A woody grass called Miscanthus is one of the biofuel feedstocks being examined.

Despite all the buzz around biofuels, commercial production has been slow to scale up. As a result, the EPA scaled back its goals for advanced biofuels earlier this year. Still, some Bay Area scientists recently made a breakthrough that could move us one step closer to a day when our cars run on fuels from plants.

The idea behind biofuels is pretty simple. Plants take sunlight and use that energy to make sugars. The biofuels industry wants to transform those sugars into fuel. That requires some molecular rearranging, so they’re looking to microbes to do the job.

At the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in Emeryville, e.coli is the microbe of choice. Researcher Greg Bokinsky shows me racks of glass tubes that are home to e.coli cultures that have been biologically engineered. They’ve created e.coli that munch on a woody plant called switchgrass.

If you’ve heard anything about biofuels, you’ve probably heard about ethanol that’s made from corn, which you can buy at gas stations today. But ethanol can’t be transported long distances because it corrodes pipelines. And using corn for fuel has also raised some concerns.

“Corn is used extensively to feed animals. Corn is also used for some food as well, human consumption. So we want to be very careful about using corn itself,” says Jay Keasling, CEO of JBEI.

Engineering Microbes

JBEI was founded 5 years ago with a $125 million grant from the Department of Energy. It’s a partnership between UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and other groups with the mission of creating biofuels from plants that aren’t used for food – also known as cellulosic biofuels.

“Switchgrass is one that gets mentioned a lot,” says Keasling. “Switchgrass is a native to much of the Midwest. It grows without a lot of water and fertilizer.”

But unlocking the energy inside switchgrass is no easy task. “Plants have evolved to be tough. There are beetles, there are fungi that want to attack them all the time and get access to those sugars. So they’ve evolved defense mechanisms,” he says.

The first line of defense is like a barbed wire fence. Plants protect their sugars with a tough material called lignin. Keasling’s team breaks through it using a liquid salt solution.

Once it’s gone, the sugars still have to be broken down further. Most companies use industrial enzymes to do that. But this is where Keasling’s engineered e.coli comes in.

“What we’ve done is we’ve gone to places like the rainforest in Puerto Rico and to compost piles. We’ve sequenced the organisms that are breaking down that biomass and then cloned those genes into e.coli,” Keasling says.

The e.coli break down the sugars for themselves, saving an expensive step in the process. Using the sugars, they produce fuels. “Really they’re pooping out fuels,” says Keasling. “And these are fuels that can be put directly into gasoline engines, diesel engines or jet engines.” These microbes are an exciting breakthrough for Keasling, since they could help bring down the cost of production.

Federal Goals Scale Back

The federal government was once excited about cellulosic biofuels, too. In 2006, former President George W Bush included them in his State of the Union address, saying “we'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switchgrass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within 6 years.”

Congress set up tax credits for cellulosic biofuels with a goal of seeing 500 million gallons produced in 2012. Since then, the industry has faced a harsh reality. The goal for next year has been cut back to just 12 million gallons.

“It was oversold. There was a lot of hype around it. It’s a tough problem. We can’t expect this to happen overnight,” says Keasling.

Keasling says if there’s anything that casts a shadow over biofuels, it’s the price of their biggest competitor. “If oil is under $100 a barrel, we’re not going to see many advanced biofuels on the market. They’re just not going to be able to compete. It’s virtually impossible,” he says.

Chris Somerville, director of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), agrees. “The costs are still not where we need them to be.” EBI is also run by UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, among other collaborators. It was started with a $500 million grant from BP.

Like JBEI, EBI’s mission is also engineering cellulosic biofuels. They’ve developed specially engineered yeast that eat feedstocks like miscanthus. “It’s going to be another 10 years before it really scales up. And it’s not because there’s a big problem. It’s just takes time to build and bring online big industrial facilities that are first of a kind.”

Companies, including BP, are now building commercial-scale biofuel plants. But the science is evolving so quickly, Somerville says it’s hard for companies to commit. “If you’re a company that has to lay down some hundreds of millions of dollars for a new facility and you look around and everyday, there’s new advances, you think, well maybe I’ll wait until next week and build a better facility.”

Although some in Congress are impatient over the progress of advanced biofuels, Somerville is confident that it’s just a matter of time before the industry scales up. “What we’re really trying to do is change the world. And we have this huge entrenched energy sector. And so there’s lots of entrenched players that don’t welcome change.”

And he says, if we care about addressing climate change, we won’t be able to do it without remaking the fuels that go in our cars.

One morning I realized that I could cut down my showering time by at least one minute if I could combine my shampooing and conditioning into one step. I went to a grocery store looking for a combination shampoo and conditioner that really works. I’m still looking, but I know they are out there.

A study commissioned by the California Department of Water Resources looked at water use in California single-family homes. The study determined that showering was the third largest user of water inside a home, after toilets, which are the biggest users, and washing machines the second biggest.

There are about 36-million people in California. Each person uses about 18 gallons of water each day for a shower. I’m not including baths, but baths generally use as much as or more water than showers. The average shower lasts about 9 minutes. Average flow rate is about 2 gallons per minute. If just 10% of us switched to a combination shampoo and conditioner, shaving at least a minute off of our shower time, it would save the state:

1/9 minutes x 18 gpm x 365 days x 3.6 million people = 2,628,000,000 gallons of water each year

Anywhere from 50%–75% of the water in a shower—depending on the preference of the person taking the shower—comes from the water heater. To heat a gallon of water from 60⁰F to 105⁰F takes about 375 Btu, which is the equivalent of 0.1 kWh. At a price of $0.12 per kWh, the cost of heating a gallon of water is about one cent. If half the water used in a minute of showering is heated water, and one out of ten of us switched to a combination shampoo and conditioner, the amount of energy we could save and the cost of that energy is about:

2.63-trillion gallons x 0.5 x 0.1 kWh = 130-million kWh of power saved each year

and

130-million kWh x $0.12 per kWh = $15.8-million saved each year

For an individual, switching to a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner could save more than 730 gallons of water a year and save about $4 in energy costs.

The window testing facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (Photo: LBNL)

Windows may not be as sexy as solar panels or electric cars, but they play a major role in energy efficiency. Buildings are responsible for 40% of the country’s energy use, which is why researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are trying to improve windows by making them smarter.

As Berkeley Lab engineer Howdy Goudey demonstrates in his lab, studying windows involves some pretty complex physics.

“So we use an infrared camera to study heat transfer in windows,” he says, pointing to a normal-looking video camera that senses heat instead of visible light. Goudey uses the camera to study how windows lose energy.

For the most part, windows simply aren’t good insulators. They leak heat in the winter when we want a warm house and they let heat in during the summer. Many homes still have single-pane windows, which were the name of the game in the 1940s and 50s when California was booming.

That changed when energy prices sky-rocketed in the 1970s. Double-pane windows became common. And then came double-pane windows with invisible coatings, which are twice as efficient. Today, they make up more than half of windows sold.

Measuring Low-e Windows

Goudey demonstrates how they work by turning on two heat lamps. “You’ve seen them in a diner keeping food warm," he says, putting them behind two identical-looking double-pane windows.

We stand in front of one window, which feels like standing in the sun. “But if you hold your hand to other one, compared to this one, it’s very dramatic,” Goudey says.

An infrared image of two windows during winter conditions, as seen from the inside of a room. The window on the right has a low-e coating while the window on the left doesn't. Warmer temperatures mean a better insulating window. (Image: LBNL)

The second window is cooler because it has a low-emissivity coating, or low-e, as its known. It’s an invisible layer of metal on the glass that acts as an insulator. And it does one more thing.

When sunlight shines directly through a window, it provides both light and heat. Most of us want light coming in, but heat is the last thing we want on a hot summer day. So, the coating on the window blocks the heat from the sun (in the form of infrared light), while letting in the visible light. This is known as solar gain. (Check out this guide for more on what to look for when buying windows.)

“If you have a few windows in a room with direct sun on them, its equivalent to running a little space heater. So it’s significant energy,” says Goudey.

However, on a cold winter day, the extra heat from sun would be helpful. “You’d actually like that solar energy to come in and help heat the space,” he says.

That’s why researchers are working to develop a “smart” or dynamic window that can change based on the weather or temperature.

Using Nanotechnology to Make Windows Smarter

At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, Delia Milliron grows tiny nanocrystals that will eventually become a window coating.

“Nanocrystals are very small,” says Milliron. “Way smaller than you can see with your eyes. And so that’s why when we spread them out in a coating on the window, you don’t see anything.”

Milliron’s coating is dynamic. In one setting, it lets in both the light and heat from the sun. But, apply an electric charge of a couple volts and the window blocks the heat from the sun, while still letting light in.

Ideally, these windows would be controlled by your heating and cooling system, which could adjust them based on the weather. Milliron and her team are currently working on the coating itself. Their next step is to build a full-scale prototype. Other companies also have similar kinds of dynamic windows in the works.

Windows as Energy Suppliers

This changes the conversation about windows, says Stephen Selkowitz, head of building technologies at Berkeley Lab. Before, windows were energy losers. Now, windows could actually make buildings more efficient. And that means big cost savings.

“If we add up all the energy and economic impact of windows in the US, it costs building owners about $40 billion a year. And I’d rather have the $40 billion in my pocket than sort of sending it out the window,” says Selkowitz.

Smart windows could start appearing in larger projects like office buildings next year and should be more widely available to homeowners in three to five years. But they could be twice as expensive as today's windows. Selkowitz expects the cost coming down as manufacturing ramps up.

“The biggest expense in replacing windows is often the labor of replacing the window. And if you already decided to put a new window in, the marginal cost of going to a much better window is almost always worth it,” he says.

So, while it may be only a few tech-geeks that spring for smart windows at first, Selkowitz says that leads the way for the rest of us – and for new buildings codes, where technology can have a much broader impact.

Daylight Saving Time just ended—along with energy savings. Photo: Jim Nix/Nomadic Pursuits.

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, the little hand on the clock ticked backwards one hour and Daylight Saving Time ended. Now we’re on Standard Time, which will last for about 4 months, until we click forward to Daylight Saving Time again in March. Daylight Saving Time (DST) started in Europe during WWI, to save energy, and has been used consistently in the US since 1966. DST was temporarily extended in 1974 and 1975, to save energy during the Arab Oil Embargo. It was extended in 1986 and again in 2007—DST now begins earlier in the spring and ends later in the fall than ever before.

When we turn the clock forward in the spring, we move an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening. The idea is that we save energy in the evenings, because we don’t need to turn our lights on for an extra hour. A 2008 report to Congress quantified the amount of energy saved after the 3-week extension of DST that began in 2007: 1.3 Tera Watt-hours, a decrease of 0.03% of the country’s annual energy usage. The amount of energy saved depends on where you live. You might actually use MORE energy during DST, if you need to run your heater on a cold, dark morning or if you come home at the end of a workday to a hot, stuffy house and need to run your air conditioner.

And that extra hour of daylight impacts more than just the energy bill, as reviewed in an article in National Geographic Daily News. People tend to be more active outdoors during DST. This is beneficial for tourism. Plus, crime rates drop because crime tends to happen in darkness. There are fewer traffic accidents because people aren’t driving home from work in the dark. And there are effects on human health: there is evidence that springing forward is linked with increased risk of heart attacks.

There are places in the world that don’t observe Daylight Saving Time; their inhabitants don’t have to deal with the bi-annual adjustment of their internal clocks. In areas close to the equator, day length remains relatively consistent throughout the year; there is not much daylight to save. Many tropical lands don’t observe DST, including Hawaii. (Neither do parts of Arizona—don’t ask me why). Russia observes DST year round, and in the summer turns its clock forward an hour anyway—Double DST. In 2001, in the wake of rolling blackouts, California requested to observe Daylight Saving Time year round, and observe double DST during the summer. This report details small but measurable energy savings, but the request was never approved.

Turning clocks back and forth doesn’t make the airlines happy, as they try to schedule international connecting flights that originate in one time zone and end in another, which may or may not be observing DST, depending on the day of the year. The whole idea of a standard time, at least in the US, began with the advent of the railroad. Before that, towns set their own time.

When I was a kid, I went to summer camp in New Brunswick, pretty far north, where summertime sunsets occur around 9:00. We would have “camp time”—we’d turn the clock back, so it would seem to get dark earlier in the evening. We could sing camp songs and cook bannock around a campfire, and still be in our bunks by 10. Time, I guess, is relative.

A PG&E SmartMeter on a Bay Area home. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

Smart meters have arrived for many Californians. More than 11 million have been installed by electric utilities in the state, with PG&E leading the way. The new meters digitally track a household's energy use. So, for the first time, we can see our daily and even hourly data online (with a one-day lag before it's posted).

Studies have shown that consumers reduce their energy use when they have access to this information. But as PG&E and other utilities have discovered, raw energy data doesn't mean much to most of us (including me in this week's QUEST story).

A number of clean tech start-ups and major corporations are jumping into this space, trying to bridge the gap between hardware (meter) and well, "soft"-ware (consumers).

Getting busy people to change their behavior is no simple task. So I spoke to two companies that have worked with PG&E and other utilities on this problem. Both Opower and Silver Springs Networks have designed the web portals that consumers see when they log into their utility accounts. They're designed not just to make us understand, but to inspire us to use less energy in our daily lives. I asked Dan Yates of Opower and Eric Dresselhuys of Silver Spring Networks what lessons they've learned.

Lesson 1: Keep Up with the Joneses

You might think that saving the planet would be enough of a reason to guilt us into energy conservation. But it turns out that our competitive streak is a bigger motivator.

The companies' websites show customers how their energy use compares to similar houses in their neighborhood. Don't worry – they're not publishing exactly how much electricity the Smiths use down the street. But the companies say knowing how you compare to others is a powerful motivation.

"It's not shame," says Yates of Opower. "It is really just recognizing an addressable opportunity to reduce usage. If I have a $250 utility bill, I don't really know how much I can save. But as soon as I know that a similar home in my neighborhood is paying $150, suddenly I feel like I have an addressable gap of $100 that I want to pay attention."

It's called "normative comparison" in the behavioral science world. And Dresselhuys agrees. "People don't like to lose. People start to wonder why they use so much more than their neighbor does and they start to dig into it."

Opower is rolling out new social features later this year that allow customers to compare themselves to friends on Facebook. "It puts the information in a context that's relevant to people. We've seen the power of the neighbor comparison and we're taking it to the next level with the friend comparison," says Yates.

Lesson 2: Provide Concrete Advice

Once you get people's attention, they need specific recommendations to take action on – and those recommendations need to be doable, say Yates. "People don't want data, they want insights."

"I always joke that my mom is my litmus test. And I know that she would never spend a minute looking at raw energy data. But what she would love to find out is that her freezer is very energy intensive and it would be worth it to buy a new one," he says.

Opower is working with PG&E to roll out a new web portal to customers by the end of the year. Using smart meter data, they can analyze a household's energy use and break it into four categories: heating, cooling, base load (like refrigerator and DVR) and everything else (like lighting and TV watching).

Heating and cooling makes up half of a home's energy use on average. Yates says reducing your heating and cooling load is one of the easiest ways to save energy and reduce your bill.

Lesson 3: Get Information Out There

"The average customer isn't getting up in the morning and checking their energy use data," says Yates. Emails, text messages and plain old snail mail are crucial for getting customers to pay attention.

Eric Dresselhuys says mobile devices, including iPhone apps, are making it much easier. "You can get a text if your electricity usage is getting high. Or the utility can send a message on peak days when they need customers to conserve energy," he says.

Letting customers know what their bill will be is also a good way to get their attention. "Today, getting your utility bill is like shopping for groceries all month long and never seeing a bill until the end of the month," he says.

Lesson 4: Set a Goal

Remember those gold stars in elementary school? It turns out we still like to be rewarded when we achieve something.

"What we see is that getting people to go after a goal, even 5%, has a big impact," says Yates. When they track a customer's progress towards a goal, Yates says it helps them save energy, no matter the size of the goal. "It's applicable even if you're at the very bottom of the pile and use a ton of energy," he says.

Lesson 5: Tell People When They Do Well but Don't Overdo it

Say you're super energy efficient, turning off lights and power strips in your house with unrelenting dedication. If your utility tells you that you're head and shoulders above everyone else, chances are you'll stop trying so hard. "This was a concerning outcome of earlier studies we did," says Yates.

"It's been seen in other scenarios. There was an anti-drinking campaign called ‘two beers is enough' at college campuses. There were non-drinkers who started thinking ‘if the campus is telling me two is enough, maybe I should drink more beer," he says.

"We've designed our reports so everyone has a goal in front of them," says Yates. It's always good to reward people for doing a good job, but Yates says they stay away from telling people if they're achieving way above expectations.

Lesson 6: The Smart Grid is Probably Smarter without Consumers

Home automation, as its known, is almost a holy grail for utilities. If technology can take care of energy conservation, then customers don't have do remember to do it.

The idea is that on peak days, when the utility needs to conserve energy, it can send a message to a customer's smart meter. The meter is connected to the thermostat over a Home Area Network, so the thermostat adjusts itself by a few degrees to conserve electricity. Customers can opt-out anytime.

Both the carrot and stick in this case comes in the form of a varied pricing plan. During hot afternoons or so-called "peak events," electricity would be more expensive. So the customer has the potential to save money by shifting their energy use later in the evening when power is cheaper.

Dresselhuys says they saw the potential of this in a pilot with Oklahoma Gas & Electric customers. "The more automation in the home, the higher the level of savings. Using that home automation about doubles the amount of money they can save," he says.

A "smart" demonstration home set up by Southern California Edison. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

California's electric utilities have installed more than 11 million smart meters in homes and businesses around the state. Which means for the first time, customers can see how much electricity they're using every hour, instead of once-a-month when the bill comes.

Consumers use less energy, studies have shown, when they can see that real-time data. But getting customers to pay attention in the first place may be the biggest hurdle.

Digital smart meters provide a stream of energy use data, which industry analysts say has the potential to remake our homes. That's evident just outside of Los Angeles, where Southern California Edison has set up a "smart" demonstration home.

"Above us we have photovoltaic solar panels to the left used for generating electricity and a solar thermal water heating system," says Cynthia Miller as she leads a tour of the "Smart Energy Experience."

"You might notice that we have some nice appliances," she says, pointing to the kitchen. The house is a green gadget-lovers dream. There's an electric car in the garage, LED lights, and a "smart" washing machine that communicates with the dryer.

"They're able to talk to each other so the washer can tell the dryer what its washing and the dryer can determine the optimal heat setting for that particular load of laundry," Miller says.

There's also a small screen in the kitchen that shows how much power the house is using at any given moment. Miller demonstrates what happens when you turn the toaster on. "And we'll see a jump here… and there we go. The jump happened and it's 1.7 kilowatts at 41 cents per hour."

The real intelligence of this house is its ability to communicate with the electric grid through its Home Area Network. So on a hot summer day, when SCE is cranking out power, the utility could send a message to your house that kicks your home into conservation mode.

"You notice my lights have dimmed, the ceiling fan turned on, the shades are coming down," says Miller. The thermostat turns up to 73 degrees and the air-conditioning shuts off. SCE would offer this as a voluntary program with financial incentives to sweeten the deal.

"You know, what we anticipate is the awareness is really going to drive a change in behavior for our customers because this information is compelling," says Miller.

Swimming in a Sea of Data

Of course, our homes today aren't quite as advanced. That's evident every time I log into my PG&E SmartMeter account.

My home energy use on PG&E's website.

My account shows charts of my home's daily and hourly energy use. But, for the average consumer like me, it doesn't tell me a lot. I see a few spikes in the chart where clearly my husband and I used more electricity, but what caused it? Neither of us could figure it out.

"For most people, including for me, that really is not very useful information," says Jim Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University.

Studies have shown that consumers reduce their energy use by as much as 10 percent when they have smart meter data like mine. Sweeney says they also studied that with a group of Google employees.

"The results have been very disappointing. In the first month, there was a significant reduction of energy use, but by end of three or four months, they were back to the same amount. This becomes an interesting toy or gimmick for people at first, but then they get tired of doing it and they revert right back to the old behavior patterns," Sweeney says.

No One Said Change Was Easy

Sweeney says using electricity in our homes is a lot like going grocery shopping in a store with no price tags. "There are flank steak and chuck steak and hamburger. But you've never seen a price tag ever in a grocery store. How good a shopper would you be with that little information?"

There are reasons to pay attention to energy, whether it's to reduce your carbon footprint or save money on your utility bill. But even though electricity may seem expensive, Sweeney says it's only a small part of the average household's income.

"We use 2.3 percent of our disposable personal income for electricity, natural gas and all other energy in the house. So if you have work hard to save that, you're probably not going to do it," he says.

Sweeney believes the key is to attach a price tag to the decisions we make the second we make them. So, if you turn up your air conditioning, the thermostat tells you how much more you're spending.

The technology to do that isn't far away. Today's smart meters already have the capability to talk to your house through a home area network. The California Public Utilities Commission also recently ruled that utilities must make customers' energy use data available to third-party companies that sell home energy management systems, if a customer purchases one.

But utilities have a long way to go to get customers to think this way. Only 20 percent of PG&E customers have set up online accounts. And according to one study, consumers interact with their utilities for only six minutes a year on average.

Clean Tech Companies Search for the Secret Recipe

"We have to get it right when we have those six minutes," says Dan Yates, CEO of Opower, a smart grid technology company that's trying to find the secret sauce of behavioral change. PG&E has hired Opower to redesign the website I was looking at. (Check out a preview here.)

"People don't want data, they want insights. So, I always joke that my mom is my litmus test. And I know that she would never spend a minute looking at raw energy data. But what she would love to find out is that her freezer is very energy intensive," he says.

Working with other utilities, Opower says their program has helped households cut their energy use by one to three percent and the change sticks. They do that by showing customers how their energy use compares to similar homes in their neighborhood. (More about what motivates us).

"It's not shame. It is really just recognizing an addressable opportunity to reduce usage. And then when you start to have people's attention, the key comes down to have relevant, targeting insights," says Yates.

Yates says for utilities that are used to dealing with hardware, working with behavioral science is a new challenge. But it's one with the potential to remake the way we consume energy. PG&E's redesigned SmartMeter website will be available by the end of the year.

The coal-fired San Juan Generating Station in New Mexico. (Photo: Matt Preusch)

"We currently have unit four offline, but units one, two and three are operating at full load," says Pat Themig, Vice President of Generation for PNM, the New Mexico utility that runs the plant.

"If you see the line where the stack is, everything going behind that is scrubber," he says, pointing past a towering smokestack.

Those scrubbers remove pollutants from the air emissions. But PNM has struggled to meet air quality standards and last month, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the plant to install new pollution control equipment. Those costs are generally passed on to the power plant owners, which, in this case, are utilities in Arizona, New Mexico and California. The San Juan Generating Station supplies power to several California cities and the Southern California Public Power Authority.

"People would be very surprised to know, particularly in Los Angeles, that historically, more of our electricity comes from coal fired power than from any other source," says Evan Gillespie of the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign.

"Several decades ago, Los Angeles made a number of bad bets on coal fired power plants – that that would be the way of the future. That has clearly turned out to not be the case," he says.

Gillespie is talking about one particular utility: the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP). It's the largest municipal utility in the country.

Challenges for Los Angeles Utility

"We get about 40 percent today from coal and that is all out of state coal," says General Manager Ron Nichols. It comes from two coal-fired power plants, the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Intermountain Power Project in Utah.

Historically, coal has been attractive to utilities for two reasons: it's reliable and cheap. "Coal tends to come around 5 to 6 cents a kilowatt hour. Our renewable portfolio today is around about 11 cents," says Nichols.

But that's changing, according to Nichols and most of the energy industry. Renewable energy is getting cheaper, while coal is getting more expensive due to stricter air pollution rules.

Two years ago, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa set a goal for DWP. "I'm directing the CEO of the Department of Water and Power to take every action necessary to reach these goals and eliminate the use of coal by 2020."

Meeting that 2020 goal isn't something DWP managers have committed to. That's because DWP's contract with the Utah coal plant isn't up until 2027. Nichols says ending it early is difficult because they have to negotiate with the plant's many owners.

But perhaps the bigger challenge is: that coal power has to be replaced with something else.

"Within a decade and a half, we're going have replaced on the order of 70 percent of our total power supply. And for a utility that thinks in decades, that's rocket fast," says Nichols.

DWP must generate a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, according to state law. But the problem with solar and wind power is that it fluctuates. The sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind stops blowing. Utilities often use electricity from natural gas power plants to fill in power gaps. But DWP has a problem there too.

Billion-Dollar Revamp for Natural Gas Plants

DWP relies on three coastal natural gas power plants, including the Haynes Generating Station in Long Beach. The 1800-megawatt power plant was built more than 50 years ago.

"If we walk out here, I'll show you how we get the ocean water," says DWP projects manager Nazih Batarseh. "For these old power plants, we use ocean water for cooling. And then we return it back into the ocean."

The technique is known as once-through-cooling. Everyday, almost 700 million gallons of seawater is pumped through power plant. That water holds fish larvae and plankton that die in the process. So last year, the State Water Resources Control Board ruled that coastal power plants must switch to a new cooling method over the next decade.

"It's a huge project. It is something that requires us to take plants down, plant by plant, and completely rebuild them. And those are plants that are key to our reliability," says Nichols.

Ron Nichols says rebuilding three natural gas plants will cost DWP $2.2 billion dollars. The utility recently convinced the water board to give it an extension to 2029.

Add that to investing in more renewable energy and moving away from coal power and it's a challenging time for the utility.

"It is a transition that every utility in the country will make says," Evan Gillespie of the Sierra Club.

Gillespie says Los Angeles's challenges are a snapshot of what utilities around the country will be facing as the country gradually puts national global warming rules in place. And he says those that embrace renewable energy first will benefit the most.

"A lot of these investments, while they create a lot of jobs, jobs that we desperately need, these are also investments that are going to modernize the utility. And I think the opportunity here in Los Angeles is to help provide that roadmap to help these other utilities around the country manage that transition," says Gillespie.

How one climate model breaks the planet into a 10,242-cell
spherical geodesic grid. Source: Prabhat, LBNL.

In my QUEST radio story this week, we learn about how faster supercomputers will help scientists run climate simulations. One of the trickiest aspects of that is dealing with clouds. To find out why, I sat down with Bill Collins, head of Climate Science Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

How important are supercomputers to climate change science?

We understand the climate by making observations using satellites and ice sheets. But the only crystal ball we know about, short of a time machine, is the supercomputer.

We started with by running simple climate models on supercomputers that included simulating the weather, rainfall, and carbon dioxide. In the last 20 years, the complexity of models has vastly increased. They now include ocean dynamics, glaciers, sea ice and the exchange of carbon dioxide between the ocean and the land, known as the carbon cycle. All of that has required an immense increase in computing power.

Climate models today simulate the atmosphere and carbon cycle by breaking up the planet into a grid and running the calculations in those segments, right?

Right, in modern climate models, we simulate the weather every two to five minutes and then average that to see how the climate is going to change across that grid. We simulate the weather in segments that are 25 kilometers wide.

Our goal is model something the size of San Francisco County, which is about 10 kilometers wide. Once we get to that scale, we're going to be able to provide local projections of climate change. We're honing in, but we're not there yet. We need bigger computers to get there.

The other reason is we'd like a higher resolution is that we're having to make educated guesses about certain things, like clouds. And those educated guesses are a source of uncertainty. Cloud systems can be very large or very small. We don't know how they work at the large scale, but we do know how they work at the small scale. So the trick is to simulate them at the small scale.

What role do clouds play in the climate?

Clouds stabilize the climate. They reflect sunlight, so they act like a sun shield. But they also trap heat from the Earth. They both heat and cool, but their net effect is to cool the planet. So the question is, what happens if climate change makes the cloud cover decrease or increase? Understanding how clouds will be affected by climate change has become a critical question.

Where clouds form in the atmosphere makes all the difference. High clouds reflect sunlight, but they're mostly very efficient blankets. Clouds low in the atmosphere aren't very good blankets. They act as a big sunscreen, reflecting energy.

How do climate models today treat clouds?

Models today represent clouds throughout statistical methods over large areas. That models their effect, but not really how they work. And you don't want to assume how they work now is how they'll work in the future. We want to get to a level of physical modeling of clouds.

To do that, we need to be able to resolve them at a small scale. The current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections use a 50 kilometer grid, but that's still not good enough. The scale we need to get to is about 10km or so. So once supercomputers can get us there, we'll be on a much more solid footing to predict how clouds might be affected by climate change.

If we tried to run climate models at that resolution now, it would simply take too long. The rule of thumb is that we'd like to simulate the climate a thousand times faster than it happens. So simulating three years in a day is our rule of thumb. If we increase our resolution from 50 kilometers down to 10 kilometers, that increases the computation demand by a factor of 125. At that point, you're doing 9 days in a day. We can't afford to do that and make the kind of projections that policymakers need in the next century.

Climate model resolution of California. Source: LBNL.

What will we learn about California with better climate models?

Temperature changes are happening faster in the mountains than in the valley. So climate change in California is locally specific. A big questions is how much snowfall we'll get in the future. That's going to hinge on what the temperature is at the peaks of the Sierras. So knowing how fast the temperature change is going to happen at the peaks is going to make a big difference to our water supply.

Local climate predications are really important for state and local policymakers. How should building codes be changed? How will local areas adapt? We need accuracy at the state and local level to pull off that planning.

If you can resolve clouds better in the future, will that change overall projections about climate change?

I'd be shocked if they did. The physics of climate change is really basic. We're not going to get out of global warming. We know based on the projections that we've had in hand for the last 20 years that the time to act is now. The longer we wait, the harder the solutions are to avoid dangerous levels of climate change.

What better resolution of clouds is likely to give us is a better idea of changes in rainfall. That's really important to our water supply, our forests, and our crops. Higher resolution will also give us better predictions of climate change extremes, like when droughts happen or the impact of downpours on rivers and dams.

We want to know about climate change that goes bump in the night. We're concerned about abrupt climate change – the type that occurs quickly over a large region, like the melting of the permafrost. We're also worried about extreme climate change – intense, highly-localized changes like heat waves, hurricanes and tornadoes. Both of those are stressors on society and the environment. They've been difficult to simulate since we haven't had the computing power. But now, thanks to advances, we're getting there.

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John Shalf of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab stands inside the Hopper supercomputer.

Whether its laptops or cell phones, computers are getting smaller for most of us. But for many scientists, they’re getting larger. Supercomputers have become a critical tool for analyzing complex problems like climate change.

But as supercomputers grow, so does their energy appetite. Researchers are trying to solve that problem by using a smaller, more pervasive technology.

Supercomputers have improved at a break-neck speed, especially if you look back to the Cray-1. In 1976, this six-foot tall tower of wires was the most powerful supercomputer the world had ever seen. It was installed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab for fusion research.

“If you needed an icon for a supercomputer, you would use the Cray-1,” says Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum, where the computer is spending its retirement. “It blew people’s minds. It was so powerful, so fast.”

Of course, in today’s terms, “It’s roughly equivalent to a first generation iPhone from Apple,” says Spicer.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Future of Supercomputers

The reason we don’t play Angry Birds on a supercomputer today is thanks to something called Moore’s Law.

“Moore’s law is a predication made by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors – that is the little switches that make up a computer – the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will double approximately every 12 months,” says Spicer. Moore later amended that timeline to every 18 months.

What that means is computer chips have gotten smaller and faster at an incredible rate over the last 40 years. Which leads us to a supercomputer known as Hopper.

Today's Supercomputers

“This is our new Cray XE6 supercomputing system,” says John Shalf, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. We’re standing next to row after row of tall black computer towers inside a building in downtown Oakland. The sound of the computer’s massive cooling system is deafening.

“You have to keep it cold or it’ll melt. We’ll have a puddle of chips on the bottom of the floor,” says Shalf.

Hopper is the eighth largest supercomputer in the world. And right now, it’s chewing on some complicated problems. “Number one here is particle accelerator design. We have fusion energy and then we also have laser plasma inertial fusion simulation,” says Shalf.

“Science has just really been revolutionized by the speed of computers,” says Kathy Yelick, associate director for computing sciences at Berkeley Lab. She says scientists use Hopper to simulate everything from black holes to climate models. There’s a special term to measure this supercomputer’s power: a petaflop.

“So how fast is that?” says Yelick. “Most people can do probably about one arithmetic operation per second if they’re pretty good.”

Now imagine asking a billion people on the planet to do one math problem per second. To get to Hopper’s speed, “we would need a million earths,” she says.

A million earths, each with a billion mathematicians – that’s how fast Hopper is. But it won’t be long before a faster model comes along. “Every four years we get a system that’s about 10 times larger than one we put in three or four years earlier” says Yelick.

According to Moore’s Law, those next generation supercomputers should be faster and more compact. But John Shalf says computer chips have hit a wall.

The End of Moore's Law?

“The problem is now we can’t make them go any faster. So we can cram more things on the chip, but if you make them go fast, it’s so hot they’ll melt.”

If chips themselves aren’t faster, supercomputers will simply have to add more and more of them to increase computing power. And that comes with a very big impact on the energy use.

Hopper uses around 3 megawatts of electricity – about as much as 2000 homes. But future supercomputers? “Projections say that at the end of the decade, we’d be at 100 megawatts if we continue,” says Shalf.

That’s enough power for a small city, about the size of Novato. The electricity bill alone would be roughly 100 million dollars a year.

“What that says is our current approach to doing supercomputing is dead end. And that we need to think of dramatically new ways to improve the efficiency of computing,” Shalf says.

That could be done with some very familiar technology. Cell phones have computer chips inside them, but not the same chips as desktop computers.

From Peter M. Kogge, "ExaScale Computing Study: Technology Challenges in Achieving Exascale Systems," Sept. 28, 2008

“For as long as they’ve existed, they’ve wanted a cell phone that would last longer, be less expensive,” says Shalf.

To do that, chips in cell phones have had to be smaller and more energy efficient. So Shalf says, why not build a supercomputer with chips that combine millions of these simple cell phone processors, specially designed for scientific jobs? In other words, use cell phone technology to make the world’s most powerful computers.

“We’re able to demonstrate an additional 80 times more energy efficiency than business as usual, and that gets us within striking distance of where we need to be to build a practical supercomputer,” he says.

Instead of a 100-megawatt supercomputer, it would be a three to ten megawatt computer. Whether or not it gets built depends on chipmakers like AMD and Intel, who would design the chips. But Shalf says a supercomputer with that power could make a big difference in climate change science.

“It enables policymakers to have the tools they need to make important decisions that have trillion dollar consequences. And that’s why you want to build a supercomputer that’s able to do this.”

Berkeley Lab hopes to use the supercomputer to better predict some of the trickier impacts of climate change – like changes in rainfall patterns, ice sheet melt and the effects of clouds.

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Almond shells at the West Biofuels biomass test plant in Woodland, California.

When you think of where energy comes from, you might picture a power plant or maybe wind mills. You probably wouldn't think of a pile of 12 tons of almond shells.

California is hungry for renewable energy. Solar and wind power have taken off thanks to the state's ambitious clean energy goals. But there's another way to generate electricity — by using organic material like agricultural and tree waste. It's known as biomass power.

Matt Summers is an engineer with West Biofuels at their test power plant near Sacramento. California, by the way, is the world leader in growing almonds.

"So we've got more almond shells than anybody else. And you know, we know some companies that handle almond shells and they're always looking for somewhere to take them," says Summers.

Listen to the QUEST radio story How Green Is Biomass Energy?

But where some see a waste product, Summers sees an energy source.

"So this is the heart of the West Biofuels process," he says, pointing to a tower of industrial equipment that turns almond shells into electricity. First, the waste, or biomass, is fed into a reactor.

"We call it reforming, so we're re-forming what's biomass, what's almond shells into smaller particles that are gases," says Summers, describing their gasification technology.

The gas that's produced is a lot like natural gas, so it goes to an advanced generator where it's burned to produce electricity.

But this is where biomass is different from other renewables. The generator produces air pollution, unlike, say, a solar farm. So Summers and his team use pollution control technology to meet California's air quality standards.

Still, despite the emissions from biomass plants, many say there are big benefits to using waste as an energy source.

"Waste is pretty green," says Jim Boyd, a member of the California Energy Commission. "There's enough material out there to make thousands of megawatts of electricity."

Matt Summers of West Biofuels stands next to their fuel source.

There are a lot of unused energy sources out there, Boyd says, like construction debris and orchard cuttings. Biomass energy also has one big advantage over other renewables – reliability. Wind and solar power are variable since the sun and wind aren't available all the time.

"And instead of just thinking about building more natural gas plants to fill the void, we could utilize biomass plants because they are seven by 24 once you get them up and running," says Boyd.

But while other renewables are booming, biomass is on the decline in California. After dozens of plants were built in the 1980s, today, only a handful of new plants are being proposed. In 2009, biomass provided about two percent of the state's electricity.

"There's a great infatuation with wind and solar and very rare references to biomass and some of us are trying to turn that around a little bit," Boyd says.

One problem is simply cost. Biomass facilities need tons and tons of material and trucking it in from around the state isn't very economical.

The other issue gets back to the concern of whether biomass energy is really as green as supporters say. There's the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from biomass plants. Another controversy is over one particular fuel source: trees.

All those years of Smokey Bear and fire suppression in California have created very dense forests – which are at high risk for fires. Both private and public land managers have been trying to reduce that fuel load.

"In a lot of cases you'd do thinning operation where you take out some of the trees, usually the smaller trees, the less valuable trees," says Bill Stewart, a forestry specialist at the University of California – Berkeley.

Stewart says most of the material removed from forests is either burned or left to decay. So there's a lot of interest in using forestry waste in biomass plants.

But Debbie Hammel of the Natural Resources Defense Council says, "I think if you're talking about waste, it's important to define what you mean."

"If you take too much of that residue out of the forest, you're going to have an impact on the forest floor, the fertility of the soil, erosion and potentially wildlife habitat."

Hammel says there's a major debate over how much thinning is good for a forest. So, she worries that a larger biomass industry would create incentives to over-harvest forests. That's why Hammel says not all biomass is equal – and why waste like almond shells should be used before forest cuttings.

"There is a role for biomass done right, but it's a smaller role I think than some people imagine," says Hammel.

Looking ahead, Hammel says the next thorny issue is calculating the greenhouse gas emissions from biomass plants, which can be tricky since the fuels come from a number of sources. That's something the federal Environmental Protection Agency is reviewing now.

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