Oregon Geothermal: Tapping the Earth’s Power

The earth’s crust is in pieces. Huge continental-size plates. Along the seams, the crust thins and fractures. Mountain ranges form. Volcanoes erupt. The heat from inside the earth flows closest to the surface where these plates come together. Mount St. Helens is just one volcano in the Ring of Fire along the periphery of the plate beneath the Pacific Ocean. Oregon’s place on the Pacific Rim assures a resource of geothermal energy. Groundwater that flows into cracks and fissures of hot rock can carry the heat to the surface. A geothermal resource has three distinct applications: direct use of hot water, ground-source heat pumps for heating and cooling of buildings, and electric power generation.

Throughout the millennia, people have immersed themselves in hot springs. The minerals dissolved in the water at depth and carried to the surface have restorative properties. Belknap, Breitenbush, and Cougar are a few of the resorts people can enjoy in the Cascades. There are many more hot springs found just off the highway in Oregon. A geothermal resource near a town can provide hot water for heating buildings, greenhouses, and farming tropical fish.

Portland boasts the first commercial building in the United States to incorporate ground-source heat pumps.

Focus The Nation: Renewable Energy

Focus The Nation: part one. from Shawn Patrick Higgins on Vimeo.

Crosstown Traffic: I can pay for that!

The Value-priced Express Lane

Cars are great and convenient, but there’s room for improvement. The carpool lane, for instance. There’s plenty of room there, but what if I’m driving without a passenger? The extra lane could do extra-duty as a value-priced express lane.

I’m on my way to work, say driving on I-26 from Beaverton into downtown Portland. Up ahead traffic is at a stand-still. I look to the electronic display above the toll entrance. Four dollars. To get to the meeting on time, this morning it’s worth it. A double mocha Americano with extra whip? Heck, I’m going to drive in the express lane. Click! A sensor camera photographs my license and windshield. I’ve got two weeks to pay the toll at participating grocery stores. I don’t mind. I’m making good money, and I know the four dollars goes directly to pay for the new lightrail and overhead wires for the cities’ electric bus fleet. Of course, I plan to sell my car and afford myself one of those new cars: electric vehicles have free access to express lanes.

Seeing as people will pay for convenience – especially when you’re talking traffic jams – an express lane can pay for itself, and create a revenue stream to finance a more sustainable transportation infrastructure. The pricing would be dynamic: reduced when traffic is light, and as high as twenty dollars when traffic is at a standstill.

The Smart Grid Begins with a Simulation

It’s expensive to install networked meters. Given the rapid turnover of products as new technology develops, it’s an expense that utilities are not willing to require of their customers. The test market for Smart Grid technology is in wealthy towns like Boulder, Colorado where citizens are willing to afford the developmental costs of energy efficiency.

One way to get Portland involved is a website that simulates the home energy dashboard of a Smart Grid. Data streams from appliances, lights, and room temperatures allow the home owner or building manager to see where they are wasting energy. The website displays the fluctuating price of electricity as demand rises and allows customers to plan their use of electricity for off-peak hours. The dashboard tracks how changes in behavior or structural improvement affects energy use. Networked to a thermometer outside the building, the energy dashboard could acclimatize the building’s temperature to the weather.

Individual consumers interact with the Smart Grid through their personal computer. The same infrastructure of Xcel’s grid in Boulder can be made available as a simple website tutorial-game in which you play to maximize your savings. Let’s experiment with the technology on a simulation website before spending millions to install it systemwide. PacificCorp and PGE can best implement new technology when the customers demand it after having experienced it for themselves, virtually.

Straddle Structure Homes

Condos and apartment houses are one way to increase urban density. In established residential neighborhoods near downtown Portland, people are invested in their home and have no interest in deconstructing it to build condos. Rather than deconstruction of valued single family homes, the property owner could consider the option to build a structural-steel support straddling the home and serving as the foundation for a second home directly above.

What if home owners could sell the property above their house? Within a few miles of downtown Portland, the city could allow innovative zoning to allow straddle-structure homes in residential neighborhoods to encourage dense urban growth.

The SunEdison Equation: No need to own the installation, just buy the juice.

You’re in business, and you have a large commercial warehouse the size of New Seasons. You are ready for solar power. The cost of installing photovoltaic panels on your building runs in the tens of thousands. You’ve got a budget for the next five years, and a distant ten, but in no way is your company prepared to pay for twenty years of electricity up front. Enter Jihar Shah, the entrepreneurial developer of SunEdison.

Shah got the solar power business into the energy business. Well-capitalized investors, banks, and corporations with government subsidies (not to mention the cost of procuring and shipping fossil fuel to your friendly neighborhood power plant) develop and own coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear plants. Public utilities sell electricity to customers.

Shah created SunEdison to apply energy industry practice to solar power. SunEdison clients Whole Foods, Staples, and Ikea pay nothing for their solar systems. They sign a power-purchasing agreement (PPA) and agree to buy electricity at a set price for at least 10 years. This helps establish price certainty in a volatile market and reduce the carbon footprint. Once SunEdison has customer commitment in PPAs, they borrow money to build solar systems with PPAs as collateral.

On March 7, 2008, SunEdison purchased Renewable NRG, a solar company in Portland.

Latent Demand

New roads do not relieve traffic. New lanes fill with people who previously chose to avoid busy roads. Wise city planning solves long-term transport problems. There can be high-density zoning near large transit stations. Public transit supports large employment clusters. If business parks locate in the exurbs, they should be within foot or bicycle distance of the rail stop. Public transport also connects suburban homes to downtown businesses. The rail connection to the airport saves money on long-term parking. Personal transport is an expensive convenience and public utilities provide for lower-income populations.

Public transport is a necessary convenience for visitors from other countries who can’t rent a car.

See Good for great ideas!

Yellowline Extends on Replacement Bridge to Vancouver, WA

Jeff Mize, a reporter at The Columbian in Clark County WA, covers the Columbia River Crossing. Here’s a section from his article, “Two Sides Clearly Divided on Bridge”:

Comparing options Crossing officials have come up with a matrix showing the different implications of an eight-, 10- or 12- lane bridge.

A 12-lane bridge would result in less congestion, fewer accidents and less traffic diverting to the I-205 bridge than the other alternatives. A 12-lane bridge, unlike the other two options, would not create unsafe “hot spots” at freeway interchanges or cause clogged freeway traffic to spill over onto local streets.

On the downside, a 12-lane bridge would cost $100 million more than a 10-lane project and $180 million more than an eight-lane option.

Metro Council President David Bragdon said officials agree on a number of issues, including the need to replace the bridge and to extend light rail into Vancouver. On the day a light-rail line opens connecting Portland and Vancouver, it would have the highest ridership of any route in the Portland-Vancouver area, he said.

“This is a very important project to do,” he said. “And it’s a very important project to do it right.”

For Bragdon, doing the project right means making sure there are no “unintended consequences,” namely triggering more sprawl by building a bridge with twice as many lanes as the current crossing. Read the full article.

Portland Steps Forward: Building the 21st Century Transportation Infrastructure

The Columbia River Crossing proposes spending $4.2 billion dollars to build a 12 lane [cars] mega-bridge. The problem is congestion, greenhouse gas emission, and job creation. The best route to solve these problems and build a sustainable transportation infrastructure is passenger rail with parking hubs at major work/live destinations in downtown Vancouver, Hayden Island, and Portland.

“‘The temptation is much greater to bail out the automobile industry,’ said Anthony Perl, an urban studies professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the author of ‘Transport Revolutions.’ He advocates electrical mass transit powered by renewable energy as the solution to our twin problems of climate change and energy.

“The United States once led electric rail technology, stringing interurban rail lines across Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Americans abandoned many of the lines and stalled any new rail development with the coming of the Great Depression and the rise of the automobile.”

For the whole story see: Obama’s stimulus plan offers opportunity for Chicago mass transit by Chris Gray and Alexander Reed, Dec 11, 2008

The infrastructure spending written into the stimulus bill is Portland’s opportunity to quell congestion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and build out the clean tech industry. The potential to power an electric passenger rail with energy generated from renewable resources of wind, solar, wave, and geothermal will create the synergy necessary to mitigate cost.

Future Past: Looking Ahead from the 70s

“This was the aborted response to the last oil crisis:

From an informative article by Alan Drake on The Oil Drum.