The Editor's Blog

The Big Green Hype – Natural Gas Vehicles

How ‘green’ are natural gas-burning cars, truck and buses?

If you want to stay focused on the single biggest threat to the world today — the runaway emission of the greenhouse gas Carbon Dioxide (CO2) — then calling natural gas a ‘green’ fuel for cars, trucks and buses puts you into a very fuzzy area.

Yes, in some ways burning natural gas is cleaner than burning gasoline or diesel (and much cleaner than burning coal) but in a vehicle engine it only reduces the emission of the CO2 by 25%.  And while a 25% reduction in CO2 emissions is better than doing nothing, compared to the truly sustainable green energy technologies now available, burning natural gas in hundreds of millions of cars and trucks doesn’t offer any real hope of pulling us out of the climate change death spiral we are in. And the cost to retrofit all those vehicles would be tremendous.

But, hey… right now there is a big push on in corporate America to re-label everything as ‘green’ — even SUVs, offshore oil-drilling platforms and coal-fired power plants! Before the term and the vital concept behind it are completely swamped and rendered meaningless in the public mind under a tidal wave of media hype, it is important for everyone to start insisting on full disclosure when they see the G-word used. It is particularly vital for the media to be responsible in using the term and so far that has very often not been the case.

Here’s an example of what I mean: The online version of the Los Angeles Times publishes a blog called Greenspace and it has posted some good articles, but one recent piece caught my attention because I felt the author’s application of over-enthusiastic green zeal tended to distort the true nature of natural gas as a vehicle fuel.

Here’s an excerpt… the extra emphasis is mine:

It pays to drive green
4:17 PM, December 8, 2008

<… snip …>

An additional 100 of the near-zero-emission LNG trucks are earmarked for deployment to the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in the coming months.

The largest delivery of LNG trucks in the nation’s history was made by Daimler Trucks North America under a partnership involving the Environmental Protection Agency, the California Air Resources Board, the Southern California Air Quality Management District and California Cartage Co.

“Each tractor will reduce the use of imported oil by 500 barrels per year,” Daimler Trucks President and CEO Chris Patterson said in a statement. <… snip …> “…that reduces our dependency on foreign oil by more than 116,000 barrels annually.“

Arrival of the clean rigs will help the ports meet stricter California emissions standards expected in 2010.

– Full article at:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2008/12/it-pays-to-driv.html

It was the heavy emphasis on “green driving” and “zero-emission” and “clean rigs” in the piece that bothered me. The danger of using green terms and phrases so casually in a story like this is that you help convince the public that natural gas is truly ‘green’ in all respects. Sometimes half-truths, myths or self-serving corporate propaganda gets passed on. That can end up encouraging decision-makers to put a lot of public and private money into infrastructure dedicated to converting vehicles to natural gas. That’s precious time, money and resources which would be better put towards deploying those truly sustainable alternative fuels which emit no greenhouse gas at all (or any other pollutants for that matter).

Replacing some oil burning — and particularly coal burning — with natural gas can be worth doing in some cases, but a wholesale conversion of millions of vehicles to burn natural gas will not seriously address climate change and people should not be mislead into believing it will.

Thus example is hardly the worst case of excessive green zeal/green hype in the media, but it is symptomatic of the casual nature of modern reporting and demonstrates how often the whole story not covered and how important facts can be conveniently left out. Facts like these:

OK, the chart above does show that burning natural gas is better than burning oil or coal — particularly in the area of some visible pollutants which can cause health problems. But it also shows that, as a true ‘green fuel’ for vehicles, natural gas is far from ideal in the all-critical greenhouse gas department.

And then there’s the twist: The green hype around natural gas is always accompanied by the ever-popular battle cry that it will “free us from dependence on foreign oil!” That line really helps clinch the deal and makes natural gas sound like a premier green alternative. Oh yeah? Check this out:

It turns out that, besides having most of the oil, those folk in the Middle East and Russia also have 2/3 of all the natural gas in the world! So much for getting out from under foreign dependence. No, changing over millions of our vehicles and service stations in order to use natural gas for an automotive fuel really does not make much sense if you look at all the cards.

But…

There is a better way to use Natural Gas:

We retrofit the 600 coal-fired electric power plants in the U.S. to burn natural gas instead of coal. This has ALREADY BEEN DONE to several power plants around the country. It is a cost-effective conversion. By using natural gas this way, we could very quickly achieve a whopping 56% reduction in the C02 emissions from our existing power plants! That would be about a 25% reduction in total U.S. emissions. It could easily be done over the next ten years and would cost much less — and do more immediate good — than any of the other large-scale proposals I’ve seen.

Converting coal plants to burn natural gas is obviously a much better use for the stuff compared to burning it in cars and trucks. We could even go one step further with the power plants and trap the CO2 before it leaves the smokestacks and inject it back into the ground, something that is not possible with vehicles. This would not be a permanent solution to our future electricity needs, but it would make a real dent in the emission problem and give us a little breathing room while we ramp up our truly sustainable solar, wind, water and nuclear power generating capabilities.

Natural gas can play an important role in transitioning our society to a sustainable future, but please, let’s not allow anyone to claim it is a long-term solution to climate change — or that it offers a truly ‘green fuel’ for our vehicles.

We are running out of time to fix the future. When it comes to the cars of the future, we simply can’t afford to be diverted down yet another hydrocarbon dead-end street.

— Jim Beacon

Comments:  3 Comments »

Filed Under: Climate Change, Conservation, Electric Cars, Energy, Green Hype, Media & News, Solar Power, The Politics of Green, Transportation

Whatever Happened to Low-Cost Solar Power?

The Dream betrayed?

In 2002, when he was 80 years old, the widely-acknowledged genius and inventor Stan Ovshinsky spent over $50 million dollars to build a huge factory in Aubrun Hills, Michigan. It had one purpose: to mass-produce his breakthrough solar panel technology. At the time Ovshinsky was eager to tell everyone about how his thin flexible ’solar laminate’ was not only better in many ways compared to other existing types of solar cells, but that his new factory — with its production line longer than a football field — proved they could be made much faster and for less than half the cost!

In public interviews and videos, Stan stated his intention was to launch a solar power revolution — to build more factories and quickly mass produce a lot of his low-cost ’solar laminate’ — to finally enable millions of average people to afford the dream of residential solar power without having to take out a second mortgage.

So… here we are… six years later. The good news is that four more of those huge factories have actually been built. The Ovshinsky solar panels, sold under the brand name Uni-Solar, have been on-the-shelf retail products for over two years now. But something went terribly wrong on the way to the market:

The promise of Ovshinsky’s new low-cost solar power technology has been betrayed by corporate greed and the bottom-line mentality of simply doing business as usual. Yes, today you can buy Ovshinsky panels. But you won’t pay half the price of what other solar panels cost as Stan promised. No, instead you will pay the SAME price — and often a higher price — on a per watt basis.

At least that’s the case as far as I’ve been able to discover. If I’m wrong, somebody please send me an email and tell me where I can buy them at the promised low cost.

But the betrayal of Stan’s plan is worse than just another example of ordinary garden variety of green greed. That’s because for the last 30 years the painfully slow, labor-intensive process of making traditional solar panels with their heavy glass covers, rigid frames, and electronic-grade silicon — all resulting in a very high price tag — has been the big roadblock to widespread public adoption of residential solar power. Stan Ovshinsky broke that bottleneck over 6 years ago — and just in time — but where are our low-cost solar panels now when we need them the most?

Uni-Solar (United Solar Ovonics) is the company Stan founded to turn his dream into a reality and they own and manufacture the solar laminate technology. Uni-Solar now operates 5 huge factories in North America and they are busy cranking out Ovshinsky panels by the acre — about 500,000 watts worth of cells every day. But Stan no longer runs the company. He stepped down in early 2007 and his retirement coincided with the beginning of large-scale commercial distribution (and pricing) of Uni-Solar products. How much of his retirement was due to age and health and how much was due to corporate politics no one knows, but it’s a damn shame he left the helm at such a crucial time.

Sadly, the company Stan Ovshinsky founded to manufacture his solar revolution now appears to have decided that just because they can make solar panels faster — at less than half the cost of anyone else — that is no reason why they should pass those cost savings on to the rest of the world.

Sure, their logic is easy enough to understand: With demand for solar panels skyrocketing from people with plenty of money to spend, they can sell the entire output of their factories for a premium price. Why should they only charge a reasonable profit and sell them for far less? In the world of business, dominated by accountants and the bottom line, it’s hard to argue with that kind of purely financial logic. But I can still condemn it, particularly when the real-world results of that self-serving logic are so clearly wrong and adversely affect so many people (not to mention the future of the world we all live in — including the Uni-Solar board of directors and their families).

At first I was hopeful that it was just a matter time… of Uni-Solar merely needing to ramp up production, get more factories built, develop a network of retail dealers, etc. and then they would bring the price down dramatically. But according to the Uni-Solar website,  their output of solar laminate has soared in just four years — from 28 million watts worth of panels per year in 2004 to a total production capacity of 182 million watts of panels per year in 2008. They also have plans to be cranking out 300 million watts worth of panels per year just two years from now. Yet the price of their product has not come down. In fact, it seems to have crept upwards a bit.

From the beginning, it was clear that Stan Ovshinsky did not invent an improved and much cheaper solar power technology just to make money — he already had plenty of that from other sources, like royalties on the NiMh battery he invented. No, he did not spend a big chunk of his own personal fortune to build that first factory just to get richer — he did it because he was knew that quickly providing affordable solar energy is the single most important key to turning back global warming, ending the oil wars and building a better world.

Isn’t that goal another kind of  ‘bottom line’ — one that should also be observed?

Now that the Ovshinsky solar panels are available for retail purchase, I find it heart-breaking not to be able to come out 100% behind them because they really are fantastic — everything Stan promised, except for the price. I’m sure many people will be perplexed by my attitude. After all, “The best products always cost more.” Right?

Certainly that’s what we’ve been told all our lives. But in truth that belief often does not reflect the actual manufacturing cost behind a high price tag — as Ovshinsky demonstrated when he built that factory in 2002 and mass-produced his solar laminate for less than half the cost of other solar cells. But since we consumers have been conditioned to believe that the better product must always carry a premium price, the Uni-Solar executives apparently see no reason not to conduct business as usual, forget all that jazz about saving the planet while we still have time, and simply charge whatever the market will bear.

Oh, sure, it all makes perfect financial sense. But in the long run… in the global framework… what their decision really means is that millions of people will NOT be able to put Stan’s low-cost solar panels on their roofs anytime soon.

And wasn’t that the whole point?

— Jim Beacon

Related links to this story —

A good overview of Stan’s work and the benefits of his solar laminate technology:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=51559

The history of the development of Stan’s first factory:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06332/741837-28.stm

A good series of additional Ovshinsky videos:
http://www.itsmynet.info/tag/Ovshinsky

The Uni-Solar website:
http://www.uni-solar.com/interior.asp?id=102

The best price on solar laminate panels I’ve been able to find so far:
http://www.affordable-solar.com/solar.panels.htm

Comments:  5 Comments »

Filed Under: Climate Change, Energy, Green Hype, Solar Power, The Politics of Green