Amory Lovins Keynote speaker 3rd APS Conference on the Physics of Sustainable Energy

[kristopher]

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/meetings/energy/index.cfm


Third Conference on the Physics of Sustainable Energy

Using Energy Efficiently and Producing It Renewably
March 8-9, 2014
University of California, Berkeley

This conference will be an intense weekend short course to enhance the background of private and public sector professionals, researchers and students active in energy affairs now or in the future. The content will be centered in the physical sciences, but will reach substantively into related fields important to energy policy and practice. The conference is sponsored by the APS Forum on Physics and Society, the APS Topical Group on Energy Research and Applications, and the American Association of Physics Teachers. As with the two previous conferences on this theme, in 2008 and 2011, both also held on the UC Berkeley campus, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) will publish the proceedings as a sourcebook. The motivation for this third conference is the continued importance of this energy research and the need to update faculty and educate students either to work in the field or to have an appreciation for the key issues.

Organizers
Daniel Kammen, Energy and Resources Group and Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley
Robert Knapp, Physics and Sustainable Design, Evergreen State College
Barbara Levi, American Institute of Physics

Program
Saturday, March 8
(Day sessions in North Gate Hall 105, UC Berkeley campus)

Welcome and Overview:
Daniel Kammen (UC Berkeley) and Rob Knapp (Evergreen State College)

Session A:
Global and Regional Issues
Global Carbon Balance – Ken Caldeira, Carnegie Institution
Energy and the Global Poor – Daniel Kammen, UC Berkeley

Session B:
Renewable Energy Sources
Solar Upconversion: Giving Photovoltaics the Green Light – Jennifer Dionne, Stanford
Biofuels: status and prospects – Chris Somerville, Energy Biosciences Institute, UC Berkeley
Wind Energy – John O. Dabiri, Caltech
Synergies of Energy and Information Technologies – Eric Brewer, UC Berkeley

Session C:
Efficient and Transformed Uses Part I
Buildings: Lower Energy, Better Comfort – Gail Brager, UC Berkeley
Energy Use and the Information Economy – Jonathan Koomey, Stanford
Industrial Ecology – Valerie Thomas, Georgia Tech
The Rebound Effect – Tilman Santarius, UC Berkeley


Banquet Keynote Speaker – Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

Sunday, March 9
Session D:
Sustainability and Nonrenewable Energy
ARPA-E: searching for breakthroughs – Arun Majumdar, Google, Inc
Displacing Oil with Gas and Biofuels – Vikram Rao, Research Triangle Energy Consortium
Topics in Nuclear Power – Robert Budnitz, LBNL

Session E:
Efficient and Transformed Uses Part II
Low Carbon Power Systems – Duncan Callaway, UC Berkeley
Toward Profitable Oil-free Transportation – Amory Lovins, RMI
Batteries – George Crabtree, Argonne National Laboratory

Session F:
From Lab to Market
Solar Development Roadmap – Dan Kammen,UC Berkeley
Government Initiatives – Cyrus Wadia, LBNL
Private Sector Initiatives – Todd Strauss, Pacific Gas & Electric
Session G: Non-Energy Climate Initiatives
Adapting to Climate Change – Ann Kinzig, Arizona State Univ.
Geoengineering – Alan Robock, Rutgers University

Final Comments / end of main conference

[bananas]

1. and Dan Kammen, Alan Robock, etc - k&r! nt

[caraher]

2. Yup

I'll be there - I'm really looking forward to it. I learned a lot when I attended 3 years ago... They've also added tours for people hanging around the Monday after; those are full, but I got my requests in on time so I'll also be spending time at:

Energy Biosciences Institute (UC Berkeley campus): The Berkeley facility of a 10-year corporate/university/national lab project pursuing two primary areas of bioenergy development – cellulosic fuels (derived from non-food plants) and fossil fuel microbiology.

FlexLab (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab): Large-scale testbeds for green building integrated systems, including realistic heat, light, comfort and energy saving equipment at whole-room or whole-building scale.

Grid Alternatives (Oakland): a nonprofit that brings solar technology to communities that would not otherwise have access, providing needed savings for families, preparing workers for jobs in the solar industry, and helping the environment.

Natel Energy (Alameda): A start-up developing low head hydropower as a source of clean baseload power, using vertically moving rather than rotating vanes.

[kristopher]

3. I wish I could be there.

Don't forget to take notes for those less fortunate.

You --->

[caraher]

4. Day 1 quick summary...

In reverse-ish order...

Lovins basically gave a summary of "Reinventing Fire." (He'll speak tomorrow as well...) In a nutshell, his vision for 2050 includes car transport via lightweight carbon-fiber shell eVs, connectable, robust and more stable microgrids based on renewables, and lots of efficiency measures (e.g. better windows). One great emphasis in his intro was that we need not and ought not to rely on the federal government and other largely ineffectual bodies for leadership in energy transformation; another was that making the changes he recommends result in substantial net financial savings over business as usual (and he outlined many projects he consulted on as evidence for his expertise in assessing costs, payback times, etc.). He addressed "intermittency" by pointing out that large thermal power stations have roughly 10% downtime, and this routinely takes ~1 GW out of production for periods up to months with no advance warning, which he contrasted with, for instance, accurate wind forecasting on the timescale of a week or so. He had little to say about nuclear beyond arguing that it's simply not economically viable and that, for the time and effort to build such a "cathedral" of centralized energy, one could build manufacturing capacity for solar PV whose capacity could exceed that of the nuclear plant many times over before the latter came online.

Talks were in a slightly different order... a few things I thought were interesting included John Dabiri's talk on wind. His research argues that the effectiveness at the level of a wind farm (as opposed to an individual turbine) could be an order of magnitude higher for small vertical axis turbines than large horizontal axis turbines, despite lower wind speeds at low altitude and smaller single-turbine efficiency. His research suggests something like 25 W/m^2 should be achievable by a farm of VAWTs, vs. 2.5 W/m^2 for HAWT wind farms, and should offer substantial improvements in cost, ease of maintenance and even lifetime. Much of this comes because of turbine-turbine interactions; in particular, the turbulent flow in the wake of a HAWT causes affects performance and causes substantial stresses.

From Tilman Santarius' talk, I was a bit surprised that rebound effects are still so poorly understood (though I do recognize they are a challenging thing to model).

Gail Brager's talk outlined a number of significant ways conventional building design gets occupant comfort wrong, mainly through an obsession with "thermal monotony" and a tendency to overcool in summer and overheat in winter. The engineering standards for comfort are based largely on research on "white college students" and is of limited applicability to the population at large, whether in the US or the world. Her group is looking into ways to make the emphasis be less on heating and cooling spaces and instead giving occupants more agency with things like foot warmers, desktop fans and battery-powered chairs that can heat or cool the user.

Ken Caldeira's talk was quite good, especially toward the end. Perhaps the most amusing exchange came when he was asked how much removal of CO2 would it take to get climate "back" to mid-19th century conditions, and he said, ""If you want to go back to where we were, you have to undo what we did." He puts climate response at roughly 2 mK per gigaton C and now says that, contrary to what he and many others have often said in the past, the effects of CO2 increases should be discernible on a time scale of closer to 10 than 30 years (based on some modeling of climate response to a large "pulse" of CO2. One hopeful part of his talk was that he's really not at all worried about what we do with existing energy infrastructure, as most of it will need to be replaced due to age, if nothing else, on a relatively short time scale, meaning that the emissions we really need to worry about are those associated with the infrastructure we've yet to build.

Dan Kammen's main talk was about bringing electricity to the 1.4 billion or so people worldwide with no access currently. He described the vast marginal benefits of providing even just enough to replace fuel-based lighting with solar-charged LEDs and cell phone charging, and discussed a few case studies of expanding access to electricity.

And now I must sleep...