Apple HQ, Cupertino, California

Back in 1965, IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson, Jr, wrote, in IBM’s Basic Beliefs & Principles,

“We accept our responsibilities as a corporate citizen in community, national, and world affairs; we serve our interests best when we serve the public interest…. We want to be at the forefront of those companies which are working to make the world a better place.”

Today, IBM says “Sustainability is no longer an option. Sustainability is an imperative.” IBM is focused on making data centers and supply chains more efficient, and providing their customers with tools to become less unsustainable (IBM green blog). The European Commission awarded IBM for energy efficiency at 27 data centers (IBM Press Release).

However, it looks to me that Google and Apple are one or two steps ahead of IBM. Google has invested $915 Million in solar arrays, which should be 1.0 to 1.5 MW. Apple is putting a 5MW solar array on the roof of it’s headquarters in Cupertino, pictured above, and described here on Treehugger and here on 9to5mac. Apple is also using solar and biofuel to power it’s new data center in South Carolina (article in Renewable Energy World). Essentially:

• A 100-acre, 20 megawatt (MW) solar array, supplying 42 million kWh of energy each year.
• A 5 MW biogas system to come online later this year, providing another 40 million kWh of 24×7 baseload renewable energy annually. Apple claims this will be the largest non-utility-owned fuel cell installation in the US.
• Combined, that’s 82 million kWh/year of onsite renewable energy generation at the facility.

For more details, see the 2012 Apple Facilities Report.

Apple’s building may be a derivative design of the Widex headquarters, in Allerød, Denmark, described on Widex home page,  here. The Widex building is a ring that surrounds a large atrium courtyard to be planted with grass, flowers and trees and is according to Widex,”designed to be both pleasant to look at and be in…. and environmentally friendly

Heat for the building will be supplied by a geothermal system, where groundwater is used like a heat reservoir; excess heat in summer can be stored and used when needed during winter. Our ambition is to reduce energy consumption by 75 percent compared to traditional technology.

Apple, Google, and IBM report high profits. Their stock prices are also high, perhaps demonstrating the correlation between doing well and doing good.

Here are my top 10 predictions for 2012. These are less readings of the tea leaves or the entrails of goats and chickens and more simple extrapolations of patterns in progress. Altho that may be the way effective oracles. They just masked their observations with hocus pocus, mumbo-jumbo, and guts.

This list runs a gamut from business and technology to energy, instability in the Middle East, micro-economics in the United States, politics, and not-yet-pop culture.

1.  Apple and IBM will continue to thrive. Microsoft will grow, slightly. Dell and HP will thrash. A share of Apple, which sold for $11 in December, 2001, and $380 in Dec. 2011, will sell for $480 in Dec. 2012.
2. The Price of oil will be at $150 to $170 per barrel in Dec., 2012. The price of gasoline will hit $6.00 per gallon in NYC and California.
3. There will be another two or three tragic accidents in China. 20,000 people will die.
4. There will be a disaster at a nuclear power plant in India, Pakistan, Russia, China, or North Korea.
5. Wal-Mart will stop growing. Credit Unions, insurance coops and Food coops, however, will grow 10% to 25%.
6. The amount of wind and solar energy deployed in the United States will continue to dramatically increase.
7. The government of Bashar Al Assad will fall.
8. Foreclosures will continue in the United States.
9. Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio will resign. Calls for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from matters involving his wife’s clients will become louder, but Justice Thomas will ignore them. A prominent politician who says “Marriage is between a man and a woman,” or her husband, will be “outed” as gay. President Obama will be re-elected.
10. The authors of Vapor Trails will not win a Nobel Prize for literature. They will not win a “MacArthur Genius Award.” Nor will I despite my work on this blog or “Sunbathing in Siberia” and the XBColdFingers project.

Here are the details … Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Dell, & HP

Apple will continue to reinvent itself, bringing out “the best iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and MacBook – ever.” It won’t get Apple TV right, but no one will care. The Mac Mini will very quietly enter the server space, in workgroups, small companies and science and engineering labs. Software “apps” will be developed on iMacs and Minis for use in the field. It will continue grow by creating then exploiting new markets. It may even get Apple TV right one day. IBM will continue to thrive in computer hardware and software engineering and professional services.

As illustrated, their market capitalizations and stock prices will grow 25%. The valuation of Microsoft may grow 20%. Dell, and HP, however, will not grow more than 10% and will remain well below their historical peaks.

Financial analysts will come to regard Microsoft, MSFT, as analogous to an investor owned utility. They will note that it has completed it’s growth cycle and has leveled off, and will expect dividends, and continue to receive them. One way that it could grow dramatically would be to split into a three companies: a server software company, a business desktop software company, and a home software company, but that idea is 10 years old. They didn’t do it then; they won’t do it now.

HP will continue to gyrate without focus. They designed an inferior tablet, compared to the iPad, and an overpriced tablet compared to the Nook, Kindle and Kindle Fire, and face competition in the printer space from Canon, Sharp, and Xerox. HP will, in 2012, cede the laptop and workstation markets to Dell and Lenovo, and lose market share in the server market to Dell and IBM. They won’t care about the laptop and workstation markets because the margins are so thin, except for Apple, but the loss of the server market will be painful because there are margins and services there. HP needs a Lou Gerstener to make the elephant dance, and return to the “HP Way.” Fiorina didn’t do it. She tried to remake HP in her image rather than return to what Hewlett and Packard did that made HP great. I don’t know if Whitman will do it. She won’t do it in a year, and may wind up fired by a Board that is impatient and bored.

Dell will continue to take it’s customers for granted and treat them badly. While this may not rise to the level of the 2008 settlement between the Attorney General of New York and Dell Computer and Dell Financial, (NY AG Dell site here / NY Times coverage here) bad customer service will not get better. Dell is growing by acquisition, which is an expensive way  to gain customers, typically requiring tremendous leverage putting a heavy burden on staff. It will sacrifice morale for statistics.

This will reflected in the stock prices. Apple, and IBM will increase 25% to 480 (AAPL) and $225 (IBM). Microsoft may grow 20%. Dell, and HP will gyrate but end the year where they started. The Dow Jones Industrial Average will increase about 10% to 1320.

The price of oil will end 2012 at $150 to $170 per barrel. The price of gasoline will hit 6.00 per gallon in California and New York City. People will drive less, and when they buy cars, they will buy more efficient new cars.  Increased CAFE standards, click here for overview, 27.5 mpg, since 1990, which Obama will again try to increase, will continue to annoy Republicans and Tea Party faithful, who will buy more efficient vehicles anyway.  Meanwhile fleet efficiencies will climb faster than the CAFE standards mandate as businesses and municipalities factor in fuel and maintenance costs in the life cycle analyses they perform. Parking lot solar energy systems will spread from California, Texas, and New Jersey to other parts of the country. These will feed the grid and charge electric cars driven by commuters, and generate revenue for the owners.

Nuclear Power & Disasters.

There will be a disaster at a nuclear power plant in India, Pakistan, Russia, China, or North Korea. If Russia, we will not learn of it for days. If China or North Korea we will not learn of it for weeks. If India, the government will blame Pakistan. If Pakistan, the government will blame India, the United States, and Israel. This will have the unintended consequence of driving stronger ties between Israel and India. We will see battery powered Tata Motors cars in Israel, as well as Europe. These will be commuter vehicles. They will not displace trains. We will continue to see high speed rail displace inter-city and regional airplane traffic. And trains will continue to grow, particularly in Europe and Asia.  We will look for evidence of leaked tritium at various nuclear power plants, and find it wherever we look.

There will be another two or three tragic accidents in China in which 20,000 people will die. This will take place in a coal mine, an elementary school, a railroad, a housing project or an airport, another example of unregulated totalitarianistic state capitalism.

Wal-Mart v Credit Unions and Food Co-ops.

Wal-Mart will stop growing. Part of this will be due to gas prices, and higher priced poor quality goods from China. People will stop buying cheap crap they need to replace quickly, and start demanding – and paying for – good, durable, locally sourced goods – goods that are good.

Credit Unions, Mutual Insurance Companies and Food Co-Ops will grow 10% to 25%. Credit Unions and Insurance co-ops will grow, in part, as a result of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. We will also see a slight increase in organic and sustainable farming.  The margins will increase because people will pay more for healthier and better tasting food, and manure will cost less than gas based fertilizers. Ranchers will also begin deploying manure to methane cookers, and will run farm equipment on manure. They – we – will also plant gardens, eat less meat, and get healthier.

Energy  Pundits (funded by coal, methane, and oil industry interests) will continue to call for fracking and carbon sequestration. Politicians will listen oblivious to the facts on water use or pollution costs that will be externalized to future generations. At the same time, conservative politicians will begin to re-assess energy subsidies for coal, oil, methane, and nuclear.

Solar energy capacity in New Jersey and California will increase by about a third, from 400 MW to 600 MW, in Jersey, and from 700 MW to 1 Gigawatt in California. Solar will spread to Florida, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, This will be accompanied by a price drop to below $5.00 per watt, and additional technology breakthroughs in manufacturing and design efficiencies. These phenomena will feed each other in another positive, or reinforcing feedback loop.  Small solar will spread to aboriginal communities in Africa, Australia, South and Central America, and remote parts of Asia.

Iowa gets 20% of it’s electric power from the wind today. This will increase to 25% over 2012.

Wind, hydro, solar hot water, and geothermal will increase by 25% in the Pacific Northwest.

1.0 gigawatts of nameplate capacity in one or two old coal or nuclear plants will be decommissioned, replaced with wind, solar, geothermal, and insulation. This will be done for reasons, having as much to do with economics as the environment.

1.0 million homes in the US will be retrofitted with R25 or better insulation in the walls and attic.

Ground – or water – will be broken as the first offshore wind farms in US waters will be started, either Cape Wind, in the Horseshoe Shoals off Nantucket, or the New Jersey wind farms.

There will also be design breakthroughs in offshore hydro-electric, or marine current generation, and deep geothermal.

The government of Syria will fall, but, as is happening in Egypt, the military will take or hold power. Bashar Al Assad will be killed, like Muammar Gadaffi, by the people at whos heads he has pointed his guns, or he will find refuge in Tehran, Iran, Baghdad, Iraq, or, like Idi Amin, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Iran and Turkey will compete to fill the power vacuum. Since the government of Iran is unstable – the people are hungry for democracy as well as food- this round will go to Turkey. Hamas will continue embrace the Palestinian Authority. It will also continue to call for the destruction of Israel. Without support from Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Saudis, these cries will grow louder, harsher, more shrill, yet less effective. The Israelis, however, will grow more frightened and will respond with harsher methods. It’s a reinforcing feedback cycle. Hamas will continue to execute people who call for peace with Israel. Calls for divestiture of Israel by the left in the US and Europe will be ignored.

Back in the US, foreclosures will continue, driving property values down. Many will remain unsold as credit will be expensive and speculators will be cautious.  However, as energy prices climb, and as effective insulation can be made from recycled cellulose (newspaper) treated with boric acid, people who have some equity will invest in negawatts, and nega-fuel-watts. And they will plant gardens.

The Republican Party will be divided over calls by Newt Gingrich and business owners for amnesty for undocumented workers (here), calls by Mitt Romney and Wall Street to allow “the foreclosure process to take its course” (here), and by citizens opposed to the appearance of a biases in favor of illegal aliens and Wall Street “Banksters.” People will turn away from the GOP as they will see adherance to Grover Norquist’s pledge as destructive and unpatriotic, and the focus by John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, on cutting taxes for the 1% while raising taxes on the 99%, which people will perceive as a transfer of wealth to the very wealthy. Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is said to have cost Maricopa County $43 million in lawsuits, will resign over his alleged bias against Latinos. The calls for the impeachment of Clarence Thomas, over conflict of interest for not recusing himself over business dealings of Ginny Thomas – Mrs. Justice Thomas – will get louder. Another two or three married members of the House or Senate will be involved in a ‘sexting’ scandal. There will be a scandal involving a prominent Republican politician or her husband involved in ilicit sexual liasons with a professional sex worker of the same gender. This will be immortalized with “Marriage is between a man and a woman. But with sin; anything goes!” The unemployment rate will drop below 8.2%. Elizabeth Warren will be elected Senator from Massachusetts, the Democrats will regain control of the House. Barak Obama will win re-election to the Presidency.

“Vapor Trails,” by Bob Siegel and Roger Saillant will not win a Nobel Prize for literature. Nor will I despite my work on this blog or “Sunbathing in Siberia” and the XBColdFingers project. “It’s Rainin’ Outside the Cave” featuring “Sunbathing in Siberia” and other songs of peace, love, and global warming will not become a hit record. Neither Emenim nor Kanye West will do a ‘rap’ version. Rianna will not do a duet with me . Lady Gaga will not moan a version of it. Brittney Spears will not ask about covering any of my songs as part of her “Comeback Tour.” Neither will Justin Timberlake, Justin Beiber, Arlo Guthrie or Tom Paxton. Nor do Siegel, Sallant, or myself seem likely to win MacArthur “Genius Grants.” However, we will develop a screenplay of Vapor Trails which will feature some of my songs, and we ink a film deal.

   Tweet To paraphrase Bob Dylan,”The answer my friend, is storage of the wind.”

We have long been saying that the question is not:

“Can clean, renewable and sustainable energy power the grid?”

It is:

“How can we harness clean, renewable and sustainable energy systems to power the grid?”

As Matt Wald observed in Taming Unruly Wind Power, shattering the conventional wisdom, the critique of renewable-resource energy is that it’s “not enough;” turns out to be wrong. In some places on some days, it’s not only enough, it more than we need. When the winds blow and the rains fall, a power grid built on wind and big hydro turbines, i.e. the northwest grid built on the Grand Coulee Dam, pictured at left, and the wind farms in the Columbia Gorge, below left, can get overloaded. So while you can never, according to the conventional wisdom, be too thin or too rich, you can have too much energy.

The corresponding criticism, that wind and solar don’t work in a storm, also applies to nuclear power. As noted here, on Popular Logistics by Lawrence J. Furman, eight nuclear plants from North Carolina to Connecticut were shut down due to Hurricane Irene or the earthquake that preceded it.  Wind and solar, however, unlike nuclear, come on automatically after the storm.

Excerpted from Matthew L.  Wald:   Taming Unruly Wind Power, published in the New York Times, on November 5th, 2011

For decades, electric companies have swung into emergency mode when demand soars on blistering hot days, appealing to households to use less power. But with the rise of wind energy, utilities in the Pacific Northwest are sometimes dealing with the opposite: moments when there is too much electricity for the grid to soak up.

In June 2010, for example, a violent storm in the Northwest caused a simultaneous surge in wind power and in traditional hydropower, creating an oversupply that threatened to overwhelm the grid and cause a blackout. As a result, the Bonneville Power Administration, the wholesale supplier to a broad swath of the region, turned this year to a strategy common to regions with hot summers: adjusting volunteers’ home appliances by remote control to balance supply and demand. When excess supply threatens Bonneville’s grid, an operator in a control room hundreds of miles away will now dial up a volunteer’s water heater, raising the thermostat by 60 more degrees. Ceramic bricks in a nearby electric space heater can be warmed to hundreds of degrees. The devices then function as thermal batteries, capable of giving back the energy when it is needed. Microchips run both systems, ensuring that tap-water and room temperatures in the home hardly vary.

“It’s a little bit of that Big Brother control, almost,” said Theresa Rothweiler, a teacher’s aide in the Port Angeles, Wash., school system who nonetheless signed up for the program with her husband, Bruce, a teacher. She said she had been intrigued by an ad that Bonneville placed in the local paper that asked consumers to help enable the grid to absorb more renewable energy, especially wind. “We’re always looking at ways to save energy, or be more efficient or green, however you want to put it,” said Ms. Rothweiler, who worries about leaving the planet a livable place for her 21-year-old daughter, Gretchen. Bonneville paid for the special technology, which runs around $1,000 per home. The initial goal of Bonneville’s pilot program is to gain experience in charging and “discharging” the water heaters and space heaters to see how much response operators can count on as the use of these thermal batteries expands.

Mark K. Lauby, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which enforces standards on the grid, said that such storage innovations would be “the holy grail” as the nation shifts to greater reliance on renewable energy. While the threat of excess supply is most severe in the Pacific Northwest, other regions may land in the same situation in coming years because a surplus would threaten to destabilize the electric system as much as a shortage. California, for example, is committed to getting a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. That would be harder if it had to turn off the wind machines on their best generating days to prevent the grid from being overwhelmed.

For decades, the Bonneville Power Administration rarely had a problem with excess supply. Its backbone is hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River, and while the operators must often run all of the falling water through its power-producing turbines for environmental reasons, the grid could adjust the supply by turning off fossil fuel plants. That balance began to shift over the last few years as entrepreneurs built hundreds of wind machines nearby in the Columbia River Gorge, an area that utility executives now call a “wind ghetto.” While the wind turbines produce electricity far below their capacity most hours of the year, they get busy when a storm rolls through, which is when river flows are highest, too.

Tweet I will be presenting Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes at the Space Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011.  The festival  is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott. Haley Sales, (Website / Facebook / Youtube),a local singer / songwriter, will perform.

Our current energy paradigm today is to fuel based. We burn oceans of oil and methane mountains of coal. And there are consequences.  We suffer oil spills, polluted water, mercury, coal mine disasters, nuclear power plant melt-downs, we fight wars …

According to the DoE, in 2010 we burned 1,085,281 thousand short tons of coal and 15,022 thousand short tons of coke (here).

Wind and solar don’t burn fuel. The winds blow, the sun shines, you put a widget in the path of those moving particles in the air or those photons of light and you get electricity – without greenhouse gases, radioactive wastes, toxic wastes, and it costs less. So the question is not ‘Can we meet our energy needs with clean, sustainable renewable energy technologies?” The real question are How? How Much? And How quickly?

And we could do it within 25 Years if we wanted to.

Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, coined the term “Negawatt” to mean energy you don’t need to buy, as in “The cheapest unit of energy is the one you don’t have to buy.” The next cheapest, the “nega-fuel-watt” is the unit of energy that doesn’t require fuel.

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Image courtesy of NASA

The Vanguard I satellite was and is remarkable in a number of ways: it’s the fifth publicly known launched satellite, the first to use solar power, and, as of this writing, the longest-lasting artificial satellite, at 53 years and counting.

NASA diagram, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Six solar cells powered a 5-milliwatt transmitter (a second transmitter was powered by a battery). The solar powered transmitter lasted for six years.
This post is part of an occasional series through which we hope to investigate the progress and promise of solar power.  And its limitations.  So we’re looking for  data points, landmarks, so we can plot the vector of solar power over time. One of our first posts on Solar, “Staten Island Ferry – Sailing to the Future,” posted here, March 8, 2007, noted the 40 KW array on the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, at the base of Whitehall Street in New York City.

Promise and Progress of Solar Power

1. First Solar Powered Satellite, the Vanguard 1, 1958, posted here, September 3, 2011.
2. In Jersey Three Strikes Equals a Home Run, posted here, September 7, 2011.

Green Living Festival

Tweet I am presenting “Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes,” a discussion of the hidden costs, or “economic externalities,” of nuclear power, coal, and oil, and the non-obvious benefits of wind, solar, marine hydro and efficiency at the Space Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011.

The festival  is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott.

Cocoa Beach is about 60 miles east of Orlando and 120 miles north of West Palm Beach. It is easily accessible by air, land, sea and space.

This will be similar to the presentation I recently gave to the NYC Business Sustainability Minded Action Round Table (Click here or here).

It is during hurricane season. Hopefully life will not be imitating art as portrayed in Vapor Trails, by Roger Saillant and Bob Siegel, and the conference will not be cut short by a hurricane of Katrina-like proportions.

Earth from Space, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC

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Earth Day, 2010, I looked to the future on Popular Logistics. In 2009, I wrote about water pollution and agricultural waste in the Chesapeake. Today I am looking at the present and recent past. While a comprehensive look at where we are can be found on the web pages of the World Watch Institute, the New York Times, and the World Factbook of the Central Intelligence Agency, I want to make a few points.

Our energy policy is “when you flip a switch, the juice gotta flow.” It ain’t magic. It’s engineering and classical physics, with an understanding of radioactive fission and decay and a profound lack of long term thinking. It ain’t magic, but it might as well be. But we really need to base our energy policy on an understanding of ecological economics and sustainability.

We’ve had a few problems with nuclear power and fossil fuel in the last few years. Yet, there’s some light on the horizon.

Regarding those problems with fossil fuel …

December 22, 2008, a flood of 1.2 billion gallons of toxic coal ash at the Kingston Steam Plant on the Clinch and Emory Rivers, upstream of Kingston, Tennessee, here or here. April, 2010, a disaster at the Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia (here). One of the results of the accident was that Massey Energy, the company that operated the mine, was sued by institutional investors who alleged corporate malfeasance. And then there was the catastrophic spill of 50,000 to 70,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico for three months. These, I said, were the “Fossil Fuel Trifecta of Disaster.” My series began with “Fossil Fuels and a Walk on the Moon.”  BP’s stock – and “market capitalization” was cut in half. While it has since recovered somewhat, it is still well below the level immediately prior to the spill. BP has also lost good executives to the nascent biofuels industry.

Also back in 2009, I started covering the “Purgen Plant,” a “Rube Goldberg” design for a coal plant with carbon sequestration, here.  The technology is incredibly expensive – $16 to $18 per watt – and spectacularly stupid. The plan is to use 25% to 40% of the output of the plant to capture 90% of the carbon, then compress it and pipe it 70 miles along the sea floor, then bury it 1 mile beneath the bottom of the ocean. It will cost the taxpayers billions, as long as nothing goes wrong.

More recently I’ve been writing about the unfolding earthquake – tsunami – nuclear disaster in Japan beginning with  Earthquake, Tsunami, and Energy Policy and concluding with Nuclear Power, What Future? But there are two important points – under “normal” conditions nuclear power produces less radioactive waste than coal, and the wastes from nuclear power plants are regulated. Under real world conditions, nuclear plants leak tritium and other radioisotopes into the biosphere. Look to this blog for more posts on this in the future.

Yet, there is some good news.

• Cape Wind, LLC finally got the permits they need to build America’s first offshore wind farm (see Cape Wind, Leadership and Vision).
• The solar energy industry is strong in New Jersey and California, and expanding.
• The FDA expects America’s rural electric coops to continue to move into renewable energy.
• Bright, dedicated, passionate and beautiful people are thinking about sustainability in places like Bainbridge, Columbia Earth Institute, the Fowler Center at Case Western, Marlboro College, the Presidio, UVM.
• Large institutions such as Deutsche Bank – one of the 10 largest banks – and Zurich Reinsurance are concerned about climate change. Click here and here. concerned about climate change.

In addition to my work on this blog, my song “Sunbathing in Siberia” may not be “American Idol” fare (and that’s part of the problem) but my friends dig it, and my “Earth Energy Haikus” were posted on Amida’s web site. The problems we write about on Popular Logistics are complex “systems” problems. They have developed over the last 50 or 100 or 200 years. They can’t be fixed with a magic wand. We need to look long and hard at various paradigms, such as energy and consumption, and how they need to shift. In his lectures, his book, “Sustainability by Design” and on his blog, John Ehrenfeld defines “Sustainability” as “Flourishing forever.” Doing it is the conundrum.

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The image of the “Blue Marble” was created by Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, at the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA GSFC. It is described here.  “This true-color image shows North and South America as they would appear from space 35,000 km (22,000 miles) above the Earth. The image is a combination of data from two satellites. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite collected the land surface data over 16 days, while NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) produced a snapshot of the Earth’s clouds.”

Waste Equals Cost. Less Waste Equals Equals Lower Costs.

Standard process versus 1366 Direct Wafer process

People frequently ask me about waste in Solar PV. Clearly, given that no fuel is consumed, no waste is produced from the use of a solar energy system to generate electricity. PV solar modules are not flammable (below something like around 1,000^o C) so even if the building burns down under the modules – which could produce toxics – there is no waste from the solar energy system.

However, there is a carbon footprint in transport and installation, and there is waste associated with the production of solar modules. This is about to be reduced.

Massachusetts based 1366 Technologies developed a manufacturing process which cuts waste in manufacturing solar wafers by about 65%, and could cut PV module costs in half. Since the modules are about 50% to 60% of the cost of the system, using this process can cut system costs by about 25% to 30%. The 1366 Tech process replaces a 4-step process with a lot of waste with a one-step process with significantly less waste. According to 1366, their “Direct Wafer process produces the world’s first compatible, low-cost “kerfless” wafer that requires < 10% of the electricity of standard wafer manufacturing.”

As reported in Business Wire, here, GE and Vantage Point Venture Partners invested in 1366 Tech.

The name comes from the amount of solar energy – 1366 watts – that hits each square meter of earth.

Ground-mounted solar array in a field of wildflowers. Copyright iphotostock.com

If you think there are zero direct emissions from the production of electricity from PV solar modules, YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. There are however, indirect emissions associated with production, transport, installation and refresh / recycle are dependent on the technologies used in those processes. Most are associated with the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power to manufacture and move solar modules.

Three observations stand out David Biello’s article, “Dark Side of Solar Cells Brightens,” Scientific American, Feb. 2008.

1. Indirect emissions are derived from the fossil fuels used to generate the electricity for PV manufacturing facilities.
2. Heavy metals, such as cadmium, used to manufacture PV solar modules, can be recovered from mining wastes and coal ash.
3. Overall toxic emissions are 90 to 300 times lower than those from coal power plants.

Biello based his discussion on “Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles” in Environmental Science & Technology,Vol 42, No 6, 2008.  The author, Vasilis Fthenakis, is a researcher with Brookhaven National Labs.

In earlier research, Fthenakis and his colleagues noted that the thickness of cadmium in the cadmium telluride, CdTe, layer of thin film CdTe PV was 5 microns in 1998 and expected to drop to 0.2 microns as the technology matured. To put that in perspective, a layer 5 microns thick is 14 grams per square meter; a layer 0.2 microns thick is 0.55 g/m2. Accounting for waste and process inefficiency, Fthenakis says “we estimate between 1 -2 g/ m2 would be needed for a mature technology.” This is discussed in “Thin-Film Cadmium Telluride Photovoltaics: ES&H Issues, Solutions, and Perspectives,” published in February, 1998 by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL. (Information / PDF)

This article states:

• One nickel cadmium flashlight battery has about as much cadmium (7 g) as a square meter of PV module.
• A typical cordless power tool will have 5-10 batteries.
• Solar modules have a life-span of 30 years – six to 10 times the life-expectancy of a NiCd battery.

The article continues:

“Today’s utility coal plants … produce heavy-metal pollution. Among these pollutants are cadmium, which goes up the stack [and into the biosphere or fly ash] at a rate of about 4 g/MWh. One square meter of module at 10% efficiency produces 180 kWh in an average U. S. location each year. If there are 2 g of Cd used to make the module, PV would use 0.4 g/MWh, one-tenth the amount sent up the stack by coal burning. Meanwhile the module would be using an inert form of cadmium that can be recycled.”