The mind boggling climate impacts of the Navy's EA-18G Growlers

At the request of my friend Cynthia Dilling of the San Juan County Quiet Skies group, I wrote a letter to Senators Cantwell and Murray addressing the Navy's EA-18G Growlers and climate change.

Dear Senator Cantwell,

I live on Lopez Island, north of the village. This is a part of the island that is supposedly well north of the flight plan of the EA-18G Growlers. I routinely am disturbed by loud, low-flying growler jets directly overhead. I find it surprising that our nation’s most sophisticated military aircraft are apparently routinely miles off course.

When I hear the military jets overhead – and my work, conversations are interrupted -- my thoughts often turn to the following disturbing simple math that puts in stark relief how damaging these jets are for our climate and our pocketbooks.

One EA-18G Growler flying for an hour:

·         produces more CO2 than 12.7 round trips from Anacortes to New York in a Toyota Prius;

·         produces more CO2 than an hour of operation by the entire ferry fleet of four vessels serving the San Juan Islands;

·         produces more CO2 than that emitted by the generation of electricity sufficient for 7 average hours of electricity consumption to meet the needs of all of San Juan County;

·         costs over $31,000 – pretty close to the annual salary of a public school teacher in our teacher-starved district.

These calculations (with full references) are available at www.tiny.cc/growler.

As a species, we stand at a precipice. Our collective actions, including gluttonous acts of consumption – will shape the future our children, grandchildren, and their children will be burdened with for many generations to come.

In light of this, we need – as a society – to ask tough questions of our military. Is the national security benefit of flying that extra hour really worth the high climate cost it imposes? Because these machines put so much CO2 into the air, we need to be prepared to make every step possible to reduce flying time. At the training level, how can we reduce real flight hours by investing in best-of-class flight simulation and accompanying training techniques? At the level of global leadership, how can we invest in intelligent peace and diplomacy and engage in fewer reckless wars? How can we build more non-zero sum arrangements (through trade, cultural exchanges) in which we have mutually vested interested in success rather than failure of our fellow humans? Do we really need 117 of these fantastically expensive and polluting machines – or even the existing 82 stationed at Whidbey NAS? How many are actually needed by the US in realistic wartime scenarios, given their specialized role in electronic warfare? What kind of checks and balances ensure that the military leaders’ estimates are in the public interest?

Like many Lopezians, I would welcome any measures that mitigate the excessive and disturbing noise from these flying weapons. In light of this, I encourage you to sign onto Representative Larsen’s 6 mitigation points.

Also, like many, I urge you as our elected leader to work more deeply to build a future in which there are a lot fewer of these machines of war in the air. I encourage you to schedule meetings in the near future with San Juan County Councilman Jamie Stephens to discuss an action plan for mitigation, and to engage in soul searching about the role of these machines in the future you’re working towards, in light of their mind boggling environmental impacts and costs.

Best regards,

Chris Greacen, Ph.D. (Energy and Resources)

From energy mining to energy farming: intermittent renewables, behavior, and responsive loads

In the late 1980s and early 90s when I was in my late teens and early 20s I worked at Home Power Magazine. Our offices and living quarters comprised a 200 square foot plywood building in the mountains just north of the Oregon-California border about 20 miles east of I-5. The nearest power line was 10 miles away, and we were completely off the grid, powered by solar panels and a wind turbine occasionally supplemented by a gasoline generator.

Living and working at the magazine, by necessity we used electricity in step with what nature provided. When it was sunny or windy out we'd do laundry, and had excess power which we'd use to vacuum the floors. When it was cloudy and calm we would minimize waste to preserve precious charge in the batteries. When the battery voltage got really low, we'd have to go out and fire up the smelly gasoline generator. Living this way I'd estimate that about 90% of our electricity came from very intermittent renewable energy.

This is remarkably different than the standard American practice in which one turns on an appliance or light with no regard to where the electricity comes from and how abundant it is at the moment.

As a result of our collective "we want it when we want it without any thought to what's available" behavior, utilities by and large say that intermittent renewable energy becomes a significant problem when it exceeds a few percent of average load. At very low levels, intermittent renewables are fairly easily accommodated by decreasing a bit the output from peaking plants (gas turbines) and some hydropower plants. Higher than that, it becomes more expensive -- the rapid cycling of gas creates premature wear and tear; operating steam turbines at low power output lowers efficiency significantly, and so forth.

But what if we (or our appliances) could respond in real time to relative abundance or scarcity of electricity supply? When the wind is blowing strongly in the Columbia gorge, we would be in the habit of doing that load of laundry and our water heaters would automatically crank up a few degrees higher temperature. When it's a calm, cloudy day our water heater would be ever so slightly cooler and we'd hold off on doing the laundry

I don't know how much, but I'm convinced that an unprecedented and aggressive demand side-management approach like this could go a long way towards accommodating a lot more renewables... adding a bit of intelligent storage into the mix will make this strategy even more effective.

To the user, electricity is there if you need it. But we're encouraged -- and our appliances are encouraged -- for non-urgent tasks to use electricity when it's abundant and less when it's not.

This evolution from an "energy miner" to an "energy farmer" regime means that when the sun is shining brightly on solar farms of cheap solar panels, and the wind is blowing strongly our appliances have a way to know this and respond to absorb the surplus.

This is, of course, not a new idea. Already some industrial customers participate in curtailable load tariffs where they agree to be shut off several hours a year in return for significant savings. And some utilities run 'dispatchable load' programs where they might install a device on your electric water heater that turns down the thermostat slightly a few hours a year.

This difference in what I'm suggesting is to design a system where these signals aren't being sent and responded to just a few hours a year, but constantly. I suggest that our power system -- like many complex social/technical systems -- can, if built with flexibility in mind -- self-organize to a hither-to unappreciated level -- through small incentive signals.

I imagine an iPad like device on the front of my refrigerator. Or maybe my watch. It shows an artistic graphic of bright sun and strong blowing wind the Columbia and I know, at that moment, it's a good time to take that bath I've been waiting for, which will feel especially good knowing that the electrons that heated that water came from a renewable source. The same signals are being sent to my water heater, my heat pump.

Has anyone imagined the implications (on climate, on power system stability, and on human behavioral) of a power system designed like this?

Dear OPALCO members and island residents,

We invite you to join us in signing a petition (http://tiny.cc/opalco) requesting OPALCO to provide an accounting of their investment in fiber optics or communication equipment together with an item-by-item justification of its use for the electrical grid.

Like many on the islands, we are very much in favor of fast, reliable, internet. Indeed, our professional work depends on it.

But we don’t want the cost of broadband infrastructure to be borne on the backs of OPALCO electricity members who don’t necessarily want or need internet. This is brought to the forefront with approved electricity tariffs (see http://www.opalco.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Rate-Change-Materials-1-22-15.pdf) which bring an unprecedented increase in the cost of electrical services, especially for smaller users (low income, the elderly, families that conserve electricity, and those with grid-connected renewable energy).

It is noteworthy that in the USA, electric cooperatives are not under the jurisdiction of state energy regulatory authorities. The presumption is that because we, the members, are the owners, the coop acts in the interests of its members through the representatives we elect. In many cases this works out well. But it also means that as members we need to watch out to make sure the train stays on the rails and our elected representatives are working in our best interests. Transparency in expenditures is an important part of that.

An important part of the equation in our opinion is that for electric utilities, broadband holds a powerful allure. There is considerable symbiosis: fiber optic cables can provide ultra-reliable high speed switching for substations, with extra bandwidth to spare. Fiber optic cables are hung on poles or go in trenches, and laying both fiber and electric power cables at the same time can save considerable costs compared to doing each separately. On the other hand, widespread deployment of internet in the county requires very large investments in infrastructure – and excessive investments can severely disrupt utility finances.

Last year OPALCO made a policy choice we applauded: to make its fiber optic and communication investments only in areas that are justified based on their role in improving or facilitating reliable electricity service, and to build out fiber to customers on a ‘pay as you go’ approach, expanding where customers were willing to pay the infrastructure costs. If, as OPALCO board members assure us, this is the case, then it should have no problem providing detailed data that will put to rest questions about allocation of electrical budget resources to broad-band that keep arising in the community.

We see this request for data part of an engaged democratic process, committed to seeing OPALCO succeed as a respected, reliable utility that provides clean, affordable power to its customer/owners and extends opportunities for broad-band incrementally as they make sense financially.

Best regards,

Islands Energy Coalition