Switching from steel to concrete somehow feels like a step backward, technologically speaking, but researchers at Iowa State University think doing so could aid in building ever-bigger wind turbine towers. Led by engineering professor Sri Sritharan, a group is using ultra-high performance concrete to build turbines that could soar past the 80 or so meters that steel has maxed out at.

Steel towers are the standard in the wind industry, but building 100-meter towers—needed to get better wind currents—becomes extremely expensive and logistically difficult. Sritharan's group is working on a couple of ideas using concrete that would allow a degree of modularity—instead of one big piece for the tower, panels attached to columns or pre-assembled "cells" could allow for towers of varying heights and would be easier to manage and transport.

So far, these designs have shown promise in load testing. Full-scale segments of the towers easily withstood the 100 000 pounds of operational load, and still performed well at much higher loads. Along with the modularity, concrete would increase the operational lifetime of a tower, from 20 years to as many as 40. And at even a mere 20 meters higher, turbines could take advantage of higher wind speeds.

To be clear, there are some concrete towers already out on the market. Acciona Windpower, for example, has a 3-megawatt turbine that can be installed using an 80-meter steel tower or a concrete version of varying heights. The concrete tower can get as high as 120 meters, and is also assembled in five or six sections. The vast majority of towers out there, though, are steel, and the Iowa State designs provide new methods of construction and assembly.

Of course, changing from steel to concrete carries some environmental questions: concrete contains cement, the production of which yields some serious carbon dioxide emissions. Like, five-percent-of-global-emissions serious. Steel production also emits CO2, though not on the same level; I asked Dr. Sritharan about this, and he said that he and a student have so far done only a limited analysis of the issue.

"The steel tower is likely to have less overall environmental impact if [a] duration of 20 years is used," he wrote in an e-mail. "However, the concrete tower can last longer as its design is not governed by fatigue." If the concrete tower lasts 40 years instead of 20, the overall environmental impact is likely smaller than that of the steel tower. "We definitely need to do more work in this area," he said.

The wind industry in general has long been interested in going both bigger and higher. Using concrete won't yield the 500-meter turbine, and it won't suddenly produce 10-megawatt behemoths, but it's a potentially useful step in those directions.

Photo: Iowa State University/Sri Sritharan

Last Thursday, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, as measured atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano, reached 400 parts per million. The good news is that most educated people now have a sense of what that means—which would not have been the case 10 years ago. The bad news is that the world is more confused than ever regarding what to do about it.

Since humans started pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in large quantities with the beginning of the industrial revolution in the mid-1700s, CO₂ concentrations have increased about 50 percent. To put it another way, today's CO₂ concentrations are about 50 percent higher than at their interglacial peaks, going back at least 800 000 years, as estimated from the longest Antarctic ice core. And they are climbing at the highest rates in measured time. Two-thirds of the increase in industrial times has taken place in just the last half century, since Charles Keeling set up instruments on Mauna Loa to measure CO₂ in the late 1950s.

“The last time in the Earth’s history when we saw similar levels of CO ₂ in the atmosphere was probably about 4.5 million years ago when the world was warmer on average by three or four degrees Celsius than it is today,” Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, told the Financial Times . “There was no permanent ice sheet on Greenland, sea levels were much higher, and the world was a very different place.”

“If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO₂ emissions have to occur right away,” Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist and paleoclimatologist, told The New York Times. “I feel like the time to do something was yesterday.”

There's the rub. Metaphorically speaking, the day before yesterday saw the conclusion of the Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol 1997, whereupon many of the leading industrial countries did start making serious efforts to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. But the United States opted out of that process, and rapidly industrialized countries like China and India were not required to join in. Then, yesterday, with the global financial meltdown and near-depression, the whole world took a timeout on climate policy. Traumatic events like the U.S. heat wave last summer and Hurricane Sandy last fall continued to deliver rude reminders of what climate change could mean. But with major economies still struggling to get moving again, much of the public remained unready to get—and certainly unready to act on—the message.

What now? Is it not time for the United States, which seems at last to be getting over the economic hump, to get into the game of climate diplomacy in a serious way?

Photo: Mauna Loa Observatory, by Chris Stewart/AP Photo

Texas and California are the two biggest states in the country by population, and second and third by area. So it's no surprise they're one-two on the installed wind power state ranking list. But what's Iowa—26th biggest by area and 30th by population—doing there at third place?

Iowa, already impressive in its wind power progress, continues its march into the energy future with one of it's two main utilities announcing plans to build US $1.9 billion worth of new turbines by 2015. MidAmerican Energy says the project's 656 new turbines will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax revenues and will arrive at zero extra expense to utility customers. In fact, after only a few years of operation, ratepayers will see a decrease in electricity bills thanks to the 1050 megawatts of new wind.

That full gigawatt of power joins more than 5 GW already installed in the Hawkeye State through the end of 2012, and would add about 1.5 percent to the total installed capacity in the U.S. And though Iowa may be smaller than Texas and California by just about any measure that doesn't include corn production, in 2012 it led the way in percentage of electricity generation from wind, at 24.5 percent. According to Iowa's own wind industry group, the installed capacity is enough for about 1.1 million homes; guess how many households the state even has. Yup, just over 1.2 million.

So what gives? Some of it is grandfathered in at this point, with a historically strong wind industry in the region leading residents to welcome the sight of wind energy towers instead of resent them. And yes, there is a lot of wind to go around: 26th in size, but seventh in total wind resource, with an enormous 570 000 potential megawatts floating in the first 100 meters off the ground. But interestingly, state policies aren't really pushing the rotors of wind power in Iowa: While the state does have a renewable energy portfolio standard, it sets a weak goal, in terms of megawatts rather than a percentage. California, by contrast, requires itself to have 33 percent of electricity from renewables by 2020; Iowa's now-ancient standard (passed in 1983) calls for 105 MW from renewables divided between the two main utilities. The state passed that mark long ago.

Whatever the reason, the $1.9 billion in new turbines suggests Iowa isn't ready to slow down, even though now it can essentially power every home in the state with just those spinning blades.

Photo: JG Photography/Alamy 

The Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave Desert marches ever closer to its official opening this summer. That plant, a huge concentrating solar power (CSP) facility using mirrors aimed at central towers, will join others in Spain, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere. So there's a sizeable capacity potential for CSP, but is the technology worth it? When Ivanpah and a number of other plants were designed or suggested, photovoltaic prices hadn't dropped off the map just yet, so the economics of building plants that concentrated light seemed reasonable. That has since changed and PV is incredibly cheap, and the actual value CSP provides has yet to really be quantified. A recent analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) tries to do that—specifically in California, though the methodology can certainly be used elsewhere.

The basic answer is that CSP is very valuable to the grid, especially when it is capable of providing "operating reserves," or short-term extra capacity in times of high demand or failures in other parts of the grid. The value is essentially based on how much fossil fuel-based generation can be avoided through the use of CSP; the NREL researchers compared a baseline scenario to photovoltaics, CSP alone, and CSP with operating reserves. CSP beats out the baseline scenario by about US $6 per megawatt-hour, and by $12 per MWh over PV.

By using operating reserves, though, those differences increase fairly dramatically: CSP wins in that case by $22 per MWh over baseload and $29 per MWh over PV. Interestingly, running CSP plants with operating reserves would mean a shift in standard practice: generally, these plants are run at full capacity whenever the sun shines, but to provide operating reserves would mean running at only partial capacity some of the time and then ramping up when needed.

This analysis was conducted solely for the California grid, and was based on the state's renewable energy portfolio standard calling for 33 percent of electricity from renewables by 2020. The same method, though, could be extended to other regions as well. And quantifying CSP's value may help it continue to grow, given some recent struggles; BrightSource Energy, the Ivanpah plant's developer, has shelved a full gigawatt of further CSP plans this year alone thanks to cost and other issues. PV is cheap these days, but can't incorporate storage using molten salts or other ideas the way CSP can, and clearly doesn't add value to the overall grid the way CSP does. To really scale up renewables we will need both in huge amounts, but understanding CSP's value is an important step toward its expansion.

Photo: BrightSource Energy

Eurotechnology Japan noted in a recent e-mail circular that Japan's ten major electricity operators were deeply in the red for the year ending 31 March—the second year in a row that the utilities took such a hit. Their combined 2012-13 losses came to US $15 billion, almost exactly the same as the year before. In its annual report for the fiscal year that ended 31 March 2011 (three weeks after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe), Tepco had to report a $10 billion loss—nearly all as a direct result of the accident. In the next fiscal year, says the e-mail alert, all but one of the country's nuclear operators were affected by the shutdown of Japan's reactors and the urgent need to replace nuclear electricity with power generated from imported natural gas. "Currently all Japanese regional electricity operators, except Hokuriku Electric Power Company and Okinawa Electric Power Company show net losses." As a result, the country as a whole has seen its trade balance slip into the red, despite its position as an exporter to the world.

Japan need not have found itself in such dire straights following an event like Fukushima, an author of the Eurotechnology Japan report told Britain's Economist magazine. Although the country has great potential in renewables--from rooftop solar to offshore wind and geothermal energy--Japan's utilities have arbitrarily sought to limit the share of renewables in electricity production to 1 percent, an unspoken rule, said Gerhard Fasol. Though officials now are talking of boosting that share to 15-25 percent, actually getting that done will surely require a battle royal with vested interests.

Meanwhile, Fukushima has been a huge blow to nuclear manufacturers everywhere, Japan's first and foremost. So it was big news for them and something of a breakthrough last week when Turkey announced it would purchase a huge, 4.5 Gigawatt atomic power plant complex from an international group led by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries at an estimated price of more than $20 billion. Though Mitsubishi will have the role of prime contractor, the actual technology will be provided mainly by France's Areva—its first big nuclear sale since Fukushima as well.

Many financial details of the deal remain unresolved, and the deal cannot be considered fully done until they are worked out. Evidently Turkey will take a large capital stake in the project, but most costs will be carried by the international contractors, who will be repaid out of revenues from the plant's electricity sales. The issue of just how much risk will be shifted to investors is key, given the jittery financial climate for nuclear power post-Fukushima. In the case of an earlier 4.5-GW nuclear power complex commissioned by Turkey (the nation's first such deal), Russia's nuclear supplier assumed all the risk.

Photo: The third and fourth reactors buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, as seen from the air on Feb. 20, 2013.
Credit: The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images

You would think that to the extent the old-fashioned car powered by an internal combustion engine comes into disrepute, because of its noxious emissions and oil consumption, the obvious beneficiaries will be the hybrid-electric and all-electric vehicle. But you might be wrong, to judge from the New York Times's second annual "energy for tomorrow" conference, which was devoted to "Building Sustainable Cities."

Last year the Gray Lady knocked the ball out of the park with a conference sharply focused on a single theme, the radically stronger U.S. position in energy—a development little noticed then that has become a virtual truism in the meantime. A repeat performance was not to be expected this year. But even so, "Building Sustainable Cities" delivered some startling perspectives too.

Most shocking, perhaps, was the level of hostility expressed by many speakers to the automobile as such. Jaime Lerner, a former mayor of Brazil's Curitiba, known for the work he did there introducing an integrated mass transportation system that has been copied the world over, expressed the belief that cars some day soon will be seen as noxious as tobacco is today. "The car is going to be the cigarette of the future," Lerner said.

The distaste Lerner and others expressed had to do not merely with pollutants and gasoline but, first and foremost, with congestion and what you might call human equities. Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, said his transportation reforms emphasized wide use of mini-buses (like the VW "Volksbus" seen ubiquitously in Mexico City), which after all emit pollutants and consume hydrocarbons too. The decisive factor for Penalosa is the amount of urban space consumed by a bus, as compared with a private car. "If we are all equal before the law," he said, then "a bus carrying 100 people should be entitled to 100 times as much road space as a private car."

More important than replacing regular cars with hybrids or electrics, argued Lerner, is replacing them with vehicles that are much smaller and lower-performance as well.

To the extent electrics and hybrids will gain from the growing unpopularity of the private car, some conference participants suggested, it is going to be the hybrid and electric bicycle, not the hybrid or electric automobile. (Fortune contributing editor Mark Gunther pursues the same theme in a recent article that can be found on Yale's environment.360 website.) There are an estimated 150 million electric bikes on the China's road's today, noted Hal Harvey, CEO of Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology LLC. (That was a trend Spectrum spotted eight years ago in its special issue on China's tech revolution.)

There is at least one city, said Harvey, that does not let automobiles enter when it is deemed "full." And while that may sound startling, it is actually nothing new. The imperial Romans had "time of day" entry restrictions that aimed to curtail chariot congestion, observed Anna Nagurney, director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Regulation not only of incoming cars but, even more importantly, of trucks carrying freight, is considered a planning priority in cities in many parts of the world.

Using parking regulations and restrictions to control urban congestion is another regulatory tool being considered globally, several participants noted.

All this is not to say, of course, that there will be no benefit to hybrids and electrics from urban restrictions on gasoline-powered cars. Some cities--Houston, Texas, for example--are working hard with local utilities to make themselves more hybrid-friendly. But the benefits to electrics, to judge from the Times conference, may not be as great as their proponents have hoped.

Photo: Imaginechina via AP Images

This article was edited on 9 May to correct the spelling of Curitiba and the estimated number of bicycles in China.

As one who believes that nuclear power has a vital role to play in guaranteeing our future energy supplies and in lowering the risk of catastrophic climate change, I am chagrined to report that Fukushima is still providing plenty of ammunition to anti-nuclear forces, two years after the worse-than-imagined cascading disasters that befell the reactor complex in the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami.

The New York Times reported on April 30 that groundwater is infiltrating the ravaged reactor complex at a rate of 75 gallons per minute (almost 300 liters/m), straining the operators' ability to collect the contaminated water and prevent it for escaping into the Pacific Ocean.

On top of that, there is serious concern that the accumulating water could swamp the improvised systems that cool the damaged cores, and cause another major accident.

"It feels like we are being chased, but we are doing our best to stay a step in front," a Tepco general manager and spokesperson told the Times.

Already, tanks built to accommodate the strontium-laden groundwater have the capacity of 112 Olympic-size pools (photo). And yet Tepco is planning to remove a small forest near the plant to make room for more tanks. Originally, Tepco thought it would be able to dump wastewater from the plant into the ocean, after filtering out most of the strontium and other radioactive materials. But public outcry over the amount of tritium remaining in the water has led to that idea being scotched.

Could a new generation of small, modular reactors, built underground, give new life to nuclear construction in the advanced industrial countries? Two designs are looking especially promising, as Matthew Wald of the Times reported separately last week. But, as one caustic critic told Wald, the nice thing about paper designs is that they only carry the risk of paper cuts; defects often become apparent only when designs are further along and construction begins.

Photo: Kyodo/AP Images

New York City being New York City, it was hardly surprising Monday night that eight of the nine candidates vying to replace Michael Bloomberg as mayor said addressing climate change was a major city responsibility. Where New York City stands on issues of sustainability is, of course, of more than merely local interest. Besides being one of the world's great cities, under Bloomberg New York has emerged as a world leader in efforts to promote green development and plan for disruptive climate change effects. Bloomberg himself is a leader in national and international efforts to address climate change.

What was much more surprising was that eight of the nine—not exactly the same eight—declined to call for closure of the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plant, when invited to do so by the moderator. A relatively old nuclear power plant, Indian Point is situated on the Hudson River just 35 miles (55 kilometers) north of the city; a meltdown could contaminate the river basin and spread contamination to an area that would be virtually impossible to evacuate.

That was one highlight of the New York City Sustainability Forum held Monday evening at Cooper Union, in which five Democratic Party candidates, three Republicans and one Independent squared off on energy and the environment, with WNYC's highly regarded radio host Brian Lehrer presiding.

Public opinion on Indian Point has been rather evenly split, to be sure, with almost half of New Yorkers in favor of keeping the plant open and about 40 percent favoring its closure. But considering that opponents are likely to be the more passionate and activist voters, appealing to them might tempt the demagogue. To be sure, a reluctance to phase out nuclear is not inconsistent with taking a strong position on climate change, but that has not stopped most environmental organizations from remaining staunchly anti-nuclear and it has not stopped countries with strong climate policies (like Germany) from adopting a nuclear exit.

So it's noteworthy that eight of the nine mayoral candidates specifically opposing closure of the plant until the city knew how to replace its output, which accounts for up to a quarter of the city's electricity consumption. (And this is not to say that the one candidate advocating immediate closure of the plant, City Council chair Christine Quinn, the current front-runner, is demoagogic or insincere in her position. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo also would like to see it shuttered.)

That said, many of the issues discussed in detail last night are of mainly local interest: The particulars of flood-zone planning, for example, and siting of solid waste disposal facilities. But even when it comes down to such nuts and bolts other cities may have something to learn from NYC--and NYC may have a few things to learn as well. One candidate pointed out, for example, that New York recycles 20 percent of its trash, while San Francisco is close to 80 percent. Moderator Lehrer observed that one of eight New Yorkers suffer from asthma, and that the rates are much higher in poor neighborhoods where there is a lot of trucking.

Urban air pollution was an area in which the nine candidates were surprisingly weak, though eight of the the nine agreed there is too much traffic south of Manhattan's 59th Street—an issue that Bloomberg tried unsuccessfully to address with a plan for congestion pricing, modeled on London's. Figuring out how to reduce automotive traffic in major cities is of course a major issue everywhere.

Photo: Seth Wenig/AP Photo

New York City, with its massive buildings, high population density, poor ratio of roofttop to resident, and rather northerly latitude, has represented a tough frontier for solar energy to conquer. Eight years ago, when I looked into the economics of putting a photovoltaic array on the roof of a home in the central Brooklyn neighborhood where I reside, I found that even with enormous state subsidies, going solar did not pay.

As laid out in a book about energy and climate that I was writing at the time, for a PV array costing about US $32 000, the homeowner stood to collect $20 000 in subsidies from New York State. Still, the payback period would be at least a decade—and then only if everything turned out to work as advertized.

Now, however, a few PV arrays are popping up on roofs in my neighborhood. The ones nearby are being installed by VoltaicSolaire, a four-year-old company founded by Carlos Berger, owner and operator of a successful electrical contracting business. (Why the French-sounding name? He just wanted the company to sound different, Berger explains.) The arrays are provided by an American company in Wisconsin, says Berger, and the PV material is standard silica.

Berger says that VoltaicSolaire's system installation costs run $4 to $6/Watt. The installer stands to collect a 30-percent subsidy from the federal government upon completion of the system, with another 25 percent (up to $5000), coming from the state of New York. 

Even so, the economics are still a close call. Berger says the expected payback period is now 5 to 7 years, a big improvement from what it was eight years ago. But the installation will pay off only if the home has a rooftop with a large expanse facing south or southwest. (A killer eight years ago was that my roof faced mainly west.) Another set of hurdles are the bureaucratic type. Obtaining city building permits can involve a lot of red tape, and so can getting net metering set up, which is essential. Berger expects such obstacles to diminish with time, however.

Will we soon see a deluge of photovoltaic installation in places like Brooklyn? It will depend largely on whether global PV prices stabilize near their current level—despite a general meltdown in solar manufacturing—or bounce back to much higher levels. Future price scenarios are explored in a current IEEE Spectrum news report by Peter Fairley.

Photo: VoltaicSolaire

This week a scrappy little online publication with no physical headquarters and an editorial staff of just seven was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in American journalism. InsideClimate News, based theoretically in Brooklyn, N.Y., is just the third electronic-only publication to be given a Pulitzer--ProPublica, the first to get one, now has two, and Huffington Post has one.

InsideClimate news won the Putlizer for an investigative story by three of its reporters about an under-covered oil spill in Michigan, an article that testifies to the publication's broad interest in energy and the environment, going beyond climate news as such.

The publication's report that most caught my eye was one in January, on the subject of drastic cuts in environmental reporting staffs at top U.S. newspapers. Prompted by the news that The New York Times was dismantling its environmental desk and reassigning many of the desk's reporters to other beats, InsideClimate News said that the country's leading five newspapers now had only a dozen journalists covering the environment, despite the general public's obvious interest in the subject.

The second paragraph to that story noted that Hurricane Sandy had just "brought home the reality of climate dangers to many Americans," and that a recently released draft government report predicted "far worse to come." Temperatures could rise by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century, threatening "Americans' health and livelihoods and the ecosystems that sustain us," as the draft report put it.

Michael Mann—whom the Yale University alumni magazine has dubbed "the most hated climate scientist in the U.S."—told InsideClimate News that "specialized, experienced environment editors and reporters are essential to navigate the escalating politics and complicated science of climate change." Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, said that climate change was "not just the biggest crisis ever, it's the biggest story ever."

Another InsideCimate News story catching my eye concerned John Kerry's appointment as Secretary of State: It said that he would take personal control of the controversial Keystone XL review. This struck me as a shrewd political observation. When President Obama delayed his decision on the pipeline last year, calling for further review, it was widely assumed that he would approve construction after the election. But his appointment of Kerry as Secretary of State may indeed have changed the political chemistry. Kerry is well known to be a passionate advocate of strong policy to counter climate change, respected as such around the world.

One of the InsideClimate News reporters who won this week's Pulitzer told The New York Times that though people think of the publication as an advocacy organization because of its name, that's wrong. This may be a trifle disingenuous. If you decide to devote a publication, say, to the science of evolution, that would seem to imply that you take evolution seriously. Or if you were to devote it to planetary science, that might imply you think the Earth is spherical and rotates around the Sun. By the same token, if you call your publication InsideClimate News, that will generally communicate that you take climate science seriously.

In any event, the award should hearten anyone who fears for the future of investigative journalism—a fear that all too often seems warranted. Like ProPublica, InsideClimate News has a set of media partners and makes its stories available to other publications. As other publications reduce their editorial staffs, it's a hopeful sign that other organizations are emerging to pick up the slack.

Can I interest you in a microbattery with a power density better than the best supercapacitors—2000 times higher than other microbatteries—and energy density rivaling conventional lithium-ion batteries? Yes? Thought so.

A team of researchers at the University of Illinois report on a Li-ion microbattery composed of "three-dimensional bicontinuous interdigitated microelectrodes," and a University press release and a variety of media coverage has essentially decided the battery can save the world. While it is certainly impressive and may eventually fit a range of applications, there are still problems with the idea, and as of now it mainly exists in a paper in Nature Communications. It could take a while to go from the lab to your cell phone.

To the miracle claims: "The most powerful batteries on the planet are only a few millimeters in size, yet they pack such a punch that a driver could use a cellphone powered by these batteries to jump-start a dead car battery—and then recharge the phone in the blink of an eye." Whew!

Sounds great, right? I emailed Paul Braun, one of the researchers involved, and asked what the catch is. He said that though this battery can charge at speeds resembling capacitors, "a capacitor usually can be cycled millions of times. We have a long way to go in this regard. Almost all Li-ion batteries exhibit capacity fade with cycling, including our system." He added that this isn't a direct replacement for a capacitor, but "rather this is best for systems where the high energy density is particularly useful. Because of the 3-D structure, we can also provide capacitor-like power, but a million cycle life is quite unlikely."

The architecture of the batteries allows very short electron and ion transport distance; the entire fuel battery cell has a volume of 0.03 cubic millimeters. The design does yield impressive performance; as the press release says, "imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second." The cycling question is definitely up in the air, though: in the paper, the authors write that the battery cell retained 64 percent of its initial energy after only 15 cycles, losing about 5 percent with each "low-rate" cycle. And the BBC reports (in one of the few appropriately skeptical pieces on the tech) that as the technology is scaled up for use in larger applications safety could become an issue thanks to the use of small amounts of a combustible liquid electrolyte.

I also asked Braun about manufacturing and if costs would be prohibitive, but he said the process would actually be relatively simple. "The key will be developing a manufacturing process which is compatible with both the battery and the device one wishes to power," he said.

Don't expect that all our devices will stay powered for a month after a one-second charge anytime soon, but there is clearly a lot of promise here. In the paper, the authors say the microbatteries could have a wide range of applications, "from medical implants to remote sensor networks."

Photo: Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

Abrupt role reversals are nothing new to the field of behavioral psychology: In a marriage, from one moment to the next one spouse stops being the perpetual nag and critic to assume the part of lazy laggard, while the other goes from laid-back to laying it on. There's dirty work that has to be done, so the two martial partners take turns doing it.

Evidently the picture is not much different in international affairs. During the decade following the adoption at Rio of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Europeans--above all Germany and the United Kingdom--took the global lead in cutting greenhouse emissions in conformity with the requirements of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the Rio treaty. But then, midway through George W. Bush's administration, the balance of action reversed. Virtually from one month to the next, it was the United States that was sharply cutting its carbon emissions, while Europe went from carping critic to whining, put-upon victim.

The latest manifestation was the decision yesterday by the European Parliament to not take aggressive action to shore up the price of carbon emission permits in the deathly ill (carbon) Emissioons Trading System (the ETS). The non-move left the European carbon trading system "in tatters," as the Wall Street Journal reported; an earlier report in the Journal attributed the underlying problem mainly to indecision and divisions in the government of Germany, Europe's heavyweight. In the last years, as any newspaper reader knows, Germans have gone from purposeful high-mindedness and self-sacrifice to feeling put upon in every possible way.

The U.S.-European reversal is by no means just a product of policy and public attitudes. In the last years, the single most important factor in decreasing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions has been fuel switching by utilities and energy companies from coal to natural gas, which has been largely a spontaneous response to free-market forces. In Europe, to pile irony upon ironies, the pattern has been the opposite. As several commentators on yesterday's parliamentary decision noted, in major countries like Germany, the UK and Spain, utilities have been switching from natural gas back to coal. In the UK, for example, coal consumption was 35 percent higher in the first half of 2012 than in the comparable period of 2011, while gas consumption was 33 percent lower.

Of course it's not possible in energy to distinguish sharply between market forces, policy and technology. To a great extent, price changes are driven by expectations about future policy and technological developments. But the U.S.-European reversal is just as visible in policy as it is in the marketplace. Another manifestation: A recent opinion column by former Secretary of State George Schulz and Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker advocating U.S. adoption of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Consistent with free-market principles, the two luminaries--both associated now with teh arch-conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University--argue that such a tax would level the playing field in energy.

The so-called "artificial leaf" is continuing to grow up, with an announcement this week at the American Chemical Society meeting that the device can essentially heal damage it sustains during energy generation processes on its own. This would allow Sun Catalytix's device—a "catalyst-coated wafer of silicon"—to run in the impure, bacteria-laden water found out in the world instead of just in pristine laboratory conditions.

The artificial leaf actually mimics only a part of the photosynthetic process found in plants. Drop the leaf into some water and expose it to sunlight, and the catalysts on its surface break down water into hydrogen and oxygen. Those bubbling gases can be collected and stored to be used as energy.

"We figured out a way to tweak the conditions so that part of the catalyst falls apart, denying bacteria the smooth surfaced needed to form a biofilm. Then the catalyst can heal and re-assemble," said Daniel Nocera, founder of Sun Catalytix and a professor at MIT, according to a press release.

The company has been touting the leaf as a cheap and easy solution to global issues of energy poverty. Nocera says that as many as 3 billion people lack access to "traditional electric production and distribution systems," and that a simple device one drops in a bucket of water—even dirty water, with the latest development—could provide standalone electricity to those multitudes. A couple of years ago, the company's chief technology officer Tom Jarvi told me a bit more cautiously that because "the inputs are light and water, and the output is fuel, one can certainly see the applicability of something like that to the developing world." The economics of really reaching such an audience are probably still in question, and there is still a step missing: convert the fuel the leaf creates into something readily usable in generators or even cars. The leaf is also relatively inefficient, well below 10 percent, compared to 15 to 20 percent efficiency for solar panels.

Still, back in 2011 I wrote this about the Sun Catalytix leaf:

Jarvi says the company expects to be able to bring the device to the point where a kilogram of hydrogen could be produced for about US $3. Given that a gallon of gasoline contains about the same amount of energy as 1 kg of hydrogen, as long as gas prices stay north of $3 per gallon, this would make a cost-effective fuel source.

Let's see, what have U.S. gas prices done since then? Okay: never dropped below $3.22 and scared $4.00 once or twice. Looks like we're still on track there.

Photo: mediaphotos/Stockphoto

This article originally appeared on Slate's Future Tense blog.

Thatcherites like to remember their heroine as a free-market absolutist. What most forget is how strongly she insisted that economic development not come at the cost of environmental destruction.

A chemistry major at Oxford, Thatcher was never one of those conservatives who saw science as the enemy of progress. And in the last three years of her premiership, she became one of the first world leaders to call for action of global warming. Below are excerpts from four of her most stirring speeches on the subject.

In a speech to the Royal Society on 27 September 1988:

For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself. …

The Government espouses the concept of sustainable economic development. Stable prosperity can be achieved throughout the world provided the environment is nurtured and safeguarded. Protecting this balance of nature is therefore one of the great challenges of the late Twentieth Century. …

In a speech to the Conservative Party Conference on 14 October 1988:

It's we conservatives who are not merely friends of the Earth—we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come. (Clapping.) The core of Tory philosophy and for the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease. This Government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full.

In an address to the United Nations on 8 November 1989 (as published by the Guardian in 2005):

The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world's climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all. That prospect is a new factor in human affairs. It is comparable in its implications to the discovery of how to split the atom. Indeed, its results could be even more far-reaching.

The evidence is there. The damage is being done. What do we, the international community, do about it? … It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. We have to look forward not backward, and we shall only succeed in dealing with the problems through a vast international, co-operative effort. …

We are not the lords, we are the Lord's creatures, the trustees of this planet, charged today with preserving life itself—preserving life with all its mystery and all its wonder. May we all be equal to that task.

And in a speech at the Second World Climate Conference on 6 November 1990:

The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations. Our ability to come together to stop or limit damage to the world's environment will be perhaps the greatest test of how far we can act as a world community. No-one should under-estimate the imagination that will be required, nor the scientific effort, nor the unprecedented co-operation we shall have to show. We shall need statesmanship of a rare order. It's because we know that, that we are here today.

But the need for more research should not be an excuse for delaying much needed action now.

Nor was she all talk. Thatcher backed the 1988 establishment of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which went on to lay the groundwork for the Kyoto Protocol. And she was instrumental in the 1990 founding of the Britain’s renowned climate research center, the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change.

Long after her premiership, Thatcher veered toward a more reactionary stance. In her last book, published in 2003, she decried “costly and economically damaging” schemes to limit carbon emissions and lamented that climate change “provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.” Some cynics have also noted that her early embrace of climate science dovetailed conveniently with her antipathy toward coal miners.

Be that as it may, she never abandoned her faith in the scientific method, nor her conviction that true conservatism entailed leaving the Earth in livable condition for future generations. Let’s hope that message is not lost on her acolytes.

Photo: Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images

Since the first appearance of the famous or infamous "hockey stick" graph 14 years ago, it and its creator Michael Mann have been icons and lightning rods in the climate debate. Because of its empirical specificity, the chart showing a steep rise in global temperatures in the last century seemed to carry more weight with a lot of people than mere theory or computer models. So it is not surprising that the chart and its maker became the target climate change rejectionists most wanted to take down. In the affair of the hacked e-mails at, to and from East Anglia University, Mann's correspondence was especially closely scrutinized, leading to formal investigations.

Then too there is Mann's personality, which is said to be difficult and bristly. "Mann is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with climate science today. He is a hardcore political activist, very thin skinned, does not take criticism well at all, and he surrounds himself within his own little world of supportive warmist activists,” Marc Morano, communications director for Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, told the Yale Alumni Magazine. (The committee, a conservative non-profit in Washington, D.C., describes itself as dedicated to protecting environmental values, while ensuring that people the world over can enjoy the longer, healthier and more productive lives that modern science and technology can bring.)

That's a harsh judgment, but it's nothing compared to what others have called Mann, the Yale magazine reports. A writer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, comparing Mann to Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced football coach at Penn State, where Mann happens to teach, said that "instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science." Morano himself has "called for Mann and other scientists to be publicly flogged. Morano’s former boss, Rush Limbaugh, said they should be drawn and quartered."

That kind of desperate rhetoric can be safely ignored and dismissed. What cannot be ignored are the data accompanying the Yale article showing how Mann's findings have fared in recent years. Best of all is a compact world map charting the world's hottest places in 2012. The hottest in modern history--the century and a half in which thermometer readings have been taken—were most parts of the United States, parts of south and southeastern Europe, and the areas around Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires.

Photo: Greg Grieco

An industrial research consortium that's a who's who of the European power industry says the development of technologies to produce high-voltage DC (HVDC) supergrids accelerated in 2012 and is "surpassing expectations." The assessment comes in the supergrids technology roadmap updated earlier this month by Friends of the Supergrid (FOSG), whose members include power equipment suppliers Siemens, ABB, and Alstom, as well as transmission system operators and renewable energy developers.

Summarizing the conclusions of an expert group within the International Council on Large Electric Systems -- better known as CIGRE, its French acroynm -- FOSG says there is now no doubt as to the feasibility of HVDC networks ferrying renewable energy resources from wherever they are in surplus to wherever they are needed. "CIGRE Working Group B4–2 considered this question, specifically whether it was technically and economically feasible to build a DC Grid, and the answer was yes," wrote FOSG.

The FOSG supergrid roadmap notes accelerated progress in several core HVDC components. Research enabling use of a broader range of subsea and underground HVDC cables is expanding the supplier base for supergrid lines. Another core technology moving fast is the voltage source converter (VSC) variant of AC to DC converters that connect HVDC lines with the AC grid.

VSCs make today's HVDC lines dramatically better than "classical" HVDC technology. Though HVDC has long excelled at moving high power over long distances, classical HVDC is an unlikely candidate for meshed DC grids because it must reverse the polarity of a line to reverse its current. VSC technology is more flexible, and has recently begun to enable groundbreaking multi-terminal HVDC projects. Sweden's South-West Link, for example, is expected to open next year with three terminals; a fourth converter is to extend the line to Norway by 2018.

Also noted in the FOSG roadmap are recent developments in VSC converters that make them capable of breaking HVDC current. Among them are the advanced VSC converter tested by Alstom in February (see photo), and the hybrid electro-mechanical breaker announced by ABB in November.

FOSG chairman Marcello del Brenna, who is also CEO of Italian high-voltage cable manufacturer Prysmian PowerLink, asserts that within this decade, European grid operators will begin to cobble together HVDC lines to form the world's first meshed HVDC network. It will ultimately interconnect North Sea wind farms, Mediterranean solar plants and Scandinavian hydropower. That is, says del Brenna, if policies are in place to drive it forward. He called on European Union policy makers to eliminate barriers to a truly integrated power market, and to "put in place the regulatory framework to enable large scale interconnection" between its members. 

Interconnection is a longstanding problem, but one that has undergone some recent remediation. In 2008, the European Commission brought in Mario Monti—the former EC competition commissioner who more recently served as Italy's prime minister—to secure a critically-needed link between France and Spain. The link had been stalled for 15 years. Next year, however, it's slated to start up, with two HVDC cables driven by the world's first gigawatt-scale VSC-based converters.

Photo: Alstom

Predictably, the Suntech collapse has undammed a flood of instant commentary, some of it somewhat self-contradictory.

There are those who argue that the Suntech bankruptcy and others soon to follow will relieve a glut in the global photovoltaics market, leading to supply being more in line with demand and prices stabilizing at a somewhat higher level, giving a badly needed incentive to innovators.  And then there are those—sometimes the same those—who say the shakeout will be brutal indeed, with no end in sight.

Whatever the situation, though it may now be a necessary one, it is hardly the best of all possible worlds.

Taking a relatively optimistic line, the Financial Times's prestigious "Lex" team asserts that "the end of the [solar] misery is almost in sight. Crippled balance sheets have brought growth in capacity to a halt. And demand is recovering. China’s Golden Sun solar subsidy scheme will double installed solar power capacity in the country to 10 gigawatts this year." Warren Buffett is investing in solar in the United States, and profitability could return to the industry "as early as" next year.

Yet just two days before a Beijing correspondent for the paper reported that "Chinese solar-panel makers are set to follow the lead of Suntech as the solar  industry enters a difficult period of consolidation and "adjustment.' " The clear implications were that a lot of PV makers will go down the tubes too, and that is won't be any easy adjustment.

Earth2Tech's Katie Fehrenbacher, like Lex, declared the Suntech bankruptcy "a good thing." But she went on to cite a Technology Review estimate that "hundreds of solar companies need to fail"; as many as 180 PV panel manufacturers may go under by 2015, she said.

One of the more drastic estimates of the global situation comes from Keith Bradsher of The New York Times: "The industry’s problem is that most of the cost of a solar panel lies in building the factory, not in operating the equipment. So when the industry has severe overcapacity, as it does now, each company continues running its factories to cover its tiny operating costs, and at least a small part of the interest on the loans it took out to buy the costly factory equipment. But when every company pursues that strategy, the whole industry loses money and virtually no business is able to cover its full interest costs."

Maybe the most balanced assessment was in the Wall Street Journal's "Heard on the Street": Chinese companies like LDK Solar, with balance sheets known to be weak, will go under too; stronger companies like Trina Solar and Yingli Green Energy will prosper.

photo: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

It came as no surprise today when the photovoltaics manufacturer Suntech, the world market leader in recent years, filed for bankruptcy in China. The company was well known to be in serious financial trouble and has been under investigation for having spent the equivalent of almost US $700 million for bonds that probably are fraudulent, to provide financial collateral for solar projects in Germany. Last week Suntech forfeited on a US $541 million bond, and the company's chairman, Shi Zhengrong (photo), a scientist widely admired the world over as an innovative entrepreneur, had to step down, as speculation centered on whether the Suntech's municipal sponsor, the city of Wuxi, would step in to save it with some kind of bailout package.

The news, however expected, is nonetheless, stunning. In recent years, Suntech led the pack of low-cost Chinese PV makers who laid waste to commodity manufacturers in Europe and the United States, making life impossible for innovative startups like Solyndra in the U.S. and Germany's Q-Cell, the world market leader when Suntech first emerged as a force to be contended with. But then there was sharp push-back from the United States and Europe, which imposed trade sanctions after their manufacturers complained the Chinese were "dumping" PV modules at below production costs. It now appears those complaints were well-founded, as the Chinese have run up huge debts that they cannot pay back, reportedly from selling their product at a loss. As the old joke goes, for only so long can you do that and make it up in volume.

Looked at another way, the Suntech collapse appears to be a case of a technology revolution devouring its own children. According to Keith Bradsher of The New York Times, who made his reputation as a technology and business correspondent covering the troubled U.S. auto industry, "China’s approach to renewable energy has proved ruinous, financially and in terms of trade relations with the United States and the European Union. State-owned banks have provided $18 billion in loans on easy terms to Chinese solar panel manufacturers, financing an increase of more than tenfold in production capacity from 2008 to 2012. This set off a 75 percent drop in panel prices during that period, which resulted in losses to Chinese companies of as much as $1 for every $3 in sales last year."

Suntech itself is believed to owe its Chinese creditors upwards of $2 billion. "If Suntech seeks bankruptcy protection in the U.S. [as well as China]," reports the Wall Street Journal, "or if its U.S. creditors successfully filed for an involuntary bankruptcy, the company would be the largest and highest-profile Chinese company listed in the West to enter U.S. Bankruptcy Court in recent years. Suntech ranks as the second-largest Chinese company by revenue listed solely in the U.S. through American depositary receipts…"

The implications of the Suntech story go of course far beyond the company's investors and creditors, and indeed well beyond just China, the United States, and Europe. The whole global PV industry has been radically disrupted by the cut-throat tactics of the Chinese manufacturers and their political sponsors. Until the brutal shake-out in manufacturing is complete and the world market has stabilized, we will have no way of knowing the real price of a solar cell.

Photo: Nelson Ching/Bloomberg/Getty Images

It only takes five of these bad boys to clean the entirety of the Shams 1 concentrating solar power plant in the desert near Abu Dhabi every three days. That's a lot of cleaning: there are 258 048 mirrors at the plant, measuring 1.5 m by 1.3 m each, covering a total of about 2.5 square kilometers. The mirrors concentrate the sun's heat onto a liquid inside a tube, which is then used to make steam that turns a turbine to make electricity. According to Alawi Al Jafri, who took me and a gaggle of press around the plant on Sunday, they like to keep the mirrors to 85 percent reflectivity, though it could drop much lower and still function well. It turns out, he says, that there isn't much of a difference in output between clean and somewhat dirty mirrors, but when they get extremely dusty (which happens quickly in the windy desert of the UAE) and the reflectivity drops very low the efficiency comes down dramatically.

Watch the trucks in action: