ARPA-E, the government’s incubator for high-risk energy inventions, has its first graduate in the electricity area — a new energy storage technology — and on Thursday it announced a preliminary agreement to get it tested.

The agency, more formally the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, modeled after the Defense Department’s longstanding program, said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Duke, the big utility company, and the Electric Power Research Institute, the nonprofit utility consortium, to try out the inventions in the real world.

The agreement will “provide the connective tissue for ARPA-E,’’ said Arjun Majumdar, the agency’s director, and “provide the test bed to see how to create value in the actual business.’’

The first candidate will probably be General Compression, a company to which ARPA-E directed $750,000; that advanced the technology enough for the firm to raise $12 million privately, Mr. Majumdar said. The company developed a way to pump air into an underground cavern, using electricity generated at inconvenient hours. When the energy is needed, the air flows back out again through a generator.
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Associated Press A NOAA satellite image taken Thursday showing patchy clouds developing in the Caribbean.

As my colleagues Eric Lichtblau, Ron Nixon and I report in summary form in Thursday morning’s paper, the budget deal moving through Capitol Hill slashes funds that the Obama administration requested for a satellite program considered vital for the nation’s weather forecasting. That raises the prospect of less accurate forecasts and other problems, some of them potentially life-threatening, starting in 2016.

Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, warned at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that the cutbacks would probably lead to a serious gap in satellite data, undermining National Weather Service forecasts.

Research by her agency suggests that without the type of capability that the proposed satellites were expected to provide, the weather service might fumble forecasts of future events similar to the huge snowstorms that hit Washington and New York the last two winters.

“It’s a big risk,” said Daniel Sobien, head of the union that represents government weather forecasters.

Forecasters would still have access to data from satellites not affected by the cutbacks, but those would offer less detailed coverage of the country, which is why the weather forecasts would become less accurate.
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Richard Perry/The New York Times Air-conditioners protrude from a Seventh Avenue building in Manhattan where tenants do not pay for their own electricity use.

In a story in Thursday’s Times, I write about the energy wasted when air-conditioners do not fit snugly through windows and walls. The dimensions of the problem are described in a report from the Urban Green Council titled ”There Are Holes in Our City’s Walls.”

Although the window-mounted air-conditioner that sticks out of windows is the most familiar type, the two other kinds of units — the air-conditioner that sits in a metal sleeve in the wall and a packaged terminal air-conditioner that protrudes into the room — have also become common and require just as much attention when it comes to plugging gaps that allow heat to escape in the winter and cold air in the summer.

For the window air-conditioner, the report recommends improving the quality of installation by hiring a qualified professional to mount the unit and seal all the potential leaks around it. “This may involve the use of weather stripping, closed cell foam and/or a more durable alternative to the common plastic accordion panels,” the report suggests.
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A report by Yang Chuanmin of the Southern Metropolitan Daily on the effects of a toxic spill by China’s largest gold mining company wins top honors in the second annual China environmental press awards. “Even on the hottest summer days, few women wear skirts in Bitian village. They do not want to expose their feet, which are covered with festering blisters from the water of the Ting River,” the article began. [The Guardian]

The Central Asia tiger, extinct for nearly 40 years, will be reintroduced in Kazakhstan, environmental campaigners say. A program approved by the Kazakh authorities will establish the country’s first national park, and initial efforts will focus on developing sufficient numbers of prey species before introducing tigers to the area. [The Telegraph]

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, inveighs against a bipartisan bill to boost energy efficiency standards for appliances. “We are having our choices taken away,” Mr. Paul says at a Senate hearing. “It is the collective body saying you’re not smart enough to buy a light bulb, to buy a toilet, and therefore we will tell you what to buy.” [Greenwire]

Just a week before the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, legislation that would greatly speed the pace of offshore drilling permitting has been approved by the Republican-led House Natural Resources Committee.

The bill would require the Interior Department to approve or deny permit applications within 60 days; after that period, permits would be granted automatically.

“This bill allows drilling to resume in a safe manner and provides certainty to businesses by implementing firm time lines for the Interior Department to act on permits,” Doc Hastings, the panel’s chairman, said in a statement.

Two other bills before the panel would open vast new areas to offshore drilling, including much of the continental shelf off of Southern California, and provide subsidies to energy companies for exploration activities. Both bills are expected to easily clear the committee.
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Monica Almeida/The New York Times The spigots on the Glen Canyon Dam have been opened wide this winter, pouring water from Lake Powell, above, downstream 357 miles to Lake Mead.

Not quite five months ago, on Nov. 27, the level of Lake Mead, the massive federal reservoir that serves faucets and fields in Nevada, Arizona and California, hit an all-time low level of 1,081.85 feet above sea level. Seven feet lower, and the first water shortage ever would have been declared in the river’s lower basin.

An unusually wet winter, however, has given the basin a reprieve, and policy makers think they will have enough water to keep promises to every user from Mexico to Las Vegas to San Diego, while still filling Lake Mead to a level 30 feet or more above the shortage line of 1,075 feet this year. Rains began strongly in late December and continued with enough oomph through the winter to leave the snow pack in the mountains above the Colorado River 20 percent higher than normal.

So the Interior Department announced this week that it would follow its original plan and deliver 40 percent more water than usual from Lake Powell, the Utah reservoir that is 357 miles upstream and about 2,500 feet uphill from Lake Mead. With users in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and the agricultural valleys of California and Arizona expected to take a little less than normal for 2011, most of the excess of more than three million acre-feet will stay in Lake Mead, the lower of the two massive Colorado River reservoirs that have enabled the rapid growth of Phoenix, Las Vegas and southern California.

Problem solved? Not exactly. At least, not for the long term. Read more…

Reuters A chinstrap penguin in the South Shetlands, off the Antarctic Peninsula.

Just what is ailing the Southern Ocean penguins?

For a long time, the answer seemed to be that their icy habitat was being lost to global warming.

But as the BBC and others reported on Tuesday, a new study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggests that isn’t the case.

According to the study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one hypothesis guiding ecological interpretations of changes in top predator populations in this region, the “sea-ice hypothesis,” proposes that reductions in winter sea ice have led directly to declines in “ice-loving” species by eroding their winter habitat, while populations of “ice-avoiding” species have increased.

However, 30 years of field studies and recent surveys of penguins throughout the West Antarctic Peninsula and Scotia Sea demonstrate that populations of both ice-loving Adélie and ice-avoiding chinstrap penguins have declined significantly.

While the researchers say that ice loss does affect penguins, they say the more important problem appears to be a decline in the population of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), tiny shrimplike crustaceans that dwell in vast schools.
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Associated Press Pondering the legacy of America’s outsize vehicles: a Hummer and Cadillac dealership.

One of the world’s great minds on issues of energy use, food production and the connection between them is a fellow named Vaclav Smil, of the University of Manitoba. Bill Gates reads him. He is No. 49 on Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the top 100 global thinkers. He is often a curmudgeon, but our editorial colleague Andrew Revkin recently pitted him against the environmental advocate Lester Brown on questions of future food supply, with Dr. Smil playing the optimist that time.

Anybody with a serious interest in the future of the planet could disappear for many days into Dr. Smil’s astonishing list of publications. A book he wrote called “Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production” is enough to change one’s whole view of humanity. It turns out many of us would not even exist but for a chemical breakthrough dating to 1909, one whose consequences have put enormous strain on the ecology of the planet.

Dr. Smil is just out with a fresh essay on energy, this time criticizing what he calls “the latest infatuations” in the field, like biofuels, hydrogen fuel cells, electric cars, and so on.
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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Recycling bins are one of the environment-friendly features of Terminal 2 in San Francisco.

In Tuesday’s Times, I wrote about San Francisco International Airport’s renovated Terminal 2 and efforts to make flying a less carbon-intensive and stressful experience.

The art-filled terminal, known as T2, features Danish modern furniture, organic chow, 350 power outlets, free Wi-Fi and other creature comforts and innovations designed to cut the building’s energy footprint while making air travel, dare we say it, more fun.

The terminal reflects the techno-cool sensibility of Virgin America, which shares the space with American Airlines. Virgin has attracted a youngish hip clientele with a fleet of Airbuses that have neon mood lighting, a nightclub soundtrack and seatback touch screens that enable passengers to order food and entertainment.

Airport authorities are seeking LEED gold status for T2 because of the reductions in its energy and water consumption. If granted, T2 would become the first airport terminal to achieve such a rank, which the Green Building Council awards according to a point system.

Not all of T2’s green attributes are visible to passengers. Virgin, for instance, intends to apply for LEED Platinum status, a higher ranking, for the commercial interiors for its crew quarters hidden below the gate areas.
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The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the New York City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, are both calling for replacing school light fixtures that are leaking PCBs in five years or less, putting more pressure on the Bloomberg administration to speed up its planned time line of 10 years.

The E.P.A. will cite the five-year target in written remarks to be delivered Wednesday afternoon at an oversight hearing by council committees on the city’s plans. It is the first time the agency has given a number to the shorter time frame it is seeking in its negotiations with the city. “The city can and should take steps to achieve this,” the officials write.

In her own statement for the hearing, Ms. Quinn says she supports a five-year time frame and urges the administration to work with the E.P.A. to revise its plans. “We should err on the side of caution when addressing health matters pertaining to children in our schools,” the statement says.

The issue of replacing old fluorescent light fixtures became a pressing one for the city after a pilot study that began last year identified leaking lighting ballasts as a major source of high levels of the toxic chemical compounds known as PCBs in air samples taken from schools. Subsequent spot inspections of schools by the E.P.A. this year suggested that the problem was prevalent throughout the school system.
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times Marijuana growing in a converted bedroom in a house in Humboldt County, Calif.

Don’t bogart that megawatt, my friend.

A new study estimates that indoor pot-growing operations in the United States burn about $5 billion worth of electricity annually, or roughly 1 percent of national power consumption. That’s enough electricity to power two million average homes.

The electricity use of the typical grow operation approaches 200 watts per square foot, on par with the power usage of a modern computer data center, Evan Mills, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and author of the study, said in a statement. (The study was completed in his free time and without federal funds, Dr. Mills added.)

The study estimated that a single joint contains the equivalent of roughly two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of running a 100-watt bulb for about 30 hours on the California grid.
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Tokyo Electric Power Company The damaged Unit 3 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.

Now that Japan has raised its assessment of the Fukushima accident to a 7 on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s scale, equal to the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, it may be time to review past accidents. Thomas B. Cochran, a physicist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, just did that in preparing to testify on Tuesday afternoon before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Some of the incidents that he lists are technically not meltdowns but rather “core damage accidents.” That term is used when an intact core holds in nearly all of the radioactive materials that are created by a reactor as it splits atoms of uranium and plutonium, leaving behind fragment atoms of materials like cesium, strontium and iodine, which seek to return to stability by giving off radiation. If the core melts, as it did at Fukushima, or explodes, as it did at Chernobyl, that radioactive material is released.

The seven-level scale for the seriousness of the accidents runs from “anomaly,” something that would probably not be mentioned in a newspaper, to “incident,” which might be, to an event with major off-site consequences for health and the environment, like Chernobyl or Fukushima. Some do not involve reactors: Japan, for example, experienced an accident in 1999 at a plant that processes plutonium fuel. The plutonium was stored in a liquid in a vessel that was too large, inadvertently creating a “critical mass,” an amount capable of sustaining a chain reaction. The chain reaction created a shower of radiation and heat, blowing apart the critical mass, but as it cooled, it re-assembled. That rated a level 4. Read more…

James Leynse for The New York Times Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, co-authored a study suggesting that unconventional natural gas development is worse than coal for the climate. The natural gas industry begs to differ.

Not surprisingly, a new study suggesting that the greenhouse gas footprint of unconventional natural gas development is far worse than coal is already undergoing a furious deconstruction.

As I write in Tuesday’s Times, Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, concluded in an analysis published this week in a peer-reviewed journal, Climatic Change Letters, that somewhere from 3.6 percent to 7.9 percent of methane, the chief component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas, is leaking into the atmosphere at various points along the shale gas production life cycle.

This would make unconventional natural gas production — the sort associated with the contentious practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — worse than coal for the climate.

Energy In Depth, a coalition of independent oil and gas producers, has already offered up a lengthy rebuttal of the Howarth analysis at its Web site.

The group questions, for example, some of the assumptions made by the Cornell team made about a metric dubbed “lost and unaccounted-for gas,” or L.U.G. — essentially the difference between the amount of gas collected at the wellhead and the amount that eventually makes it to market. Not all of that missing gas is necessarily puffed into the atmosphere, the group argues.

Also worth considering: Mr. Howarth and his fellow researchers build estimates for industry-wide transmission and distribution methane losses based on data that appear to come exclusively from long-distance runs in Russia and Texas. But how relevant are such measurements, the industry critics ask, when considered against new shale gas plays in the Marcellus Shale, where the well-to-market pipeline span is just a fraction of those distances?

Fair questions, all. But the real debate over the study, at least in climate circles, is likely to be over time frames. Read more…

Dozens of large-scale clean energy projects could be derailed if a measure to defund a federal loan guarantee program becomes part of a final Congressional budget deal.

The loan program was established in energy legislation written by Republicans and signed into law in 2005 by President George W. Bush. So far, it has provided loan guarantees or made preliminary commitments of more than $18 billion for 20 projects, according to the Department of Energy. Another 25 projects are nearly finished with the application process and would be expected to receive guarantees, the agency said recently.

A short-term spending bill passed by the Republican-controlled House in February proposed sweeping cuts for the program, however, raising the specter that those loan guarantee applications that are near completion but have not yet been finalized would be canceled. The program’s fate remained up in the air as leaders in Congress hammered out the final language for the spending bill, which could come to a vote as soon as Thursday.
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Responsibility for energy and climate change issues cuts across at least eight executive agencies and more than two dozen committees of Congress. The predictable result is policy paralysis, the retired general who stepped down last October as President Obama’s national security adviser argues.

Gen. James L. Jones, retired, said in an interview that his inability to streamline executive branch energy policy was one of his greatest shortcomings as National Security Council director. He is now part of a group proposing major government reorganization and other measures to reframe the debate over energy and climate policy.

The group includes the retired senators Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, and Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, and William K. Reilly, a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and co-chairman of the president’s commission on the BP oil spill. They plan to announce their project at a Washington press conference on Tuesday.

Acting under the auspices of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research and advocacy group financed by foundations, unions and corporations (including some major energy companies), the group hopes to break the political deadlock that has stymied any significant action on comprehensive energy policy.
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