thorough-going program of economic conversion for the benefit of civilian society—"were altogether conventional and uninteresting, and far removed from libertarianism. But his positive analysis was anti-statist to the core, and provides us with an array of important and typically neglected costs of large military establishments."

As it turns out, both liberals critical of the arms industry and free market enthusiasts wary of big government could agree when Melman paraphrased sociologist C. Wright Mills' wary appraisal of conventional wisdom in Washington: "Military Keynesianism," Melman wrote, "has become the 'crackpot realism'… of the American economy."

The Glamour of Guns Over Butter

In the decades since their debate commenced, neither the intellectual kin of Kalecki nor members of Melman's "depletionist" school have decisively prevailed. Those who have reviewed the evidence point to some weaknesses in each approach. Economists such as David Gold suggest that Military Keynesians may have overestimated the overall stimulus provided by government spending on the military—especially as the American economy has grown ever larger. On the other side, analysts contend that the depletionists go too far in their assessment of how the military saps the private sector.

Yet, ultimately, the differences between Kalecki and Melman may be less important than the common ground they share. Marxist analysts of Military Keynesianism, after all, never argued that arms spending was a particularly productive use of public funds. Nor did they endorse it as a way to keep the capitalist economy afloat. They merely highlighted the political realities that make it the most acceptable form of government spending for monied elites, and to the way in which the strategy becomes entrenched once pursued.

This point has been acknowledged by observers across the political spectrum. Libertarian Robert Higgs points to a 1944 book, As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn, in which the author describes militarism as "the one great glamorous public-works project upon which a variety of elements in the community can be brought into agreement.” Flynn then warns, presciently, that, "Inevitably, having surrendered to militarism as an economic device, we will do what other countries have done: we will keep alive the fears of our people of the aggressive ambitions of other countries and we will ourselves embark upon imperialistic enterprises of our own."

Today's arms contractors are geniuses at spreading production facilities over a wide range of Congressional districts, and they are not hesitant to spend millions for lobbying and campaign contributions. As a result, they have deftly reinforced the loyalty that elected officials feel toward military spending projects in their home states. And they have locked the country into an economically tragic pattern of public spending. For while it is debatable whether the military crowds out more productive activity in the private sector, it is clear that it leaves far less room in government budgets for social programs.

The trade-off of "guns versus butter," now used as a textbook example in economics of an either-or choice that nations face, has been invoked by a wide range of lofty orators. Eisenhower famously remarked, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Martin Luther King, Jr. added, "We hear all this talk about our ability to afford guns and butter, but we have come to see that this is a myth… [W]hen the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer."

A "Badly Under-Resourced" Military?

Melman may have had intellectual disputes with economists such as Kalecki, but his true adversaries were not theorists. They were defense hawks who not only agreed with the proposition that the military was propping up the economy, but who advocated for tax dollars to be devoted to this very purpose. Such figures continue to exist today. They include Martin Feldstein, the former chief economic advisor to President Reagan who argued in a 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed that the Pentagon should be a primary recipient of government stimulus funds.

Also among their number is the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Kagan, who insists, "Defense spending has long been recognized as one of the single strongest stimulants to any economy." Kagan's view of Pentagon budgeting is extreme enough to exhibit a certain through-the-looking-glass quality. Despite the historic expansion of military spending in the new millennium, Kagan considers today's military "badly under-resourced for nearly two decades by both Democratic and Republican administrations." Therefore, he sees few worthier recipients of public aid. When the military, he writes, "is so severely strained and billions of dollars in stimulus money are being sloshed around, refusing to give some of that money to the best and bravest Americans who need it badly—to say nothing of demanding that their budget be cut—is just wrong."

Although the stimulus debate of 2008 and 2009 brought out some Military Keynesian arguments, the stakes have since been raised. In the wake of the debt ceiling compromise negotiated between President Obama and Congressional Republicans in August, the guns-versus-butter dilemma has become starker than ever.

Eisenhower may have always been right on a metaphorical level about arms merchants stealing bread from the hungry. Yet the trade-off has not always been so direct. In past years, politicians have often chosen both to fill Pentagon coffers and to support a measure of social spending, even if it meant sustaining budget deficits.

Current demands for austerity have changed that. The debt compromise not only mandated an initial round of budget cuts, it also charged a congressional “super committee” with finding between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion in further reductions to the 10-year federal budget. If lawmakers do not meet this requirement by the end of November, the deal will "trigger" an automatic $1.2 trillion in cuts, half of which would come from "defense and security." To avoid these automatic cuts, hawks will be pushing hard to instead put social programs on the chopping block.

Given the Military Industrial Complex's canny instincts for self-preservation and the loopholes included in the compromise agreement, there is some doubt about how severe cuts at the Pentagon would actually be, even in a most extreme case. Nevertheless, the threat of a budget squeeze has been real enough to prompt an aggressive counter-offensive by arms lobbyists.

In mid-September the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) launched the "Second to None" campaign, designed to "educate the public on [the] impact of indiscriminate budget cuts." According to AIA President and CEO Marion Blakey, the debt agreement "dangles a Sword of Damocles over our national security." Furthermore, he says, "the cuts to defense proposed in the ‘trigger’ deal are so draconian that it’s hard to believe they are even on the table."

Wary of openly embracing pork-barrel politics, politicians and their beneficiaries in the arms industry have traditionally avoided being too overt about touting the economic benefits of a given defense initiative. Hawks have usually been careful to put national security at the fore, and to keep the Keynesian implications of their endeavors in the background. But now, with public concern about unemployment at the center of national debate, arms merchants have increasingly made job creation one of their key selling points.

Loren Thompson, chief operating officer at the industry-funded Lexington Institute, has been a vocal spokesperson in this drive. Writing for Forbes, Thompson warned that "Defense Cuts Could Destroy A Million Jobs." He painted President Obama's jobs bill as especially counterproductive, since "the cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act to reduce deficits could grow bigger if the president’s jobs bill passes." As a result, Thompson writes, "the government could end up destroying many thousands of good [defense] jobs to create lots of not-so-good jobs in areas like construction. What kind of a tradeoff is that?"

Elsewhere Thompson asked, "Does Washington really believe that building a new bridge in Kentucky creates jobs, but a defense plant or military base there does not?"

The Economic Value of a School

In fact, there are good reasons to hold that allocating funds to build a bridge—or to open a hospital, or to staff a school—is a superior path to creating jobs than spending the same amount of money on arms. These reasons are based in morality and public interest, as well as in economics.

First, the moral argument. In the 1960s student activists at MIT were calling for an end to military research on campus, which was consuming an increasing portion of the university's attention. However, as Stuart Leslie relates in his book The Cold War and American Science, not all of their peers were convinced. One graduate student, dismissive of protests, told The New York Times: "What I’m designing may one day be used to kill millions of people. I don’t care. That’s not my responsibility. I’m given an interesting technological problem and I get enjoyment out of solving it.”

Needless to say, building a bridge or hiring an educator has less dubious moral implications than supporting such military research. Bridges and schools also create long-term economic value, something most defense procurements cannot claim. An educated child becomes a more productive member of society. A bridge becomes part of the country's infrastructure, facilitating further commerce. On the other hand, when we build bombs, the best we can hope for is that they are never used.

Melman argued, "whatever else you can do with a nuclear-powered submarine that is almost as long as two football fields… you can’t wear it, you can’t live in it, you can’t travel in it, and there’s nothing you can produce with it.” Author and attorney Ellen Brown elaborates on this point, explaining the many quirks and inefficiencies that distinguish military spending from other economic activity:

Military spending is the very essence of "built-in obsolescence": it turns out products that are designed to blow up. The military is not subject to ordinary market principles, but works on a "cost-plus" basis, with producers reimbursed for whatever they have spent plus a guaranteed profit. Gone are the usual competitive restraints that keep capitalist corporations "lean and mean."… Yet, legislators looking to slash wasteful "entitlements" persist in overlooking this obvious elephant in the room.

Adding to these considerations is what Melman dubbed the "overkill" problem. To a certain extent, one could argue that building up a military arsenal served the economy by protecting private property, deterring foreign invasion, and allowing the nation to conduct its business in peace. But this notion became more and more dubious as the United States amassed ever-greater military might. By the time the U.S. armed forces were able to destroy every possible enemy nation many times over, the continued investment of billions of dollars per year in new military technology ceased to have nearly as much value.

Also worth noting is the fact that our "overkill" investments have a uniquely risky downside: With an army of soldiers and an unmatched arsenal of armaments sitting around, politicians are inevitably tempted to think they should be put to use. And that is an economically costly proposition indeed.

Doing Right On Jobs

What is true for the economy generally is also true in the realm of employment: When it comes to jobs, not only would it be a great day for our kids if the schools got all the money they needed and the Air Force had to a hold bake sale to buy a bomber—this would be a great day for American workers, too.

The most compelling recent study on this point was produced in October 2009 by Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Using data from the Department of Commerce, the authors looked at four areas of investment: education, the military, renewable power, and fossil-fuel energy.

"By a significant margin," Pollin writes in a Boston Review article describing the report's conclusions, "education is the most effective source of job creation among these alternatives—roughly 29 jobs per $1 million in spending." This included both direct employment (of teachers and other personnel), jobs created indirectly by investment in this sector (those, say, of suppliers selling photocopiers or paper to the schools), and "induced" jobs (in businesses supported when teachers spend their salaries on other good and services). "Clean-energy investments are second, with about seventeen jobs per $1 million of spending. The U.S. military creates about twelve jobs, while spending within the fossil-fuel sector creates about five jobs per $1 million."

There are several reasons why military spending ends up near the back of the pack. The inefficiency of the "cost-plus" system is one. Pointing to another, analyst William Hartung of the Center for International Policy explains, "more of the military dollar goes to capital, as opposed to labor, than do the expenditures in the other job categories." He cites the example of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. With the cost of materials and other overhead high, a mere 1.5  percent of the money spent on each aircraft goes toward labor costs for manufacturing and assembling planes in the F-35's main plant in Fort Worth, Texas.

A third issue is "leakage." Military spending that takes place outside of the country—say, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or one of the many U.S. bases abroad—has less economic benefit for the United States, since some of the stimulus created instead benefits foreign economies. Green technology, as a counter-example, produces more significant ripple effects at home.

Nevertheless, Pentagon boosters such as Loren Thompson are not persuaded. They argue that military-related jobs tend to pay more, and therefore workers in this industry have a greater impact on the rest of the economy. Yet this is not true compared to education, Pollin notes, where average pay is higher than in defense. Nor is it, in itself, an adequate reason to support a given sector. No doubt, public efforts to spur employment must be attentive to producing jobs that pay living wages. But this cannot be the only measure of value for public spending.

Melman offered a wider vision for doing right on jobs. The years following World War II—when America converted much of its war-making industrial might into civilian manufacturing capability—loomed large in his proposals for a demilitarized society. Through the end of his life in 2004, he pictured military laboratories becoming public hospitals, bases becoming industrial parks and green spaces, and arms factories being retrofitted to make farm machinery or communications satellites. His was the noble prophecy of swords beaten into ploughshares, re-imagined for an America in its industrial prime.

Yet even if we undertake nothing so ambitious as what Melman dreamed, we can be smarter about what we choose to support with our public funds, and what we decide to cut from our government's budgets. "Arms, more arms, and ever more arms" is no path to a just society. And it is no worthwhile strategy for creating jobs.

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books). He can be reached via the website http://www.DemocracyUprising.com. Research assistance provided by Eric Augenbraun.

4 Reasons Why The Smart Grid

Energy Net Has Failed To Take Off

By Boyd Cohen
SolidarityEconomy.net via Fast Company

Since performing research for my book, Climate Capitalism [1] (written with Hunter Lovins) a few years ago, I have become increasingly convinced that the smart grid has the potential to be one of the "holy grails" in the clean tech revolution. I believe that the smart grid can be the enabling technology that allows all kinds of other low-carbon innovations to flourish.

The smart grid will give industrial, commercial, and residential consumers real-time access to energy consumption and costs, which will lead to demand side reductions (i.e. energy efficiency). It also promises to support distributed, renewable energies from rooftop solar panels to electric vehicles (EVs). Combined with smart homes, the latter could even be used to power a consumer's home for a few days in the case of power outages, which could be reduced [2] in frequency, volume, and duration with help from smart grids.

With corporate behemoths like GE, Cisco, and IBM as well as hundreds (if not thousands) of tech startups already in this space, why hasn't the smart grid become more ubiquitous? Unsurprisingly, Europe seems further down the path with the potential to leverage wind power from the North Sea Grid and solar power from southern Europe in a continental supergrid. But why hasn't the U.S. made more progress towards smart grid connectivity?

I think one of the biggest challenges is the industry's lack of stakeholder engagement from consumers (corporate and residential) and politicians. When utilities have in the past held referendums regarding the investment in smart grid technologies, the vote [3] does not always go in their favor. This is often because consumers believe that the costs outweigh the benefits. More needs to be done to clearly establish the business case for smart grid adoption. Of course, I am not alone in recognizing this issue. The Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative [3] is focused squarely on the problem. And Katharine Brass, the Program Manager for GE's Ecoimagination program, recently argued [4] that the biggest barrier to more widespread adoption is consumer perception.

Security Concerns. In today's world of heightened concerns over terrorism and increasingly sophisticated hackers, there is no wonder many worry about the vulnerability that our energy system could be exposed to if it truly were as IT-focused (and dependent) as we envision. This is a legitimate concern being addressed by the industry, as evidenced by the forthcoming Smart Grid Security Summit [5] to be held next week in San Diego.

Standards. To Fast Company readers, this will sound like a familiar problem. Numerous technology providers are offering a range of technology solutions ,from smart meters to grid automation software--and many of them have a vested interest in using proprietary, closed standards. The smart grid will only succeed on a large scale if technology suppliers agree to work on an open standard.

Regulatory and Policy Support. The U.S. has a difficult landscape for bringing the energy industry into the 21st century. We have a mix of federal regulation and state legislation, as well as some level of autonomy at the municipal level. A great book that explains this issue is Smart Power: Climate Change, The Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities [6]. Guido Bartels, IBM’s head of Global Energy and Utilities, Chairman of GridWise Alliance and an adviser to the Obama Administration, has also spoken up [7]about the need for more regulatory action to provide the proper incentives for the adoption of smart grid technology.

I have no doubt that we will see continued progress towards the adoption of smart grid technology in the U.S. And yes, there has been progress. More than 20 million smart meters have already been installed in the country, with approximately 60 million planned for near-term installation. However, the barriers discussed above are legitimate challenges that the industry and its stakeholders need to overcome.  For example, in the past few months, BC Hydro encountered opposition from consumers and municipalities in British Columbia to its smart reader rollout because of fears about low-level radiation.  For now, BC Hydro has committed to moving forward with or without community support. Perhaps the utility should consider addressing barriers number one and four for their next phase of the smart grid deployment.

[Image: Flickr user pgegreenenergy [8]]

Boyd Cohen, Ph.D., LEED AP, is a climate strategist helping to lead communities, cities and companies on the journey towards the low carbon economy. Dr. Cohen is the co-author of Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change [9].

Links:
[1] http://www.climatecapitalism.org
[2] http://www.fastcompany.com/1777665/if-new-york-city-becomes-the-smartest-city-in-the-world-how-will-it-prepare-for-future-hurri
[3] http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/Business_Customer_Care/PG-E-s-Muscle-Not-Enough-to-Lift-Prop-16-in-the-Face-of-Anti-Smart-Grid-Consumer-Sentiment-2588.html
[4] http://gigaom.com/cleantech/ge-the-greatest-barrier-to-the-smart-grid-is-perception/
[5] http://www.smartgridsecuritysummit.com/
[6] http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Power-Climate-Electric-Utilities/dp/1597267066
[7] http://gigaom.com/cleantech/qa-ibms-energy-chief-on-the-future-of-smart-grid/
[8] http://www.flickr.com/photos/26715412@N03/4358236808/sizes/z/in/photostream/
[9] http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Capitalism-Age-Change/dp/0809034735

Richard Branson's 'Carbon War Room' Picks

Sacramento, Miami for Green Jobs Projects

By Dale Kasler and Rick Daysog
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Sacramento Bee

Sept 21, 2011 - A high-powered investment coalition assembled by Richard Branson, the eccentric British billionaire, is offering Sacramento a shot at hundreds of jobs through a $100 million energy-efficiency program.

Sacramento is one of two cities chosen by Branson's nonprofit Carbon War Room group for a privately financed effort to retrofit office buildings and other commercial properties. The other city is Miami; the program would total $650 million.

Announced late Monday, the deal could mean jobs for hundreds if not thousands of Sacramento construction workers. They would install double-pane windows, solar panels and the like on buildings throughout the city.

"This has the potential to be a huge economic boost for Sacramento," said Mayor Kevin Johnson in a prepared statement. "It represents real jobs, right now, and a chance to be a showcase."

If the deal is approved by the City Council next Tuesday, a Santa Rosa company called Ygrene Energy Fund would oversee the program and provide low-cost retrofitting loans to property owners. Ygrene is part of Branson's consortium and was chosen by city officials over two other bidders.

Consortium officials said they were impressed with Sacramento's commitment to green buildings.

"Sacramento seemed very receptive," said Murat Armbruster, a Bay Area hedge-fund manager and Carbon War Room senior adviser. "A lot of cities in California are going to watch what happens there."

Ygrene arranged a line of credit from Barclays Capital, the banking giant, to fund the loans. As buildings are approved for retrofits, Barclays will bundle loans together from Sacramento, Miami and possibly elsewhere, and sell them to investors as bonds, said Alan Strachan, government liaison at Ygrene.

Building owners would repay the loans through special property-tax assessments, which participating governments would pass through to investors. The idea is, their energy savings would more than pay for the retrofits. A private insurer will guarantee the savings will materialize.

"Every project has to save more than it costs," said Yvette Rincon, the city of Sacramento's sustainability program manager.

Local contractors would be enlisted for many of the projects, although aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin would be involved on the bigger jobs, Strachan said.

The Branson announcement was hailed by the area's hard-hit construction unions. Bob Williams, assistant business manager at Local 340 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said his local's 25 percent unemployment could be cut in half.

The city believes the program could yield 230 jobs a year, Rincon said. Ygrene is projecting 1,500 jobs, although that estimate isn't pegged to a particular time frame.

Either way, it could bridge a financing gap that has hindered the growth of the green-building movement.

California is one of 26 states that allow cities and counties to loan money for retrofits through a system called PACE, or Property Assessed Clean Energy. But most municipalities don't have the funds to loan.

The deal brokered by Carbon War Room would bring private capital into the picture. "The municipality has zero risk, financial or otherwise," Strachan said. A similar program in Sonoma County generated $55 million in retrofits, he said, while the work in Sacramento could surpass $100 million.

Branson, 61, is a high school dropout who founded the Virgin conglomerate, a global empire that includes an airline, record label, cellphone business and more.

Ever the showman, Branson led a London-style double-decker bus tour through Sacramento to celebrate the opening of Virgin music's store on Arden Way in 1994. "I love new challenges," he said during his visit. "I'm scribbling notes all the time with ideas."

The store closed in 2005, a rare failure for Branson. Forbes says he's the world's 254th wealthiest man, with a net worth of $4.2 billion.

Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999, Branson is known for his transoceanic hot-air balloon trips and speed boat crossings. One of his newest ventures, Virgin Galactic, would charge passengers $200,000 a pop for a trip to outer space. Virgin is building a spaceship factory in the Mojave Desert.

He also has had an interest in global warming. His goal in the Carbon War Room is to bring market forces to bear on climate change. Announcing the Sacramento and Miami efforts, he called the deal "the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle for cities looking to implement green plans."

Sacramento's green-building industry welcomed it. "There will be all kinds of companies lining up to be retrofitted," said Ray Kapahi of GHG Climate Team consulting in Sacramento.

It would be particularly helpful to building owners trying to rent space to the area's biggest office tenant, the state, said Rick Cull of RetroCom Energy Strategies in Elk Grove. The state has special green standards for its buildings.

Craig Sheehy of Envision Realty Services consulting said a client of his is struggling to find $200,000 to bring his building up to the state's standard.

"This is where it's really going to help," he said. "It's a huge shot in the arm."

Again for Helping State Avoid Blackouts

By Bill Dawson
SolidarityEconomy.net via Texas Climate News Journal

Aug 16, 2011, West Texas - During February, the chief executive of the agency that operates Texas’ electric power grid gave “a special word of thanks” to the state’s wind industry for producing electricity that helped the state avoid even worse blackouts than did occur as dozens of coal and gas generating units failed in the frigid weather.

Once again this month, ERCOT, the grid agency, is praising the wind industry – this time for helping avoid blackouts as 100-plus temperatures covered the state and power demand bumped against the maximum production capacity.

Wind power’s critics have belittled its potential to help meet peak hot-weather demand in Texas, because summertime winds in West Texas – where proliferating wind turbines have made Texas the No. 1 wind-energy state – typically increase late at night, when power demand slacks off.

But this month, wind generation produced more power than anticipated, especially from the state’s growing collection of turbines near the Gulf Coast, where afternoon winds were strong.

Wind advocates understandably hastened to tout wind energy’s assistance in staving off power outages. Meanwhile, various reports this month indicated the state’s wind industry continues to expand, although at a slower pace [PDF] consistent with a national slowdown in the face of competition from low natural gas prices and an uncertain future for federal wind subsidies. Following is a roundup of some recent developments.

The Houston Chronicle on Aug. 10 detailed wind power’s role in avoiding blackouts and ERCOT’s resulting gratitude:

Texas’ wind turbines – particularly those along the Gulf coast — have come through for the state’s electric grid more than expected during the hot afternoon hours when demand has been its highest.

Wind only accounts for about 11 percent of the state’s total power capacity, and last year only 8 percent of the power produced in Texas came from wind turbines.

But during last week’s daily power crisis, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s main high voltage power grid, repeatedly touted wind power’s contributions during peak demand.

Typically ERCOT only expects about 800 megawatts of power to come from the 9,500 megawatts of wind turbines installed around the state.

But wind’s contribution ranged from 1,300 megawatts to 2,400 megawatts during peak demand — including 2,000 MW last Wednesday, when the state set a new power demand record at 68,294 MW.

It’s a big improvement from last summer, when only 650 MW of wind power was humming during the peak hours of Aug. 23, when Texas hit its 2010 record of 65,776 MW.

[…]

Most of Texas’ wind farms, located in West Texas, reach their peak output in the evening, when the winds blow hardest. They do little for the state’s needs during the hottest afternoon hours and are so far removed from the areas of heaviest demand that they often have little to no impact.

But the growing number of wind projects along Texas’ coast has helped boost wind’s contribution during peak summer hours since coastal winds tend to pick up in the afternoons.

The Sierra Club’s Austin office issued a statement Aug. 12 noting that wind energy in the first half of 2011 had supplied 9.9 percent of Texas’ electricity, an increase from 7.8 percent the year before, according to ERCOT. The group added:

“Coastal wind played a critical role in meeting peak daytime demand during these past few weeks,” said Cyrus Reed, Conservation Director for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. “The data from coastal wind projects indicate that capacity is even greater than previously thought. With exciting new wind projects being considered by Austin Energy for the City of Austin and elsewhere in the state, we think the time is right to build more carefully-sited coastal wind projects.”

(KUT, Austin’s NPR affiliate, reported last month that Austin Energy, the city-owned utility was planning to balance its wind power from West Texas with a 20-25-year agreement to buy 291 MW of electricity from a pair of companies building wind farms on the Texas coast.)

The San Antonio Express-News reported on Aug. 9 that the city-owned CPS Energy would be buying 200 MW of electricity under a 25-year agreement with a new wind installation near the Gulf Coast in South Texas’ Willacy County:

The purchase will help move CPS toward its goal of 1,500 megawatts of renewable energy by 2020.

Duke Energy Renewables, a unit of Duke Energy based in Charlotte, N.C, plans to build and manage the wind farm about 20 miles from the Gulf of Mexico in Willacy County.

[…]

Once the Duke wind project comes on line in December 2012, CPS will have 1,059 megawatts of wind energy capacity. CPS spokeswoman Lisa Lewis said that project plus a pending 400-megawatt solar farm could guarantee the utility meets its 2020 goal in the next couple of years.

The Express-News, in the same article, reported that ERCOT CEO Trip Doggett said “he hopes to see more wind farms developed along the coast, especially after seeing their recent performance.”

The Wall Street Journal, analyzing the Texas grid’s close brush with blackouts this month, on Aug. 12 linked the situation to a failure to anticipate the very hot conditions:

For the second year in a row, the organization responsible for the stability of Texas’ electrical grid … has grossly underestimated summer demand in its forecasts. Last week, demand was so high across Texas that some large energy users had power disruptions, and ERCOT narrowly avoided instituting rolling blackouts.

ERCOT’s forecasts are based on an average of the past 10 summers, but the past two years have been unusually hot, pushing up energy use for air conditioning. Electricity demand in July was 12 percent higher than for any prior July.

Climate experts expect summers in Texas to continue getting hotter as manmade global warming exerts a stronger influence in coming decades.

Two West Texas newspapers reported on wind industry developments in that region.

The Odessa American on Aug. 5 had a detailed account of the industry’s rapid growth there, current projects and projections for the next 10 years:

The wind industry has spurred the revitalization of many small communities, bringing in much-needed jobs and tax revenue when some small towns were all but drying up and blowing away.

[…]

Now, wind turbines tower over the landscape from Albany to Odessa and Fort Stockton and from Winters to San Angelo. And as the Public Utility Commission builds out the transmission lines, more towers are planned.

The Abilene Reporter-News’ article on Aug. 5 included a similar optimistic prediction linked to progress on power lines to carry electricity from West Texas to the state’s more populous areas:

[W]ith the ongoing installation of transmission lines, industry advocates said that number should grow after the lines’ expected 2013 completion date.

“If you go anywhere between Post (southeast of Lubbock) and Winters, you can see hundreds of people working on transmission lines right now,” said Greg Wortham, executive director of the Texas Wind Energy Clearinghouse and mayor of Sweetwater.

In other West Texas news were reports that Texas Tech University would have a major new wind power facility next spring and a related degree program.

The student newspaper, the Daily Toreador, reported Aug. 1 on the new research facility:

Texas Tech has announced it will partner with Sandia National Laboratories and Group NIRE to build and operate a new wind energy testing facility that will be located at Reese Technology Center.

Taylor Eighmy, vice president for research, said the announcement represents the intention of the U.S. Department of Energy and Sandia National Labs to move a facility on Tech’s campus that will become a part of a very large testing program for new turbines and how turbines interact when they are in an array.

The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal described the new degree in an Aug. 5 story:

Students wanting to make a career in the world’s quickly growing wind energy field have a new option in a one-of-a-kind degree program at Texas Tech.

This fall, the university will launch its bachelor of science in wind energy degree program after Tech’s Board of Regents … approved the multidisciplinary program, said Valerie Paton, vice provost for planning and assessment.

She said the program will be the first of its kind in the country, aiming to educate individuals in a multidisciplinary format instead of focusing primarily on educating engineers and technicians.

Paton said the program will accompany Tech’s doctoral program in wind energy, which was created in 2007, and places the university in the forefront of the wind energy research in the country and globally.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram had an article Aug. 6 on the University of North Texas’ new Mean Green Stadium, which will contribute to the campus power supply with wind turbines:

UNT athletic director Rick Villarreal said the stadium, which is off Interstate 35W and South Bonnie Brae Street, stands out because it blends sustainability with the comfort and big-event experience Eagle fans seek. The stadium used nontoxic paints, and materials came from within 500 miles.

Villarreal said much of the stadium’s buzz centers on three 150-foot turbines that will be installed this fall. The turbines are expected to inject about half a million kilowatt-hours a year into one of UNT’s power grids.

An article in the Brownsville Herald on Aug. 12 about the Willacy County project contained a reminder that wind energy, while supported by many environmentalists, also has detractors among environmental advocates:

Willacy County Precinct 1 Commissioner Eliberto “Beto” Guerra called the wind farm a “win-win” for the county.

He said taxes from wind farms will benefit local school districts while creating jobs for residents.

Walter Kittelberger, co-founder of the Lower Laguna Madre Foundation, said the environmental group does not directly oppose the 30,000-acre wind farm because it would not directly affect the Laguna Madre area. However, he said it would be a hazard to birds.

“A person would have to be completely ignorant to deny that (wind) turbines pose a threat to the environment and to migratory birds,” he said.

Such complaints extend far beyond South Texas, as the ClimateWire news service noted in an Aug. 8 article about a report by an organization supporting renewable energy:

Wind provides 198 gigawatts of electricity worldwide, with 39 GW of new capacity added just last year, according to the Renewables 2011 Global Status Report (GSR) by REN21, an international renewable energy proponent. “Commercial wind power now operates in at least 83 countries, up from just a handful of countries in the 1990s,” said Janet Sawin, research director and lead author of the GSR, in an email.

The report notes that for the first time, wind power is growing more in developing countries than industrialized nations, led by emerging markets like China, which accounted for half of the global capacity increase last year. In addition, the European Wind Energy Association projects that wind energy employment will double by 2020 in the European Union.

However, the rapid growth and expansion of wind farms has had an increasingly significant effect on birds and bats, especially since, according to the GSR, the average wind turbine size has increased. The American Bird Conservancy (ABC), an avian conservation group, observes that upward of 14 birds per megawatt of wind energy are killed each year, numbering more than 440,000. The organization projects the number will rise substantially as wind energy production increases.

The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, on Aug. 3 described an investigation into deaths of golden eagles, a federally protected species, at wind farm in California and the potentially broader implications. (The Texas coast, for example, provides habitat for famously numerous and diverse populations of resident and migratory birds.)

Regarding the California inquiry, the Times reported:

A prosecution in the Pine Tree case could cause some rethinking and redesigning of this booming alternative energy source. Facilities elsewhere also have been under scrutiny, according to a federal official familiar with the investigations.

“Wind farms have been killing birds for decades and law enforcement has done nothing about it, so this investigation is long overdue,” said Shawn Smallwood, an expert on raptor ecology and wind farms. “It’s going to ruffle wind industry feathers across the country.”

– Bill Dawson

Schools of Fish Help Squeeze More Power from Wind Farms

By Hamish Pritchard

SolidarityEconomy.net
via BBC News Science Reporter

Schools of fish have shown engineers how to squeeze much more power from wind farms.

A new wind farm design mimics a school of fish to exploit wind turbulence, and could dramatically improve power output.

Familiar propeller-style wind turbines with large sweeping blades have almost reached their limit of efficiency.

But in a wind farm, they must be spaced widely apart to avoid turbulence from the other turbines.

This has limited wind farm power output to around two watts per square metre of land at favourable sites.

But redesigned wind farms could perhaps get up to 10 times more power from the same land.

A test array in the California desert takes a whole new approach to the problem, according to a study published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.

This new study uses "vertical axis" wind turbines that resemble upright, spinning egg whisks. Although they are less efficient individually than the propeller-style turbines, they are able to use turbulent winds from many directions. Schooling fish

But the big step forward comes from the layout of the array which is based on fluid dynamics around schooling fish.

"Organising the arrangement of wind turbines based upon the vortices shed by schooling fish is definitely a new approach," said aeronautical engineer Robert Whittlesey of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

"The fish aim to align themselves to optimise their forward propulsion," he writes, and this can be adapted in a turbine array to maximise energy extraction.

The new design uses closely-spaced pairs of counter-rotating turbines that funnel air to their neighbours, with little energy lost to turbulence.

Not only do the neighbours benefit, but the funnelling effect is also important. In fact power generated by the paired turbines can actually be greater than that from the turbines working independently. In tests, a turbine five rows back still generated 95% of the power of the one on the front row.

A wind farm of this closely-packed design could produce 20 to 30 watts per square metre of land, around 10 times that of current wind farms.

Author of the study, Professor John Dabiri of Caltech, said: "While the connection between fish schooling and wind farms might seem non-intuitive at first, it is in fact a logical inference from the underlying flow physics."

The advantages don't stop there. At 10m high, the turbines used in this study were only around one tenth of the height of typical propeller-style turbines.

This means that they are less intrusive in the landscape, less visible to air-traffic control radar and could be less harmful to birds and bats.

The vertical-axis turbines are also "significantly more robust and probably less expensive. There are still some problems to be solved but they really deserve a second look" added Professor Charles Meneveau of Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study.

The big question now is whether this design works as a full sized wind farm. To work on this scale, energy from wind passing above the farm must be transferred to the turbines below by turbulence.

"It's a very interesting idea but this hasn't yet been shown," said Professor Loughhead of the UK Energy Research Centre. "Also, vertical-axis turbines face a lot of stress. It's difficult to make a tall turbine light enough to spin but rigid enough to stand up to the forces and vibrations that they're exposed to," he added.

"In this research field, the work seems to be met with great interest and a bit of healthy scepticism," observed Mr Whittlesey.

Further tests look promising though. "We have collected additional wind measurements this summer on an array of 18 turbines...The results suggest that the wind flow rates required for enhanced performance relative to horizontal-axis [propeller-style] wind turbines are regularly attained," said Professor Dabiri.

By Bridget Borgobello

July 18, 2011

10 Pictures

Proposed for the Aalborg Waterfront in Denmark, a new housing development would feature 60 apartments, from 4 to 12 stories high, all supplied with a 100 percent renewable energy source (Image by C. F. Moller Architects)

Image Gallery (10 images)

Proposed for the Aalborg Waterfront in Denmark, a new housing development would feature 60 apartments, from 4 to 12 stories high, all supplied with a 100 percent renewable energy source. This zero-energy project has been proposed by Scandinavian architectural firm C. F. Møller, in collaboration with energy consultants, Cenergia.

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Møller's architectural design features a south-facing roof-plane, fitted with 1,200 sq. m. (1,435 sq. yds.) of photovoltaic and solar thermal panels. The solar paneling is reportedly capable of producing 104,000 KWh of electricity annually, which is estimated to be enough to cover the yearly electricity demand of every apartment (at 1,740 Kwh each). In addition, four vertical axis low-noise wind turbines take advantage of strong western winds, creating an additional power supply to recharge electric cars. A rainwater collection system is used to irrigate the surrounding gardens, whilst the lush landscaping helps maintain a clean air environment. Tall window openings allow for natural light to filter through to the apartments' living zones, an example of the passive-housing standards that are incorporated to ensure reduced energy consumption all round.

This slide-like shape of the building creates a distinctive silhouette, which is positioned between Aalborg's main bridges. The roof-plane appears as if it is stretching into the water's edge, where an underpass shelters a public gazebo and café. The extension of the roof is a visual display of the building's power plant, and whilst it may take precedence over optimum, waterfront views, it's essential to the building's sustainable design.

Twice the height of the Empire State

EnviroMission plans Massive

Solar Tower for Arizona

By Loz Blain

SolidarityEconomy.net via Gizmag.com

July 21, 2011

EnviroMission's solar tower: coming to Arizona in 2015

An ambitious solar energy project on a massive scale is about to get underway in the Arizona desert. EnviroMission is undergoing land acquisition and site-specific engineering to build its first full-scale solar tower - and when we say full-scale, we mean it! The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become one of the world's tallest buildings. Its 200-megawatt power generation capacity will reliably feed the grid with enough power for 150,000 US homes, and once it's built, it can be expected to more or less sit there producing clean, renewable power with virtually no maintenance until it's more than 80 years old. In the video after the jump, EnviroMission CEO Roger Davey explains the solar tower technology, the Arizona project and why he couldn't get it built at home in Australia.

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Enviromission's solar tower is a simple idea taken to gigantic proportions. The sun beats down on a large covered greenhouse area at the bottom, warming the air underneath it. Hot air wants to rise, so there's a central point for it to rush towards and escape; the tower in the middle. And there's a bunch of turbines at the base of the tower that generate electricity from that natural updraft.

It's hard to envisage that sort of system working effectively until you tweak the temperature variables and scale the whole thing up. Put this tower in a hot desert area, where the daytime surface temperature sits at around 40 degrees Celsius (104 F), and add in the greenhouse effect and you've got a temperature under your collector somewhere around 80-90 degrees (176-194 F). Scale your collector greenhouse out to a several hundred-meter radius around the tower, and you're generating a substantial volume of hot air.

Then, raise that tower up so that it's hundreds of meters in the air - because for every hundred metres you go up from the surface, the ambient temperature drops by about 1 degree. The greater the temperature differential, the harder the tower sucks up that hot air at the bottom - and the more energy you can generate through the turbines.

The advantages of this kind of power source are clear:

• Because it works on temperature differential, not absolute temperature, it works in any weather;
• Because the heat of the day warms the ground up so much, it continues working at night;
• Because you want large tracts of hot, dry land for best results, you can build it on more or less useless land in the desert;
• It requires virtually no maintenance - apart from a bit of turbine servicing now and then, the tower "just works" once it's going, and lasts as long as its structure stays standing;
• It uses no 'feed stock' - no coal, no uranium, nothing but air and sunlight;
• It emits absolutely no pollution - the only emission is warm air at the top of the tower. In fact, because you're creating a greenhouse underneath, it actually turns out to be remarkably good for growing vegetation under there.

The Arizona Project

While this is not the first solar tower that has been built (a small-scale test rig in Spain proved the technology more than a decade ago) EnviroMission has chosen to build its first full-scale power plant in the deserts of Arizona, USA.

The Arizona tower will be a staggering 800 metres or so tall - just 30 meters shorter than the colossal Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest man-made structure. To put that in context - it will stand more than double the height of the Empire State building in New York City, and it'll be as much as 130 meters in diameter at the top. Truly a gigantic structure.

Currently undergoing site-specific engineering and land acquisition, EnviroMission estimates the tower will cost around US$750 million to build. It will generate a peak of 200 megawatts, and run at an efficiency of around 60% - vastly more efficient and reliable than other renewable energy sources.

The output has already been pre-sold - the Southern California Public Power Authority recently signed a 30-year power purchase agreement with EnviroMission that will effectively allow the tower to provide enough energy for an estimated 150,000 US homes. Financial modelling projects that the tower will pay off its purchase price in just 11 years - and the engineering team are shooting for a structure that will stand for 80 years or more.

Considering that a large city like Los Angeles requires total power in the region of 7,200 megawatts, you'd have to build a few dozen solar towers up to the same size as the Arizona project if you wanted to completely replace the existing, primarily coal-based energy supply for that city's 3.7 million-odd residents. So it's not an instant solution - but then, its short projected payback period and virtually zero operating costs make it a very sound economic proposition that competes favorably against other renewable sources.

Under the terms of the pre-purchase agreement, the Arizona tower is due to begin delivering power at the start of 2015. Watch this space!

Koch Brothers Declare War on Offshore Wind

By Keith Harrington
SolidarityEconomy.net via grist.org

July 15, 2011 - The Koch brothers have now turned their firepower against offshore wind. The war over America’s coastal-energy future has officially begun, and the result could determine whether we see wind turbines or catastrophic oil spills along our coastlines in coming years.

The opening salvo came in early July, when everyone’s favorite climate-hating, fossil-fuel-loving industrialist villains, the Koch brothers, released a so-called “cost-benefit analysis” of New Jersey offshore wind development plans through their front group Americans for Prosperity.

The focus on New Jersey is no big surprise. Fresh off their recent success in manipulating the state’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie into backing out of the Northeastern cap-and-trade system known as RGGI, the brothers grim are honing in on what they see as a weak spot in the clean-energy movement’s eastern front. Hoping to score a knockout blow, the duo have packed their offshore wind "analysis" with distortions.

Topping the report’s list of misrepresented facts are the jobs benefits. In fact, forget about misrepresentation; the report actually failed to represent those benefits altogether. Considering the impressive job-creation numbers cited in a range of other studies on offshore wind, it’s hard to imagine how any analysis that wasn’t commissioned as an intentional piece of fiction could have made such a glaring omission. Indeed, a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that the 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind power New Jersey is planning to build could result in nearly 5,000 construction and maintenance jobs. Adding to the imbalance of the Kochs' equations, their report completely discounts wind power’s benefit as a relief valve against foreign-oil dependence or New Jersey’s need to import electricity from other states.

Of course, this parade of misinformation should come as little surprise considering the track record of the key Koch crony in the Garden State: AFP New Jersey chapter director and Tea Party high priest Steve Lonegan. A longtime extreme-right gadfly of the New Jersey political scene, Lonegan earned his Koch-worthy credentials publishing false accusations about political opponents during his time as mayor of Bogota, N.J., and has been accused of violating state election laws and defrauding taxpayers in a 2008 run for governor. What’s more, as chronicled in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Lonegan was the local force behind the “dishonest scare-campaign” that led to Christie’s retreat from RGGI.

With Lonegan leading the offensive, it’s clear the Kochs are planning to make the fight over New Jersey’s coasts a particularly ugly and bruising one. The situation also bodes ominously for other states up and down the Mid-Atlantic Bight that are considering wind projects, from Connecticut to North Carolina.

Thankfully, for all the dollars and deceitfulness the Kochs have in their arsenal, their victory is far from assured. As their failed attempt to cut down California’s climate law in 2010 proved, the Kochs can be beaten by a well-organized, grassroots-powered opposition with truth on its side. And that’s exactly what they’re up against in New Jersey and up and down the Mid-Atlantic Bight, where a robust coalition involving everyone from Google to the United Steelworkers to the League of Women Voters is ready to stand up for wind and smack down any BS Lonegan and the Kochs serve up.

Game on, boys. Bring it.

Keith Harrington is the Maryland/DC Field Director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and Climate and Energy Specialist for the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

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