I don't know that Obama has ever been opposed to nuclear power, but he did state explicitly during his campaign that he is not a proponent of it. Apparently that has changed -- check these quotes:
Two years ago during his campaign: (see the video) "I start off with the premise that nuclear power is not optimal, and so I am not a nuclear energy proponent. Until we can make certain that nuclear power plants are safe, that they have solved the storage problem, until we solve those problems and the nuclear industry can show that they can produce clean, safe energy without enormous subsidies from the U.S. government, I don’t think that’s the best option." (December 30, 2007)
Last week at the State of the Union address: "But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. (Applause.) It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. (Applause.) It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies. (Applause.) (January 27, 2010)
So that's the clean energy plan -- nukes, oil, gas, coal and advanced biofuels? Get a clue, man! The enthusiastic applause from the gallery should be your clue that the fix is already in on nukes. That, despite the fact that MoveOn determined that his call for new nuke plants was the low point of the speech in the public's eye.
Congress just voted to give the nuclear power industry another $54 billion in loan guarantees, so the plan is to start building in 2011.
The Chavez Center won energy awards when it opened in 2000, but when I assessed it in 2001 I quickly realized it was a mess. Oversized pumps pushing against closed valves, electrically heated water being used to flush ice (shaved from the skating rink) down the drain, and the like. Worst of all, the heat removed from the skating rink (that's how you make water freeze) was being thrown away instead of used to heat the swimming pools! So when Phaedra Haywood wrote an article about a decade-long problem of humidity from the swimming pools dripping from the ceiling of the gymnasium, I just had to respond. Enjoy!
Dear Phaedra,
Thank you for your January 12 article in The New Mexican, “Water Torture,” which detailed the decade-long saga of indoor rain at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center. Unfortunately the good folks at the City didn’t tell the whole story.
While I was Technical Director for Rebuild New Mexico in 2001, I was asked to assess the energy performance of the Chavez Center. During the assessment, Troy Houtman, the Natatorium Manager, told me about the humidity migration problem that your article chronicles, and he told me at that time that in order to prevent it the natatorium needed to be kept at negative pressure relative to the rest of the building. So the problem was already well understood in March 2001 – six months before your timeline shows it first being identified.
I wrote a report based on my walk-through assessment and submitted it to Greg Neal, Director of the Chavez Center, in April 2001. I also gave a copy to the State Energy Office, which administered the Rebuild program in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. My report included sixteen recommendations for improving the performance of the building, including several designed to reduce humidity inside the natatorium and one specifically calling for continuous measurement of the pressure differential between the natatorium and the rest of the building. I even recommended that an indicator or alarm be connected to the gauge so that the out-of-balance condition could be corrected each time it occurred, before rain would start to fall in the gymnasium.
My report was in the City’s hands long before the timeline in your article shows the problem first being identified. It described exactly how to address the problem, and if acted on at the time it would have quickly led to a permanent solution. The alarm on the pressure gauge would have highlighted the set of conditions creating the pressure imbalance, so that the ventilation system could then be adjusted to keep the imbalance from occurring.
This simple solution, if implemented, could have avoided the next eight years of paid consultants, threatening letters and negotiated settlements. And reading your article, it appears that the problem is still misunderstood. Why are we still talking about monitoring temperature and humidity when the problem arises from a pressure imbalance?
Maybe an interesting follow-up article could explore why the City didn’t consider my report, and whether they have any plans to look at it now. Beyond addressing the problem of water dripping from the gymnasium ceiling, the report contained fifteen additional recommendations for reducing energy consumption at Chavez. Back then the annual energy cost was $382,000 – what is it now, and what is the total cost of the failure to act?
This isn’t an isolated case, nor is it anywhere the worst example of costly ignorance on the part of the City. I have no idea what it would take to put an end to it, but it must stop – we simply cannot afford it any more.
Sincerely, Mark Sardella, PE
Dear Phaedra,
Thank you for your January 12 article in The New Mexican, “Water Torture,” which detailed the decade-long saga of indoor rain at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center. Unfortunately the good folks at the City didn’t tell the whole story.
While I was Technical Director for Rebuild New Mexico in 2001, I was asked to assess the energy performance of the Chavez Center. During the assessment, Troy Houtman, the Natatorium Manager, told me about the humidity migration problem that your article chronicles, and he told me at that time that in order to prevent it the natatorium needed to be kept at negative pressure relative to the rest of the building. So the problem was already well understood in March 2001 – six months before your timeline shows it first being identified.
I wrote a report based on my walk-through assessment and submitted it to Greg Neal, Director of the Chavez Center, in April 2001. I also gave a copy to the State Energy Office, which administered the Rebuild program in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. My report included sixteen recommendations for improving the performance of the building, including several designed to reduce humidity inside the natatorium and one specifically calling for continuous measurement of the pressure differential between the natatorium and the rest of the building. I even recommended that an indicator or alarm be connected to the gauge so that the out-of-balance condition could be corrected each time it occurred, before rain would start to fall in the gymnasium.
My report was in the City’s hands long before the timeline in your article shows the problem first being identified. It described exactly how to address the problem, and if acted on at the time it would have quickly led to a permanent solution. The alarm on the pressure gauge would have highlighted the set of conditions creating the pressure imbalance, so that the ventilation system could then be adjusted to keep the imbalance from occurring.
This simple solution, if implemented, could have avoided the next eight years of paid consultants, threatening letters and negotiated settlements. And reading your article, it appears that the problem is still misunderstood. Why are we still talking about monitoring temperature and humidity when the problem arises from a pressure imbalance?
Maybe an interesting follow-up article could explore why the City didn’t consider my report, and whether they have any plans to look at it now. Beyond addressing the problem of water dripping from the gymnasium ceiling, the report contained fifteen additional recommendations for reducing energy consumption at Chavez. Back then the annual energy cost was $382,000 – what is it now, and what is the total cost of the failure to act?
This isn’t an isolated case, nor is it anywhere the worst example of costly ignorance on the part of the City. I have no idea what it would take to put an end to it, but it must stop – we simply cannot afford it any more.
We spend a lot of time talking about clean energy, but the U.S. electric power industry still pumps more than a billion pounds of toxins into the environment annually, as well as 40 percent of all our greenhouse gases. So when a colleague of mine asked for input on putting together a panel discussion for a technical conference on advanced power-grid architectures, I happily responded with the letter below. I hope you like it!
Dear Tony,
Great to hear from you, and thanks for thinking of me in the context of the power-grid architecture discussion. As you know, it’s one of my favorite topics!
I think it might be a lot more interesting if, in addition to the technical discussion, you ask the panelists what they believe to be the drivers of technical innovation. For example, instead of just asking, “What does an advanced grid architecture look like?”, you might also ask, “How did we end up, after more than 100 years of development and billions of dollars of research, with an architecture that delivers just 30 percent of the energy in the fuel it consumes?”
I’m not suggesting by any means that panelists should be made to recount the sordid, criminal pasts of Samuel Insull and J.P. Morgan. What I’m saying is that it has not worked well up to this point to set technical goals and then hope that our social, economic, and environmental values will be upheld as a result. It makes much more sense to go about it the other way: set forth the values, establish rules to encourage and reward businesses for honoring them, and let innovation and entrepreneurism drive the technological direction that best advances the values. It’s an old-school conservative approach, true?
It’s beginning to happen, but it only works as well as the values we set forth, and we therefore have to be very specific about what we are trying to accomplish. If we decide we value having lots of distributed resources on the grid, we may end up with that, but it may or may not produce a desirable result.
Denmark has done a pretty good job advancing its values with its power grid. Ten years ago, the Danish government decided that the best way to foster entrepreneurism, innovation, and resource efficiency was to make the transmission system public and re-write it’s charter. The new charter gave every Danish citizen the right, upon connection to the power grid, to upload as well as download, and it required the highest possible end-to-end operating efficiency. They accelerated the process using feed-in tariffs, and the flood of interconnects necessitated development of the active architecture they use now.
If we learn from the Danish model and add to it the value of local self-reliance, it will probably lead to an architecture you described to me years ago: a network of microgrids wherein each one can island itself whenever it’s beneficial to do so, or re-close with the larger system whenever that is more beneficial.
How do we get there? Again, one could better ask, “Why are we not there?” It’s because the power industry continues to insist that active participation of DR in grid support is dangerous to linemen, that high DG penetration leads to instability, and that plug-and-play interoperability isn’t viable because they need discretion over every interconnect. Those positions are less and less credible all the time. Remember when big tobacco used to claim that their research showed smoking wasn’t harmful, but when we finally took a look it turned out they had been lying for decades to protect their industry?
I’m quite sure you don’t want to stray into a racketeering discussion at an IEEE conference – I’m just showing the futility of waxing technological about an industry that is less efficient now than when it started 127 years ago. If EPRI, with a $300 million annual research budget, wanted an advanced grid architecture, don’t you think we would have had one by now?
I hope this is helpful, or at least thought provoking! Good luck with the panel, and stay in touch!
All the best, - Mark
Dear Tony,
Great to hear from you, and thanks for thinking of me in the context of the power-grid architecture discussion. As you know, it’s one of my favorite topics!
I think it might be a lot more interesting if, in addition to the technical discussion, you ask the panelists what they believe to be the drivers of technical innovation. For example, instead of just asking, “What does an advanced grid architecture look like?”, you might also ask, “How did we end up, after more than 100 years of development and billions of dollars of research, with an architecture that delivers just 30 percent of the energy in the fuel it consumes?”
I’m not suggesting by any means that panelists should be made to recount the sordid, criminal pasts of Samuel Insull and J.P. Morgan. What I’m saying is that it has not worked well up to this point to set technical goals and then hope that our social, economic, and environmental values will be upheld as a result. It makes much more sense to go about it the other way: set forth the values, establish rules to encourage and reward businesses for honoring them, and let innovation and entrepreneurism drive the technological direction that best advances the values. It’s an old-school conservative approach, true?
it’s beginning to happen, but it only works as well as the values we set forth, and we therefore have to be very specific about what we are trying to accomplish. If we decide we value having lots of distributed resources on the grid, we may end up with that, but it may or may not produce a desirable result.
Denmark has done a pretty good job advancing its values with its power grid. Ten years ago, the Danish government decided that the best way to foster entrepreneurism, innovation, and resource efficiency was to make the transmission system public and re-write it’s charter. The new charter gave every Danish citizen the right, upon connection to the power grid, to upload as well as download, and it required the highest possible end-to-end operating efficiency. They accelerated the process using feed-in tariffs, and the flood of interconnects necessitated development of the active architecture they use now.
If we learn from the Danish model and add to it the value of local self-reliance, it will probably lead to an architecture you described to me years ago:a network of microgrids wherein each one can island itself whenever it’s beneficial to do so, or re-close with the larger system whenever that is more beneficial.
How do we get there? Again, one could better ask, “Why are we not there?” It’s because the power industry continues to insist that active participation of DR in grid support is dangerous to linemen, that high DG penetration leads to instability, and that plug-and-play interoperability isn’t viable because they need discretion over every interconnect. Those positions are less and less credible all the time. Remember when big tobacco used to claim that their research showed smoking wasn’t harmful, but when we finally took a look it turned out they had been lying for decades to protect their industry?
I’m quite sure you don’t want to stray into a racketeering discussion at an IEEE conference – I’m just showing the futility of waxing technological about an industry that is less efficient now than when it started 127 years ago. If EPRI, with a $300 million annual research budget, wanted an advanced grid architecture, don’t you think we could have had one by now?
I hope this is helpful, or at least thought provoking! Good luck with the panel, and stay in touch!
Although I generally shy away from debates about energy technology, because they frequently overshadow the more important discussions of system ownership and economics, this proposal is so bad that it makes for a good discussion.
Photovoltaics convert the sun’s energy into electricity, while ground-source heat pumps convert electricity into heat. So viewed from end to end, this project will convert sunlight into heat using a two-step process – the first one involving silicon wafers, wires, circuit breakers, power converters, and phase-synchronizers, and the second one using compressors, refrigerants, heat exchangers, and fans.
The problem, of course, is that there are far simpler ways of converting sunlight into useable heat, including by running water through a black garden hose on a sunny day. I’m not suggesting that we should heat Villa Alegre with garden hoses – the point is that when simple, low-technology means are available, you are always better off avoiding the high-tech approach.
Rudy Gallegos, the Deputy Director of the Housing Authority whose name is suspiciously close to Rube Goldberg's, assured me this morning that his experts tell them it’s the right way to go.
But no amount of “expert” advice, no accrual of LEED bonus points, and no level of government funding can make the conversion of sunlight to electricity and then back to heat a good idea. Adding unnecessary complexity is always a problem, even if experts tell you otherwise and a government grant will pay you to do it.
Assuming the City and its housing authority can accept that they got it wrong this time, then they also have an opportunity to get it right. As the nonprofit Local Energy has long held, getting it right means starting by stating your values, and then selecting technologies that best apply those values in your community.
We must value energy projects that make efficient use of local resources, and that recycle the money we are paying for energy back into our community. Our research shows that for heating, this can best be accomplished with commonly used hydronic heating systems in which the water is heated with simple, low-cost solar collectors and low-technology, high-efficiency cordwood boilers. Such systems can be supplied and installed by local companies, financed locally, and fueled by the sun and by the local foresters that are working hard to maintain the health of our surrounding woodlands.
On behalf of all the local entrepreneurs who might benefit from opportunities to participate in heating our beautiful city, I have just one message for city officials: We are here for you, and we await your call.
Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 03:03AM 
I don't know that Obama has ever been opposed to nuclear power, but he did state explicitly during his campaign that he is not a proponent of it. Apparently that has changed -- check these quotes:
Santa Fe Still in the Dark About Local Energy
Although I generally shy away from debates about energy technology, because they frequently overshadow the more important discussions of system ownership and economics, this proposal is so bad that it makes for a good discussion.
Photovoltaics convert the sun’s energy into electricity, while ground-source heat pumps convert electricity into heat. So viewed from end to end, this project will convert sunlight into heat using a two-step process – the first one involving silicon wafers, wires, circuit breakers, power converters, and phase-synchronizers, and the second one using compressors, refrigerants, heat exchangers, and fans.
The problem, of course, is that there are far simpler ways of converting sunlight into useable heat, including by running water through a black garden hose on a sunny day. I’m not suggesting that we should heat Villa Alegre with garden hoses – the point is that when simple, low-technology means are available, you are always better off avoiding the high-tech approach.
Rudy Gallegos, the Deputy Director of the Housing Authority whose name is suspiciously close to Rube Goldberg's, assured me this morning that his experts tell them it’s the right way to go.
But no amount of “expert” advice, no accrual of LEED bonus points, and no level of government funding can make the conversion of sunlight to electricity and then back to heat a good idea. Adding unnecessary complexity is always a problem, even if experts tell you otherwise and a government grant will pay you to do it.
Assuming the City and its housing authority can accept that they got it wrong this time, then they also have an opportunity to get it right. As the nonprofit Local Energy has long held, getting it right means starting by stating your values, and then selecting technologies that best apply those values in your community.
We must value energy projects that make efficient use of local resources, and that recycle the money we are paying for energy back into our community. Our research shows that for heating, this can best be accomplished with commonly used hydronic heating systems in which the water is heated with simple, low-cost solar collectors and low-technology, high-efficiency cordwood boilers. Such systems can be supplied and installed by local companies, financed locally, and fueled by the sun and by the local foresters that are working hard to maintain the health of our surrounding woodlands.
On behalf of all the local entrepreneurs who might benefit from opportunities to participate in heating our beautiful city, I have just one message for city officials: We are here for you, and we await your call.