One thing liberals and conservatives agree on

We're often told how far apart the red states and blue states are. Aside from the obvious stalemates and squabbles in Washington, conservative and liberal Americans watch different TV shows, eat different foods, drive different cars and listen to different music. But there is one thing lefties and right-wingers seem to agree on: Using less energy is a good thing.

Because when you inform an American about exactly how much energy they are consuming, it doesn't matter whether they voted for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. Either way, they want to use less electricity.

Given the news stories about compact fluorescents vs. incandescent light bulbs or hybrid cars vs. sport utility vehicles, this might come as a surprise. However the evidence — as gathered by Opower — backs it up.

The survey examined the energy use habits of customers across party lines (conservative, liberal and unaffiliated) from several regions of the country. The differences between political ideologies and geographical locations were quite close. All saved energy, and it didn't much matter how they were affiliated politically.

In the Mountain West region, liberals saved a little more than others, but only by a single percentage point. In the Northeast and Southeast, conservatives saved a little more than the liberals or the unaffiliated. So, in the end, people will save energy when they participate in programs that inform them of their electricity use, but the exact percentages can vary a bit from place to place.

There is, however, a "backfire" effect the surveyors noticed that is exclusive to conservative users. It seems that when a customer learns they are using less energy than average, the liberal-minded customer will continue doing what they are doing. The conservative-leaning one, however, will sometimes increase their energy use — perhaps feeling they're off the hook. This behavior was not observed in liberals or the unaffiliated.

The reason for this backfire effect was not fully explained by the analysis, but it appears that providing detailed information on energy use to customers who are already energy efficient is still well worth it. The more information people have, the more behavioral changes they will make in the interest of using less energy.

When it comes to trying to encourage customers to make positive behavioral changes on energy use, tech firms and energy companies can leave politics out of the equation. This is good news because making human beings of any ideological bent change their behaviors is already difficult enough.

Speeding up solar power

Many renewable energy projects, once a site is found and construction begins, deal with a lot of land, a lot of labor and a lot of building materials and equipment. Imagine an entire range of rolling hills that slowly becomes a wind farm, or an empty expanse of desert badlands gradually filling up with row upon row of 10,000 or more photovoltaic panels. The finished product can be a majestic sight, sure, but before the control room fires up and power starts flowing onto the grid, there's still the matter of all that construction that has to happen first.

Companies that can cost-effectively speed up this process while still producing a reliable and long-lasting product could probably clean up with the renewable energy market performing as strongly as it is right now.

A colleague of mine, James Montgomery of RenewableEnergyWorld.com introduced me to Alion Energy (pronounced like the words "a" and "lion"). This company's process builds solar photovoltaic panels into a sort of ramp structure that uses fewer materials to put together than other methods, and the entire process is done with robots.

And why not use robots? Similar processes using robots are already used to lay traintracks or build sidewalks. Alion's president and CEO Mark Kingsley is a veteran of ABB's robotics unit, Trina. 

During construction, the "Rover" installation robot (seen above, courtesy to Alion Energy) travels along a concrete railing built for the project that also serves as the mounting for the solar panels. To begin with, Rover is loaded up with solar panels. Rover fixes the solar panel legs into the concrete railing with a high-strength, high-durability epoxy that is used in bridge construction. The panes and their preattached mountings come next, attached to the legs. With that, the robot moves on to the next solar panel.

One of the big advantages to this approach is using fewer materials. The concrete that the railings are shaped out of is cheap and can be acquired on a local basis. There's no large panes of glass to worry about transporting, unbroken, to the site. No bulky metal frames or fasteners are needed.

Labor costs, similarly, can be reduced this way. No trenches have to be dug, no nuts and bolts need tightening. Plus, the robots don't get fatigued by repetitive work in areas where the sun beats down with a lot of heat, either.

As far as scalability goes, Alion told RenewableEnergyWorld.com that the benefits of the approach only increase when applied to bigger solar projects. Essentially, the bigger the project, the more money can be saved. The railing system can be used in areas with high winds or prone to storms, and in rocky areas or urban brownfields, according to the company.

With Rover's job done and the solar power feeding onto the power grid, another robot takes over to perform maintenance duties. A smaller robot named "Spot" (above) performs automatic cleaning of the mounted solar panels so dust and dirt do not accumulate and cause a loss of generation efficiency. Spot has his own solar-powered battery and his own solar panel, and when he isn't working, he "lives" near one end of of the concrete rail system before sliding across the panels to perform his duties. Spot can also use a hedge-clipping attachment for vegetation management, where and when it is needed.

Automated, efficient construction could potentially mean a lot for the renewable energy sector when and where it can be used. Increasing a generation technology's speed-to-market can only make it more attractive to the prospective investor — the people without which a project can't reach fruition.

How much of a setback is San Onofre's closure?

The word "uncertainty" has become quite a buzzword in business and financial reporting, but it's perhaps nowhere more aptly used than it is when talking about the state of the U.S. nuclear power industry. Uncertainty is the stated reason why Edison International's Southern California Edison decided to permanently retire its already shut down San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).

This uncertainty stems from low natural gas prices, the lingering memory of Fukushima, cheaper alternatives, nervous investors and capital costs that seem to start out high only to be revised higher — as is the case with both the SCANA Corp.'s V.C. Summer Nuclear Station expansion and Southern Co.'s Plant Vogtle expansion.

The uncertain environment is in no way helped by the spate of awful headlines that is plaguing the industry as of late — everything from cracked equipment and plant closures to the strange case of how two goldfish wound up in a juice pitcher in a restricted area of FirstEnergy's Perry nuclear plant.

Headlines such as these (and others, as the parade of bad news for the nuclear industry has been almost too overwhelming to keep track of lately) have a cumulative negative impact on public opinion, and the nuclear sector has always had to be more concerned about public goodwill than most other businesses.

So call it navel gazing, soul searching or just a much-needed conversation, but people are wondering about the long-term future of this industry. Proponents of nuclear generation are hoping the technology didn't peak in 2001 when it produced more than 20 percent of all power in the U.S., though that figure has since fallen to 19 percent.

What are the bright spots for nuclear? Well, one advantage that will never go away is the technology's superior carbon emissions profile — namely, it releases none. However, there are alternatives to nuclear that release no pollution, are easier to install, suffer from less of a NIMBY effect and are generally better-liked by the public.

Another area where nuclear proponents are holding out hope for is small modular reactors. The Department of Energy is backing R&D for SMR technology, and several big-name companies are looking into getting involved or are already involved. The benefit of the SMR is safety and scalability, but developers still need to prove they can get an SMR up and running. The advantages of SMRs don't mean much if they prove every bit as hard to get deployed and operating as conventional reactors are.

For California, the permanent loss of SONGS' nuclear generation capacity means a less diverse generation portfolio overall, to be sure, however, all is not lost on that score. Around the same time SCE announced they were throwing in the towel on SONGS, the California ISO announced that the Golden State was now capable of producing more than 2 GW of solar energy.

Normally when nuclear power plants are taken offline, for whatever reason, the only feasible solution is to replace the lost baseload with coal-fired power or natural gas power. California, though, is one of the top 10 economies in the world and in possession of an incredible variety of natural resources and geological variety. The potential for developing geothermal assets, hydropower facilities and solar and wind farms is more promising in California than in many other areas of the world. The state already generates more than 23 percent of its power from renewable sources, including hydropower.

What California does or doesn't do about its generation mix, though, is cold comfort to the nuclear industry at large. The economics of power generation is changing as fuel prices fluctuate and new regulations kick in. Coal as well as nuclear energy — both proven ways to generate baseload power — are becoming liabilities to their owners instead of assets.

Given the economics of the situation, it's hard to blame Southern California Edison's for its decision on San Onofre. The plant had become a money pit. However, even now that the decision to close it has been made, the plant itself will continue to cost its owners a significant sum. Safely disassembling the facility will take decades — perhaps even a half century. You have to wonder what things will look like for the American nuclear power industry by the time the plant has been completely taken apart.