Commercial Building Energy Efficiency Class in Albuquerque

Mark Sardella will be teaching the fundamentals of how to make commercial buildings more energy efficient this Friday, April 23, 2010, at the new American Solar Energy Institute office in Albuquerque. We'll cover commercial energy audits and assessments, and then I'll show how to benchmark a building using Portfolio Manager -- the EPA's online rating tool used to qualify buildings for the Energy Star Commercial certification. We'll discuss the most common opportunities for savings, how to evaluate their financial return, and how to drive down a carbon footprint with on-site energy.

The three-hour class will run from 9 a.m. until noon this Friday, with an overflow class in the afternoon if the morning session fills up. The fee for the class, located at 504 Yale Boulevard SE in Albuquerque (map), is $60.

To register, email us or call 505-821-9695 or 505-401-0945.

Santa Fe County Commissioner Candidate Forum Tonight

Ask them about democratic electricity for Santa Fe!

The Sierra Club in Santa Fe is hosting a forum tonight (Tuesday, April 6th from 7-9 p.m.) for the candidates running for commission seats, and it should be a good venue for getting them to talk about the future of energy in Santa Fe. What kinds of questions would inspire candidates to forego their practiced lines about solar panels and instead talk about real issues like who’s going to own all this green energy stuff and who should be able to decide how it gets made and distributed?

Here are some of my ideas for questions...please feel free to steal them (it’s flattery).

The Buckman Direct Diversion will use banks of 900 horsepower pumps to push 15 million gallons of water a day (at full build-out) uphill through 15-miles of pipe. Electricity rates have risen four times in two years, and are slated to go up again this month. Do we know what it will cost to run the pumps two years from now if electric rates keep rising the way they have been? What about in four years?

Sales of electricity in Santa Fe County total more than $80 million dollars annually, all of which goes to a utility company owned by Wall Street investment houses. If that money were instead going into Santa Fe County’s coffers, what would you spend it on? Would it be enough – $80 million a year in perpetuity – to build a system that sourced all of its energy from local, renewable sources?

Biomass to thermal energy – or burning wood and other plant materials to create heat, is the by far the most used, most cost-effective renewable energy technology in the world. Is it appropriate here, and if so, what would you do to promote its use?

Are there any examples in the world of a community that made it a policy to purchase energy, to the greatest extent possible, from local, independent energy producers?

To hear the answers to these questions, come to the forum tonight at 7p at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 107 w. Barcelona Road in Santa Fe. It's free and open to the public!

New Mexico Legislature Promoting Nuclear Power

Nice to see the progressive community here in New Mexico heading to the Roundhouse today to protest Senate Joint Memorial 38, which calls for nuclear energy to be declared “green”. As repulsive as it is to see another attempt to dress nukes up as green energy, there are three energy bills sailing through the legislature unnoticed that have far greater consequences for the future of nuclear energy in New Mexico.

To really understand how bad these bills are, it helps to first be aware that billions of dollars worth of new transmission projects are being planned in the Southwest to support the hundreds of new nuclear reactors that are on the drawing board across the country. Most of the projects are cloaked in green language and being promoted as clean. Here’s a sampling of some of the worst bills this year, along with a couple of bad memorials:

Senate Bill 190 – William Payne. This bill declares that third-party developers of renewable energy projects are not public utilities subject to regulation, but in doing so it strategically avoids addressing cogeneration projects -- leaving them in limbo with the courts. Worse, it requires the commission to give utilities cost recovery (“shall approve...rate riders”) for all the nasty things utilities always claim happen when renewables are connected to their grid: problems with frequency and voltage regulation, necessity to maintain reserve power for when the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing – the usual lies. When it comes to accounting for the benefits created when distributed renewables are connected to the grid, the “shall” language is conspicuously absent and the commission is only required to “give due consideration” to them. How sweet!

House Bill 85 – John Heaton. This bill changes the procedure by which new transmission projects are approved, as well as the standard by which their costs can be passed along to ratepayers. It even allows the commission to bypass the public hearing process on transmission projects, assuming nobody complains (or finds out).

House Bill 98 – Jose Campos. As if the Renewable Energy Transmission Authority (RETA) wasn’t powerful enough, this bill gives it access to the Public Project Revolving Fund and exempts it from the Inspection of Public Records Act. RETA already has, from prior legislation, the right to designate transmission corridors, condemn and seize property through eminent domain, issue bonds without limit, and set (transmission) rates without hearings. It was also declared exempt from all state laws except one: the tort law (it can’t be sued). Seems like a lot more power than you would need for building renewable energy projects. RETA has always been a cover for building nukes. I can’t believe how gullible we are – why would renewables need transmission lines?

House Joint Memorial 35 – Janice Arnold-Jones. As a memorial it doesn’t carry the force of law, but this bill takes the first step towards saddling New Mexico ratepayers with billions of dollars in costs for new transmission projects, including Tres Amigas. Tres Amigas is a multi-billion dollar scheme to connect the three major U.S. power grids together with a DC tie in Clovis, New Mexico. This will enable nuclear power plants built nearby to access all three major U.S. power markets. The claim, of course, is that its purpose is to help us sell renewable energy to California. They have sunshine there too, no? Seems funny to bottle it and ship it to them fromhere, but an awful lot of people are drinking that Kool-Aid.

Senate Joint Memorial 41 – John Heaton. Again no force of law, but this memorial requests that Bill Richardson includes nuclear energy as a central component of his clean energy policy initiatives. Reference my article from last week that showed that at least 27 of the 65 nuclear power plant sites in the U.S. are now leaking radioactive Tritium into the ground water. When nukes are believed to be clean...uh...Houston, we have a problem.

As you can probably tell, I'm not a big fan of our state's legislative process!

To read the bills for yourself, visit the New Mexico Legislature website.

At Least 27 U.S. Nuclear Power Plants are Leaking

The discovery of radioactive tritium in groundwater at the Vermont Yankee Plant brings the count of known leaking nuclear power plants to 27 -- nearly half of the 65 plant sites in the United States. And the NRC says the list of leaky plants isn't complete, which basically means that all of them may be leaking.

The most common source of leakage is from the spent fuel-rod storage pools, many of which have corroded pipes, according to today's AP article.

Details of the tragedy of allowing electric utilities to perpetuate a central-power model fifty years after it became obsolete are clear. To protect their exclusive control over the power grid, electric utilities promoted an obsolete model of central nuke-and-coal model while suppressing their own research showing that distributed generation would revolutionize electric power.

Promoting your business and fending off competitors are standard business practices, but utilities crossed the line when they agreed on propaganda:  A decentralized power system would be unsafe, unreliable, and expensive. Repeat, demonstrate, obfuscate.

We now know that decentralizing the electric power system -- allowing thousands of generators of all types and sizes to run the grid -- would have doubled its efficiency and cut emissions in half. But utilities, with their $300 million annual research budget, have known this for fifty years.

Convincing regulators and the public that 1960’s technology is still appropriate is a remarkable achievement, and not one that should go unpunished. The failure to modernize the grid, and the lies that enabled them to do it, directly caused the excess coal-burning and perpetual nuke re-licensing that is destabilizing our climate and spoiling our drinking water.

When utilities are finally convicted for this crime, what should the remedy be?