Where’s the logic in our rush to renewable the world?

I’m coining a new phrase today: “to renewable.” “To renew” is taken, and it can mean a variety of refreshing tangents across a number of delightful industries---it’s especially popular with cosmetics companies---but “to renewable” is specific to just power and will represent our headlong rush to make everything inside our arena lean and green---and, therefore, more appealing.

After all, when we act, as a group, “to renewable,” we’ve pushed aside pesky things like global warming (or just air pollution for those conservatives still insisting that global warming isn’t real) and nuclear regulation and massive fuel reserves and dependence on foreign oil fields that are sometimes run by angry despots.

So, with the great rush “to renewable” we can solve a lot of social, cultural and fuel-related issues. We clean up the environment when we hunker down “to renewable,” and, yet, it doesn’t impact our World of Warcraft time together. And, even politicians can love “to renewable,” cuz that means we can, metaphorically, flip the bird at those angry despots we think are holding all the oil we need---gallons of political hostage.

But, in that great rush we also create an issue, a big ol’ tech issue that we’ve known about for years. See, your World of Warcraft time there at the computer may not be when the sun shines. In may be in the dark hours of the night when the rest of the world is sleeping. And, it may not be when the wind blows. It may be during a night of complete and utter calm. So, if the wind’s not blowing and the sun’s not shining when you sit down to play, you’re going to need power from another source because renewables are, for the most part, pesky in their intermittency.

Now the intermittency of our rush “to renewable” has, of course, been around since the dawn of power itself. We’ve know about it forever, and, in fact, it has kept us burning fossil fuels in recent history because renewables just weren’t reliable. But, now we’ve turned a corner, decided to forge ahead, made a pact “to renewable.” We’re resolved---yet, no one has solved that pesky “sun’s not always shining” issue.

Still, we don’t, as an industry, talk about it. It’s the elephant in the room that we’ve painted to match the wallpaper so it just doesn’t stand out quite as much. When we hear there will be change from the governments above us and hear an echoing call for change from consumers below us, we just don’t feel like we have a lot of choice but to disguise that problem. When we talk about those problems, the governments above us think we’re stalling and the consumers below us think we just want to keep the status quo because of money---and we're stalling. So, the rush is on. And, we’ll just do some camouflaging and be done with that elephant for as long as we can possibly ignore it.

But, intermittency is bound to have impact as we grow more and more dependent on renewables. You can’t hide an elephant that darn big forever.

European consultants Poyry recently completed a study on the growing push “to renewable” and how power based on weather patterns could impact the market. Among their findings (which focused on Northern Europe): “By 2030, wholesale market prices in some countries will have become highly volatile and driven by short-term weather patterns.”

Poyry’s report also noted that there will be more “peaks” in prices: When there are lots and lots of renewables all going at once, the price will death spiral, but when there is no renewable power option, the price will skyrocket. Intermittency leads to volatility. That’s the first major lesson of our rush “to renewable”: It’s going to be a rollercoaster ride for prices, if prices are open to a market based on the fickle whims of weather. Add in the costs of renewable subsidies and the cost of keeping a back-up in baseload, and now items are trending higher more often than they are trending lower. It may always regress to mean, but, in the future, that mean may be a significantly higher price mark.

While there are options to mitigate those crazy price spikes by interconnecting more renewables across more space (as the ability to push power over lines gets easier) and creating demand-side management programs, these concepts are band-aids for a wound that won’t stop bleeding (and those concepts involve convincing governments and consumers to work together for the good of the utility, which is often not so easy to sell). In the end, until we can find a way to logically solve the technical issue of intermittency our rush “to renewable” will always be plagued by a problematic lack of logic and not nearly enough serious thinking about practical solutions.

I want our attempts “to renewable” the world to work, but it seems like we’ve gotten caught up in the excitement and money available---the soap-opera drama of it all---and forgotten that there are, indeed, some valid reasons to burn stuff to make power. If we want to get away from burning stuff, we need to spend more time mulling over the issues before we run out of the house with saws and drills in hand to build, build, build those renewables.

Can we build our way out of an energy crisis?

While the world stares down Japan in an attempt to seal off nuclear containment with collective Superman eye lasers none of us actually possess, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu touched on the crisis for just a moment in his speech to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He discussed how the U.S. is helping Japan with detectors, experts and assessments of contamination.

Nuclear may have been on his mind, of course, but not just in the form of the ongoing Japanese issue. Chu was on Capitol Hill to discuss nuclear and other forms of energy within the context of the President’s budget plans for the Department of Energy.

Diversity was key for Chu’s speech. He included nuclear, despite the crisis, along with fossil fuels and renewable efforts. But, what the President and Chu really want to do is make stuff.

“President Obama has a plan to win the future by out-innovating, out-educating and out-building the rest of the world.” Chu said.

Can we build our way out of an energy crisis? Well, you can spend your way out of a financial crisis. So, I guess it’s technically possible, depending on what, exactly, you want to build. The President, it seems, wants to build lots and lots of clean energy bits---so much so that we could get 80 percent of our power from clean sources by 2035.

Biofuels, the smart grid, R&D and carbon capture are all mentioned in this long-term goal, along with loan guarantees for renewables and energy efficiency tech. Nuclear got a push, too---up to $36 billion to help deploy a “new generation of American nuclear reactors.” Whether that will be in the final budget is hard to say. It likely depends on how well the Japanese walk the tightrope between potential meltdowns and how scared the average American is by all of that front page news.

This push up for renewables and nuclear loan guarantees is balanced by the elimination of some fossil fuel subsidies that have been deemed “unnecessary.”

This plan of Obama’s is lean and green, but is it mean? I get where he’s going. There’s a great logic to unhooking ourselves from fossil fuels and imports, creating power from the wind and sun that blesses most of the American landscape daily. But, to get to 80 percent is quite a lot of building. And, the one area that might have helped bridge that gap---nuclear power, which doesn’t emit greenhouse gases---may be sidelined.

And all renewables goals aside, we’ll never get to that 80 percent without significant improvements in energy storage---or building the world’s largest battery. Or both.

While it’s very nice to see the Administration taking a long-haul look at energy, I’m still left wondering exactly what we’re going to build to go from our current energy portfolio (with coal leading at 45 percent and renewables---not including hydro---at 4 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration) to that whopping 80 percent renewables. Like our attempts to stop Japan’s nuclear disaster, we may need some super powers for that.

Nuclear energy, Florida sunshine and emotional meltdowns

This week, I'm attending Elster's EnergyAxis event in sunny Bonita Springs, Florida. I may be working, but most people around these parts this week are all about leisure---after all, it is Spring Break. Flip flops and board shorts and bathing suits are everywhere, mixed in with the suits and khakis of the conference, but, whatever we're wearing down here, we're all enjoying the warmth of the sun.

But, not all warmth is good. While we play here in Florida, Japan is trying to stave off overheating nuclear reactors to prevent potential radiation leaks. And, the world watches and speculates about nuclear plants in an earthquake prone area, about regulations, about precautions and, really, about the safety of nuclear energy as a whole.

And the discussion is heating up. It's been all over the news. It was on Good Morning, America this morning. I watched bits of it, including their energy correspondent in a protective suit, while enjoying my sunny view of the bay.

Warmth is emotional. With the Spring Break crowd here in the Sunshine State, it's positive. We're basking in the heat. Japan, on the other hand, is emotionally cooking. Their warmth (potential and otherwise) is negative emotionally. People are afraid of that heat, of the dangerous fallout (possibly literally).

I was thinking of these dichotomies this morning, this splitting of the whole of what warmth can mean emotionally in the areas of energy, during the keynote presentation by Suzanne Shelton, president and CEO of the Shelton Group. She was discussing the tendency of people to make an emotional decision and then create reasoning to rationalize that decision.

"You cannot fight an emotional argument with a logical one," she said. Her suggestion was to focus on areas that speak to both the emotional and rational in people.

People aren't very rational about nuclear energy, even before the Japanese issue. Nuclear energy has always been squarely an emotional decision---either "for" or "against" depending on whether you are concerned about energy independence or health and safety. The reasons to rationalize the very emotional decision that nuclear will help us be energy independent fall squarely into cost and security issues. The reasons to rationalize the very emotional decision that nuclear is too problematic with health and safety issues often circle around natural or manmade disaster possibilities, reinforced, at the moment, by what's unfolding in Japan.

But, the immediacy of the Japanese tragedy certainly brings the emotional question of health and safety to the forefront during these trying days. With enough distance, however, I wonder if worries about nuclear will continue to fall on that side of the emotional argument.

To be sure, nuclear is not 100% safe. That's really very obvious right now; there are men at those Japanese reactors risking their lives to prevent a radiation leak. But, no form of energy, really, falls into a completely safe category. Oil issues killed 11 men in the gulf last year and unleashed an environmental disaster that an entire region may never fully recover from, yet we still continue to drill.

Coal and other fossil fuels contribute to climate change. And, while that isn't as immediate of a disaster as nuclear fallout, it is still predicted to be a disaster---and not one confined to a single region.

So, safety, as an emotional issue, has variables. And, our reactions to the dangers of all energy are not consistent.

In the end, will the benefits of nuclear energy---that it doesn't add to climate change, that it's a steady and reliable source of power---outweigh our fears of disaster as it often does with oil and fossil fuels? I think the final decision on that emotional argument is being played out right now in Japan. If a meltdown occurs physically and radiation leaks from the reactor, nuclear energy may burn through any remaining goodwill in the arena of public opinion.

And, if that happens, I doubt any of the rational positives about nuclear power will manage to make even a small dent in the negative emotional argument for decades to come.

Live from the Work Truck Show: Everybody dance

OK. I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the dancing thing, but I have hit just two press conferences in the wee "leading up to" hours for the Work Truck Show and both had background music that reminded me of the European dance scene---I would imagine for the "energy."

I expect the Work Truck Show, which officially opens in the morning, will have a lot of energy without the need for peppy upbeat underlying musical scores. But, heck, great underlying musical scores can't hurt, can they?

The Work Truck Show is held in conjunction with the 47th Annual NTEA Convention here in Indianapolis from March 8-10. (NTEA is the National Truck Equipment Association.) They are very self-explanatory: They have lots of work trucks---big, big ones, like the semi rig I saw unveiled during the Western Star press conference this evening and "normal" ones like the ones ringing the Ford booth during their press conference.

Western Star introduced its Class 8 vocational truck, the 4700. I can tell you this: It's pretty. And shiny. And, as said before, really, really big. They are serious with that marketing tagline: serious trucks. This one looks like it could haul a three-story house to the dump for you without breaking an automotive sweat. Mike Jackson, the general manager of Western Star Trucks also showed some pretty numbers to go with the pretty trucks: The company was up sixteen percent in retail for the industry last year (vs. 2009 numbers).

But, all detailed industry numbers aside, I think I most enjoyed the marketing campaign that helped debut the 4700. Sure there was the lovely video of the timeline of Western Star trucks (Ford did a similar video in their time slot). There was the requisite half house music/half heavy metal music soundtrack. (It's supposed to read "energy" and "hardcore" in one, I think.) But, it was the new tagline that was out of the ballpark: "Whole new truck. Same badass philosophy."

Sold. Now, who needs their house moved to the dump? We could split the cost of the 4700. I'd be nice about drive-time scheduling.

Ford took more of a fleet angle with their press conference---less giant "badass" truck philosophy, more going green. Opening with a short overview, Len Deluca, the company's director of commercial trucks, noted that Ford's sales are up nineteen percent in the commercial truck division and that the company gained over a full point in market share in 2010. They've also, delightfully, reduced their debt by $14.5 billion and delivered six consecutive quarters of profitability. Go Team Ford!

After the overview, Rob Stevens, the chief engineer of alternative fuel strategies discussed greening options, admitting that the time for one or two "examples" or "pilots" was in the past and that alternative fuels is now more than just for show.

"We're looking at the greening of fleets and the greening of commercial products," he said.

Ford offers a number of green options with fuel, from flex fuel to biodiesel to electric vehicles, and they expect that, by as early as 2012, half of Ford vehicles will be capable of running on alternative fuels.

All these fun, tough and green truck options are on display this week at the Work Truck Show, North America's largest work truck event that brings together vocational trucks and transportation equipment from some 560 suppliers.

It’s elementary, my dear Watson

IBM’s Watson robot triumphed on Jeopardy recently. While the geek guru of trivia stumbled a bit on the first day and had a tendency to answer really, really wrong when it was wrong and bet in odd, seemingly random cash sums, the computer came roaring back to leave the champion human contestants in the dust.

Did any of us really question that the computer would beat the humans at trivia?

Computers are like little digital elephants. They don’t forget. I once memorized all the U.S. presidents, their terms in office, their vice presidents, their major accomplishments and their major failures for a college class on American history. But, I’d be hard-pressed to remember much of that list today. The human brain doesn’t retain knowledge it doesn’t use often---at least, not very well and not completely or I wouldn’t have such trouble with maps of Africa.

If a computer “brain” had the gaps in it that my brain has (especially for presidents between Lincoln and Roosevelt #1), I’d be sorely disappointed in that computer. I’d think it a colossal failure if its digital circuits sparked and burnt out the way my organic ones often do.

But, Watson triumphed, and at least IBM cheered. Personally, I’m not sure what to make of Watson, exactly. I hear that the next stop on Watson’s smarter planet world tour, of sorts, is to help with medical diagnosis. Watson can take in and hold a lot of factors, facts, stats and charts that a human doctor cannot. I can see how that might be useful. But, Watson is lacking one thing you can’t ever teach a computer---human reasoning.

Yes, you can program Watson with all sorts of data. You can tell him that A + B + Ru + the speed of light over the square root of pie + a fever equals Z. And, when he sees A + B + Ru + the speed of light over the square root of pie and, by golly, a fever, he’ll cry, in rather digital tones, “Eureka, Z it is.” But, what if it only looks like Z? What if Z is the wrong answer and you have to work backward to find the right one? In Watson’s world, the answer must always be Z given those factors. Humans are a little better at realizing that factors and data aren’t the whole picture.

Still, Watson can be a great help. In our industry, IBM has pitched that Watson can assist with energy efficiency in the field and in educating consumers about use. (And, oh yes, kids and geeks alike will love learning via Watson. He’s like the world’s most advanced See ‘n’ Say.)

IBM also posits that Watson can help make decisions in utility control rooms, mostly due to his ability to understand “natural language” questions. This means you can ask Watson questions in English, and he can translate it, basically, into the digital format he works in. But, bear in mind that, essentially, Watson isn’t a native speaker of English. We natives talk weird. We drop syllables. We don’t form complete sentences. We each have our own way of speaking and writing; we complicate language with individual styles. Plus, words have subtext related to vocal inflection and context. In talking, we often get the gist of things, not every word. We grasp the overall concepts with language. We work in big pictures, and Watson sees in singular, linear details.

Singular, linear details are great for a computer, but not so great in a world built by humans for humans with human-caused and human-impacted problems which careen off the logical line in nifty and tangential ways.

Still, I will be very interested to watch Watson evolve in the field as he works with doctors and energy personnel. I’m sure he will continue to add to his extensive bit of knowledge---those details of facts and data and trivia. But, I really want to watch Watson move past the elementary item of natural language interface to something more analytical and more profound. If IBM can truly accomplish that, then as Ken Jennings noted during final Jeopardy with Watson, “I, for one, welcome our computer overlords.”

OK. Well, maybe I’ve seen the Terminator series too many times to go quite as far as Ken. But, I would welcome all the intelligent help we can get in power control rooms.

Bring on the rise of the power robots, IBM.

Study to electric utilities: Tell businesses the truth

J.D. Power and Associates released a report today on business customers’ reactions to power outages and outage management. While a bit happier and less emotional, overall, than their residential counterparts, there still seems to be a lesson in all these numbers: Dear utility, don’t shorten the outage time.

The J.D. Power and Associates 2011 Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study is based on interviews with people from 17,000 U.S. businesses that spend $500-$50,000 a month on those power bills. Those study Associates measured customer satisfaction looking at: power quality and reliability; billing and payment; corporate citizenship; price; communications; and, of course, customer service.

If the surveyed business had an outage, the average satisfaction rating was 729 out of 1,000 points---about a middling “C” grade for those of us still judging things based on old school report cards. And that “C” was only if the power clicked back on by the time told them. If the utility stretched the outage (for whatever reason, even those beyond their control) past the hour given by the utility, that grade plummeted to 576. (That’s a whopping 150-point plunge, and an “F” on the school report card scale.)

So, the lesson here: Be accurate. Tell the truth. Don’t give the best-guess estimate. The customer wants to know when it’s really going to be back up and making them money again. If it’s going to be a long time, be honest. And, let them know why.

The survey noted: Among business customers who contact their utility for information about an outage, satisfaction levels are highest among those who received at least three points of information. Satisfaction is lowest among customers who only received one piece of information.

“While causes of power outages may be outside the control of electric providers, they do have the ability to establish highly satisfying procedures for making adequate outage information available to customers,” said Jeff Conklin, senior director of the energy utility practice at J.D. Power and Associates. “Particularly for business customers, time is money. Providing accurate and comprehensive information about outages can help these customers make contingency plans and effectively plan resumption of their operations.”

The second lesson here: The customers expect you to know. True, you may not have the shiny smart grid intelligence to even get a bead on where the outage is without sending out some guys in a truck to just drive around the darkened spots. But, customers don’t know that. They hear a lot about the smart grid; they think you have one. They think there’s a robot or magic computer connection on that line. They believe that the very moment power goes out, you know. And they also believe you should know how long it takes to get that power back on. Whether or not you think that’s fair, that’s the business world you’re working in these days.

The study also noted a decline in overall satisfaction among business people with their power companies---not much, about four points, but that decline happened across a number of areas with the biggest dips in power quality and reliability (7 points) and customer service (5 points). Do you really have worse power than you did last year? Of course not. Do you have worse customer service? Perhaps. Either way, what’s important here is, again, what customers believe. They believe you know more than you are saying about outages. They believe your power is not as awesome as it was before, and they think your customer service isn’t so hot.

You can fix those beliefs with some extra time and extra communication, but the key is to be truthful and accurate---even letting them know when you don’t know. Sometimes honesty really is the best policy.

LIVE FROM DISTRIBUTECH 2: Let's talk EVs

In electric vehicle news today, researchers at Indiana University think Obama's "one million electric cars by 2015" dream will be shattered by car manufacturers who won't rev up supply because they don't think the American consumer will answer with matching demand.

The timing of this study's release is most interesting to me because I spent a good block of time today at DistribuTECH talking to ABB and ECOtality about their electric vehicle (EV) plans.

ECOtality provides EV charging systems. Last month, at the turn of 2011, ABB announced a $10 million investment in ECOtality. ECOtality, in turn, is leading the EV Project, a DOE-funded program to develop electric vehicle infrastructure with the deployment of 15,000 charging stations in 16 cities.

Murray Jones, vice president of global e-mobility at ABB, called this "range ready infrastructure" in our meeting today, which I found most intriguing---that someone is building out a basic highway charging infrastructure for EVs for a good road trip. Fleets of EVs are one thing. Distribution systems are circular, without a lot of miles traveled, and with a return trip to a central charging area. That may be how some businesses work, but that's not how the average American lives. Putting charging infrastructure along the road---at restaurants and retail outlets---and really developing an infrastructure to ease the mind of the consumer certainly seems like a step forward to getting the second wave of EV adoption, beyond the early birds that love that electric car for its ecology marketing or as a second car that cuts down on gas costs.

"We're building up a connected highway," said Jonathan Read, president and CEO of ECOtality, when discussing the EV Project that ranges across the West from Seattle to San Diego and has extensions into Arizona, Texas, and three cities in Tennessee. The ultimate goal of the EV Project is to take the lessons learned from the deployment of these first 8,300 EVs and related infrastructure to make it easier and faster to put in more---to Obama's one million and beyond.

To put those EVs on the road takes more than car companies or even consumer demand. It will take a ready, willing and enabled power utility. That's where ABB comes into the game.

Read added, "In each market, we have to work with utilities, and no one know utilities better than ABB."

ABB and ECOtality believe that those EVs on Obama's horizon are coming, and they want to work to make EVs a real asset to the grid rather than a "drag on it," as Read noted. Allen Burchett, senior vice president for strategic initiatives in North America for ABB added that it's obvious that EVs will have a major impact on the electricity distribution network, but, if utilities have more control over the timing of personal charging, it can be a positive impact, relaying on the intelligence of the charging infrastructure.

As for the Obama dream of a million EVs, Read believes that there may be as many as 1.5 million by 2015, exceeding Obama's vision. Perhaps those naysayers at Indiana University are wrong after all.