This seems to be the Finnish response to RMI’s Amory Lovins’ “Hot Showers and Cold Beer.” I arrived in Helsinki about 10 hours ago, though thanks to an airport worker’s strike and a spirited bout of jet lag, I’m only now getting to walk around the city. I have yet to get my vitamin D for the day, the weather was foggy and rainy when we arrived, and the sun set predictably early at around 4PM, which meant that my three hour nap killed any possible exposure, and I won’t lie, I feel it.

From my research in preparation for this trip, Finland has made some impressive commitments to both the environment and stimulating clean tech initiatives. What it doesn’t have in sun resources for much of the year, it makes up for in tremendous water, biomass and commitment to pursuing technological solutions. Thanks to the Finnish government’s interest in promoting the country’s clean energy leadership – and me winning a spirited game of rochambeau (rock-paper-scissors) with my colleagues for the chance to accept their invitation – I will spend the next three days visiting Finnish clean tech companies and organizations.

Given the country’s commitment to education and technology and its natural resources and heating requirements, Finland is a leader in bioenenergy, co-generation and green construction.  By implementing co-generation, the country reduces, by some estimates, 11% of the country’s primary energy consumption. While it may not be as blessed with hydropower resources as its Scandinavian cousins to the west, it gets around 25% of its energy from local renewable biomass and boasts probably the most diversified generation portfolio in the developed world.  That said, Finland’s energy consumption is relatively high (almost twice as high as the European average). For the time being, energy prices are among the lowest in Europe, and it uses a considerable amount of coal for electricity and oil for transportation.  Weak hydropower outputs and lower carbon emission prices demonstrated a spike in the use of coal this year. Hopefully, the country’s continuous advances in bioenenergy technology will make a bigger dent on this in the years ahead.

On the Schedule for the next couple of days:

Clean Ltd. (CleanTech business incubator)
Picodeon (Materials and Manufacturing)
Stora Enso (Paper and Packaging)
Eniram (Marine Automation and Optimization)
Beneq (Industrial nanotechnology solutions)
Vacon (AC Motor Optimization)
Metso (Will visit one of their biomass-energy systems… I think it’s a gasifier.. but I’m not quite sure yet!)
Durat (Recycling, Materials)

I would love to meet any Finnish CleanTechies for a beer or a meal. Particularly, if anyone has done business with these companies, please be in touch; meeting with other Clean Energy companies would be great too.

After four days in Helsinki, I’m going to head-up Lapland this weekend to try and track down Santa to talk to him about that tragic Christmas in 1984, the year it seemed he outsourced reading his correspondence, both in the orders and the customer service departments. As for the ice baths and hot saunas, I’ll be sure to report on the experience as soon as I’m able.

[photo: Matti Mattila]

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NPR’s Morning Edition recently aired this story, a variation on a theme that I have written about in the past on CleanTechies and in scholarly work: green backlash against renewable power. The Morning Edition piece focused on the land use implications of renewables, noting that it takes a lot more land to generate a terawatt of solar, wind or biofueled electricity than of coal or natural gas power.

True enough. But, for me, it all comes down to the threshold question: do you believe the worst-case climate scenarios? If your answer is yes, and you have the courage of those convictions, then you realize — as I have — that we have no choice, and no time to dawdle. People who answer that question affirmatively know that the paradigm shifts in energy production and consumption that are necessary if we are to have any chance of righting our climatological ship will face knee-jerk opposition and demagoguery from opponents (s, e.g., the spring time bloodbath over the Waxman-Markey bill). A movement that remains — however gallingly — on such tenuous footing cannot afford to endure the additional obstacle of in-fighting over policy nuances. To twist a familiar and over-used metaphor:

As we argue about the impact that renewable energy production has on the sub-climactic environment, we are not even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, we are arguing about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Only this time, the “iceberg, right ahead” is melting.

I was reassured to get the sense that at least one policymaker in my New England area understands this. In his letter responding to a Boston Phoenix story entitled “What’s Wrong with Wind Power,” Maine State Representative and Co-Chair of the state’s House Utilities and Energy Committee Jon Hinck, wrote:

“When we finally get down to grappling with dangerous climate disruption, all forms of non-carbon emitting power will rise…the slogan ‘No New Electric Power Generation’ cannot be our salvation, because America must decomission 1,100 coal-fired power plants…“

I’ll save the Chairman the need to distance himself from my comments by adding that I do not mean to imply that Hincks is even implicitly adopting my green guerilla warfare approach, but the closing of his letter does demonstrate that he shares my sense of urgency: “Maine needs to get wind power right,” Hinck writes, “but I say, ‘Blow, baby, blow.”

I venture to say that the Chairman would agree that a frenzied push for more green power — wherever, whenever, however…and fast — is not the solution. But, where there are practical, available technologies, we have to put them into wider use with urgency. For example, in the face of concerns about the effect that damming has on local ecology, hydro-power production fell precipitously during the last twenty years, both as a total percentage of renewable capacity and overall electricity capacity in the US. Big mistake! (Again, I do not speak for or mean to convey any agreement on the part of the Chairman on the specific question of hydro dams).

Will a hydro dam decimate a fish species? Should the transmission line needed to connect in a commercial scale wind farm be allowed to run through a national park’s pristine open spaces? What ARE we going to do with all that nuclear waste? Important questions all, but important things can and should be eclipsed by more important things. You don’t worry about preventing infection by sterilizing the instrument before performing an emergency tracheotomy on a patient choking to death on a chicken bone.

Given the technological hurdles, cost gaps and resource-consumption profiles of the two fastest risers during that same period (wind and solar — intermittency anyone?), we cannot make a significant shift to more renewable power as a share of overall US on-line capacity without abundantly available base-loading hydro-power capacity. Guess what? Nukes, too. Without them, you would have to build an AWFUL lot of wind and solar to have enough capacity available — discounted for intermittency unavailability — to allow load-serving entities to start shutting down their existing fossil fuel basers. Imagine the land use implications of that.

We can – and should – be sure to mitigate the ancillary environmental impacts of renewable power however and wherever possible, but we also have to come to terms with the fact that in the war against climate change, there will be some collateral damage.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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Australia’s Parliament has passed a law requiring that 20 percent of the country’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2020, an increase from the current level of 8 percent.

The standard, which matches the European Union’s, means that the households of all 21 million Australians could be powered by renewable energy in a decade.

Green Party leaders said, however, that the standard should be 30 percent, and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong noted that even with the new renewable standard, the nation’s CO2 emissions are expected to be 20 percent above 2000 levels in 2020 because of the growth of the Australian economy.

Meanwhile, a new report shows that electricity generated by renewable sources in the U.S. reached an all-time high in May, with alternative energy accounting for 13 percent of total electrical generation. That’s 7.7 percent higher than May 2008, with most of the growth coming from wind and solar power. Hydropower remains the largest source of renewable energy, accounting for 9.4 percent of U.S. electricity production.

Appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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In my continuing effort to launch the CleanTechies community to the forefront of the clean energy debate – and perhaps, in some small part, because I am an insatiable gadfly – I dashed off the following letter to the New York Times yesterday.

It is tough to give much nuance to the argument in less than 200 words, but to me, there are clear connections and contradictions between the the two energy/environment Op-Eds they ran yesterday, one by Gregg Easterbrook, the other by Paul Krugman. The letter follows:

To the Editor:

Given the cataclysmic future that Paul Krugman outlines (Op-Ed, June 29) should our “betrayal” of the climate continue unchecked, I agree with Gregg Easterbrook (Op-Ed, June 29) that it is not “forward-thinking” to oppose even piecemeal progress on carbon reduction.

Yet, as a nation, we have prevented the expansion of nuclear power and the construction of hydroelectric dams. The recently-passed Waxman-Markey legislation keeps those technologies in purgatory. It favors wind, solar, biomass and tidal technologies that remain unprepared for the kind of large-scale, reliable, cost-competitive deployment sufficient to allow retirement of fossil fuel plants. Even looking longingly in the rear view, it is impossible to predict the level of US carbon emissions today if we relied on more hydro and nuclear in place of coal, oil or gas.

The legitimate concerns of abutting communities, local ecosystems, and native wildlife populations cannot be ignored. But, as we stare down double-digit temperature increases worldwide, it begs the question: what will be our priority?

Joe Walsh
Boston, Mass., June 29, 2009

In other words, this renewable energy revolution is about innovation, policy, political will, and investment.

But, it is also about deciding that the local skink population may need to take a backseat. You may have to see a new transmission line out your front door. I may have to hear a wind turbine hum when I’m in the backyard.

As Gatorade might ask: Is it in us?

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The internecine battles in the green community are growing in number: there’s pro-renewable versus open space; the anti-hydro crowd; and the nukes or no nukes debate. Add the fight over clean coal, which the Boston Globe editorial staff weighed in on yesterday.

We know from his comments earlier this year that Al Gore essentially sees clean coal as a shell game, and he is being borne out at least in part by the larding of Waxman-Markey with billions to placate coal state legislators.

But, the Globe editorial touches on an interesting geopolitical/economics quandary. The US and Europe may be pushing toward carbon reduction reforms; but, it is the largest and fastest growing emitters in Asia that pose the greatest threat to the planet and are projected to negate even the most ambitious Western reduction estimates.

So, clean carbon technology might be the liar’s lie that Gore claims it is for US energy production, but what about the possibility of developing technology to export? Do we have an obligation to invest in clean coal research for the greater good even if its not in our future?

And, if we do, who should make the investment? The technology that emerges is likely to be immensely valuable, but it also promises to be the kind of technology over which any attempt at proprietary control would be difficult to assert on all fronts: technological, moral, and legal. All of that makes it unlikely that American companies will invest much in the effort.

Which would seem to leave any effort to our newest class of venture investor — the American taxpayer. Joe Six Pack is already going to be heavily invested in emerging renewable technologies, so the extension is not much of a reach.

But, with the banks, the auto companies, and all the other cash that Uncle Sam has already committed, is clean coal investment to give away to developing countries really a good allocation of tax resources?

There is a lot of debate in the climate change movement about the obligations that the Western world now has to emerging economies (the “you had your turn, and now its our time to pollute, so don’t lecture us” line of reasoning). Maybe clean coal is the time to turn this on its head? Let’s tell the Chinese and Indians to take all of their emerging technological might, their strong engineering technocracy, and their CO2-laced revenues and apply it all to find a marketable gasification technology and send it along when you’ve got the killer app.

For the first time in this new global economy, we’ll see what its like when the innovation product life cycle door swings the other way, with the capital investment and technological innovation happening there and the benefits accruing here.

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