Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
        I just received a communication from the International Organization
of Wind Energy Meteorologists (I-OWE-MET) that they are boycotting this
discussion because the book doesn't include any meteorologists.  My
argument that it doesn't include any proctologists either seems not to
have carried any weight.
        Peter, would you care to comment on the publisher who forced you at
gunpoint to remove all references to meteorology from your tome?
  

    
I'm having a hard time keeping up with reading this topic, let alone make
rapid progress through the book!

Still, approaching the halfway mark, following <phabib> I would have to
say that the stories of relentless and nearly instantaneous turbine
failures have made a very strong impression. I imagine the early days of
trying to make electricity from steam or running water were little
different.

I agree with the comments about photos or illustrations.  If nothing else
a few pages of images (and we all know that wind is the most photogenic
alternative energy technology) would draw in browsers in the bookstores.
Perhaps in the second edition? Thanks for the ref to Gipe in any case.

Also, Peter (or anyone else for that matter) -- could you offer a recap of
the tax-credit story on page 82ff?  I am financially challenged and didn't
quite understand how the tax breaks equated to "profits for nothing."
  

    
By the way, for others hungry for visuals, I found some pics amid some
broken links:

  http://rotor.fb12.tu-berlin.de/literatur.html#picture.tours
  

    
Howdy folks!

I'm sick and in bed and my brain is a little too mushy right now to
answer these great questions.

I'll give it a shot in the morning.

I am thinking of making a few changes in the second edition (guess I'm
being optimistic). We'll see what we can do in terms of pictures.

Jim Dehlsen kept offering to provide wind turbine photos. Though I'm
sure he would be a little pre-occupied with the Zond and Danish
machines!

Money FOr Nothing -- Chicks For Free?

Too bad we can't get Alvin Duskin involved in thsi discussion since he
is the one who made the quote. I hear he lives in Tomales....

signing off. TGIF!!!!!
  

    

Feel better, Peter.
  

    
Following the link in <128> I found this page...

   <http://rotor.fb12.tu-berlin.de/windfarm/sgpcal.html>

...the photo at the top of which is a wordless argument for the use of
fewer, larger-scale turbines.  While there's an upside to having any
landscape cluttered with windplants, better to get the same effect with less
clutter!
  

    
How about discussing power storage, which would seem key to taking
intermittent power sources above that 20% of total generation level, or
whatever the practical limit is in the absence of significant storage.

There's at least one company, Innogy, working on large-scale, stationary
batteries.  Their Regenesys energy storage system...

   <http://www.regenesys.com/brochure_FSET.htm>

...uses liquid electrolytes which are stored in tanks and cycle through
the "fuel cell" modules.  (Not fuel cells in the sense of the catalytic
oxidization of a hydrogen-bearing molecule to produce power directly.
The electrolytes _are_ the fuel.)

Also, I've recently had a spat of enthusiasm for the idea of using
liquified air (3000 psi) as an energy storage medium, and wondered idly
about the potential for directly using windpower to compress air, rather
than directly generate electrical power.
  

    
I'm betting on the growth of flywheel tech.
  

    
Small and fast or massive and ponderous?
  

    
Good discussion.

Well, I'm up out of bed but still hurting mentally and physically.

Storage technologies are key. I received an odd call from out of the
blue a few weeks back from a fellow, I believe a professor, named
Norman Milleron. I think he said he worked at Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
He was advocat linking wind power to compressed air storage. I know
that Alvin Duskin, who I mentioned a little while ago, is now working
on flywheel battery stuff. And Jim Dehlsen, another manin character in
the book, is working on turbines that would be placed under water to
generate power. He thinks that harnessing the energy in ocean currents
is a very promising source of power since capacity factors in the ocean
are more than double that of wind.
  

    
A situation where you have some use for low-grade heat at the point of
production, and some use for refrigeration at the point of use, is ideal
for using compressed or liquified air.  This meme got planted in my head
when it occurred to me that the easiest place on the planet to make liquid
air has to be Antarctica, where there also happens to be abundant wind.  
Before calming down, I had visions of a distribution operation using
semi-submersible tankers.

Did you know that a column of water ~6600 feet deep produces sufficient
pressure at its base to liquify air or prevent liquid air from boiling at
room termperature, thus imposing a depth limit on the use of air-blown
ballast in submarines?  ;-)
  

    
Randy, you know damn well, as I do, that wind farmers must not *know*
any meteorologists, because they figure you don't need a weatherman to
know which way the wind blows!

My friend Don Bain is pretty close to the meteorology crowd, actually.
He showed me national wind energy survey maps in the mid-1980 s that
were pretty impressive -- Winnipeg down to Houston is basically Wind Alley,
the only question -- the same old one faced by aggies since the dawn of
time, is how to move the produce from farm to market.
  

    
Meteorologists....I blame on my childhood. I always felt that the
weather persons let me down. The weather in Wisconsin (yes, I am a
Cheese Head) is much more unpredictable than here on the Left Coast. 
I'd plan a special event, the damn wind would bring in these storm
clouds, and...

Seriously, I wanted to include folks like Don Bain in my book, nad
many others. My editor pointed out, however, that I already had so many
characters. He wanted to cut folks like Bob Lynette, the Carters, Bob
Sherwin out. But I insisted that these folks stay because they each
represented an important part of the story in terms of the relationship
between inventors, technology and the financial community. That, in
essence, is what Reaping The Wind is all about. ANd some the lessons
learned from the development of wind power have broad applications and
implications for the current energy crisis.

By the way, I'm feeling much better today, Thank you. I can actually
breathe! Yeah!
  

    
Back to the "prfits for nothing" quote. 

What Duskinis sayin that with the combination of the federal and state
tax credits available in the '80s, and the depreciation schedules, an
investor could sink $25,000 into a $100,000 wind farm and essentially
get all of that money back in the form of deductions from one's tax
liability. The "profits" refer to the income one sheltered from the
IRS, money that otherwise would have gone to Uncle Sam. The federal tax
credit and California state tax credits returned $50,000; depreciation
schedules on the loan one took out to cover the remaining investment
would allow one ot write off most of the loan amount, too.

In the end, the cash investment and loan totals would come back to the
investor. It was this irrestible outcome that fueled the growth of the
wind industry. It also resulted in a backlash.

Much of the book debates whether these tax credits were a good or bad
thing. There are good arguments on both sides. What do readers think?

How do the lessons learned from California's wind power tax credit
days apply to today? Should we extend the production tax credit that is
now in place? Why does a production tax credit make more sense today
than the investment tax credit granted in the '80s?

How can California, and the rest of the West, create a new investment
environment that will stimulate a massive increase in renewable energy?
  

    
Boy, this Tanzania Peaberry coffee I bought from John Shababian's
Coffee Works in Sacto is working wonders this morning.

Book readers: What is your verdict on Kenetech? Did they deserve to go
under? Was it Bryson at Southern California Edison that can be blamed
for the collapse of the domestic wind power industry in the mid-90s?

Will new power generation technologies always walk a fine line between
the demands of financial markets and the perfectionist tendencies of
engineers?
  

    
One of the key questions is how to stimulate commercialization of wind
(which still needs a push to get over regulatory and operational barriers)
as well as the other renewables.  The combined state and federal financing
in California in the early 1980s accomplished what other schemes did not,
which was actually energy plants in the ground generating actual energy.
So many other schemes had little or no effect.  On the other hand, as
Randy has long pointed out, this drew in a bunch of quick-buck artists who
disrupted the necessary technology refinement process, and when the credits
went poof a lot of development efforts that had potential just crashed.

Kenetech is proof that IPO Disease existed long before March 2000.  The sad
thing is that they were profitable for several years (unlike many of the
crash-and-burn dotcoms), and chose a hypergrowth path that required them to
give up whatever integrity they had in order to bow down to the whims of
Wall Street.  I knew Kenetech's Oregon people like Barrett Stambler pretty
well, and they weren't just penny-stock bandits; many of the people at
Kenetech genuinely wanted wind to succeed -- and for them to be #1 worlwide
of course.  That's a traditional American attitude on how to grow a little
business into a Fortune 500 business.  So maybe they were Studebaker, but
because there was no Ford or GM or Chrysler, when they cratered it sucked
down the entire American wind business.

Going forward, it's very important to support not just incentives for 
developing renewables, but the right kind, that don't lead to the grotesqueries
of the 1980-95 period.  Tying renewables funding to new oil development is
just plain fucking dumb, because the absolutely dead-certain-predictable result
is that the renewables money is likely to be frittered away, and having 
provided essential political cover to the new drilling, the new drilling goes
on and on.  

There are those who would say that any government intervention in the markets
is bound to distort them.  There is a grain of truth in this, but generally
this peevish 1983 attitude, which I still hear from those who prefer to have
others do their thinking for them, disregards the reality of energy factors
in the economy.  Government intervention in tax, research, and policy areas
as well as direct regulation is pervasive and never goes away.  

The flip side of this is that we get, pretty much, what we aim for.  If
anything, I wish Peter's book had focused more on this aspect of European
wind development (maybe that's a good topic for your next book or long
magazine article, Peter, plus it means expense account trips to Europe where
you will need to consume large quantities of wine in order to converse with
the cosmopolitan purveyors and regulators of wind energy there :)
  

    
I'm glad <phred> mentioned the parallels between Kenetech and the internet
bubble.  That same thought struck me very hard as I read about promises of
technology that wasn't ready to perform, technically uninformed investors,
and the drive to take over the world.  If it were today they'd be talking
about "dominating the wind space."

I finished the book today.
  

    

Since I haven't read it, your comments leave me wondering:  does that mean
that wind power is not ready as a solution to California's energy crisis?
  

    
There's some debate about that going on in the <energy.> conference right
now.  I don't know enough to say, myself.  I don't think that the
industry's checkered past means it couldn't be of real service to
California now, though.
  

    
One of the primary points of my book is to point how amazing the wind
power story is. After all of the trials and tribulations, all of the
tax scams and bankruptcies, wind power has finally arrived -- and just
in time.

If we don't harness the power of the wind, we are doomed. Global
climate change demands it, the consumers want it, and it is the most
logical near- and long-term solution to our power supply woes...
  

    

So, it isn't ready, yet??
  

    
No, it is totally ready RIGHT NOW. Wind power is the fastest growing
power source in the world because of concerns about global climate
change and the maturation of the technology. The technology -- both
large and small wind turbines -- works today. Over 2,000 MW of new wind
power will be coming on line in California, Nevada and the Pacific
Northwest in the next few years. But we need a lot more than that to
really make a difference.

The purpose of my book was to show what an incredible success story
this is. After all of the hard work, the technology is here to save us
-- just in the nick of time. I've said it once and I'll say it again.
If we -- California, the US, the world -- do not take full advantage of
wind power, we are doomed, period. The energy crisis is a blessing
because it is waking people up to energy. This precise moment in time
is the clarion call. If we continue with buisiness as ususal, we surely
are fools who deserve to fry.....
  

    

What are the obstacles?
  

    
        The first obststacle is simply that wind turbine manufacturing
production lines are not large enough to be able to react quickly to an
immediate increase in orders.  Manufacturers have been forced through
several boom and bust cycles, and this year's production capacity is
already allocated to projects in the current "pipeline."
        There will be but a maximum of a few hundred megawatts for Cali, and
virtually none that weren't already planned.
        Further complicating matters is the pending expiration of the
production tax credits at the end of the year.  Again, as the result of
continual boom and bust cycles, windpower hasn't been allowed to make
cogent advance planning.  (Last year 53 MWs, this year 2000 MWs.)

        Serious attention to immediate policy effects could indeed hasten
development, but the prime initial target would have to be next
summer's peak load.
        As Peter says, the upside of Cali's crisis could well be the first
coherent renewables policy in the US in years.
  

    
        Some thoughts re: the tax credit years discussed in Peter's book.

        While there were certainly abuses of the tax credits, tax credits are
always abused in any industry... there are always scams by the
unscrupulous minority.  In the case of windpower they were highly
visible.  But the flip side is that some 16,000 wind turbines were
installed, the majority in credible projects, still performing today.
        From those installations, with half a billion operating hours in the
first five years, came all the engineering data which matured the
technology and resulted in today's turbines, and all the operations and
maintenance experience needed to design sound projects.

        Further, the tax incentives, traditionally used to jumpstart any new
technology, were a fraction of the huge subsidies given to conventional
fuels.  And remember, windpower incurs none of the non-tax costs to
society from fossil and nuclear fuels, what price regulators refer to
as "externalities, or social and environmental costs."  These costs
range from the relatively quantifieable, such as increased health care
expense, to the realm where calculation is the subject of hot debate,
such as military or global warming costs.

        The old renewables incentives of the 1980's were based on the
installed cost of the turbine, leading to the abuses.  Today's credits
are based solely on the production of kilowatt hours, a key difference.