M9 Solar Flare of January 23 2012; credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory

Let's see, what's the weather like right now (sticks finger into the air). Speed, 1.2 million miles per hour, density 1.1 protons per cubic centimeter, temperature 200,000 degrees Celsius. Sound a bit extreme? Surely climate change hasn't made things THAT batty. As a matter of fact, conditions have calmed down in the last several hours.

Okay, I'm not talking Earth weather—if I were, we'd all be dead, fast. I'm talking space weather, and a subsidence in its condition following a powerful solar flare whose ejecta struck Earth on Tuesday, causing a strong geomagnetic storm, and some pretty Northern and Southern Lights.

The flare in question, associated with the big sunspot numbered 1402, erupted on January 23rd, launching a coronal mass ejection–a "cantaloupe" of plasma that makes Earth look like a grape. Rated as an M9-class flare, it packed umph just shy of what's necessary for adult "X-class" flaredom, the most power kind.

When it reached us the megablob of plasma struck Earth's magnetic field, causing the geomagnetic storm and a minor list of annoyances (communications interference, for the most part, and some reported concern to an electrical grid operator). On the showier side of solar activity, the storm generated spectacular auroras in high latitudes.

The Sun's magnetic activity—the source of disturbances like flares and oft-associated coronal mass ejections—has been on the rise for the last couple of years, heading for a forecasted peak in activity ("Solar Maximum") in 2013. We're in "storm season," with respect to the Sun's 11-year magnetic activity cycle, so we can expect more, and stronger, flares and geomagnetic storms in the next year or two to come.

Back when I was growing up (1960's) I learned that space is a vacuum, void of the gases we find in Earth's atmosphere. It was a stark picture of emptiness, at least as this child comprehended the data. Sure, sunlight and starlight streams through that vacuum, but other than that, Dr. Science explained, if I took one space-step outside of my personal Mercury space capsule without protection, I'd suffocate and my blood would boil and freeze at the same time—not to mention that I'd get cooked by the dangerous ultraviolet and X-ray radiation shining from the Sun.

Okay, close the Time-Life science series book entitled "Space" and open an astrophysics textbook of my 1960's youth era, and I would have learned that there's more to the vacuum of space than nothing.

Our Sun, a gargantuan fusion bomb that consumes a mass of hydrogen comparable to that of the entire human race each second, continually spews more than just sunlight into the space around it. Hot, electrically charged gas (plasma), mostly hydrogen nuclei and electrons, blended with an accompaniment of magnetic fields, blow outward from the Sun's surface and atmosphere all the time.

That's the solar wind, and its conditions, whether normal or stormy, is what makes space weather. So when you're curious about the weather conditions in the space surrounding Earth and its protective magnetic field, poke your finger skyward and extend your arm—oh—about 50,000 miles…or just go to a space weather website like Spaceweather.com.

A Riverine Command Boat running on a 50/50 blend of algae-based and traditional fuel.

Here's a question: Who’s the largest energy user, by far, in the United States?

Answer: the U.S. Military. Its annual energy bill runs about $15 billion dollars a year, which is why the Department of Defense has developed a keen interest in finding other ways to meet its energy needs, including investing in alternative energy.

Traditionally, the military has been deeply dependent on fossil fuels, which power its helicopters and ships, as well as over a hundred thousand diesel generators that keep tents air conditioned and batteries charged in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

But on the battlefield, oil can be a dangerous liability. Last year there were more than a thousand attacks on US military fuel convoys. US Navy Secretary Ray Mabus says in order to be an effective military force, you have to know what your own vulnerabilities are.

"One of the ones that rose to the top was our dependence on fossil fuels," says Mabus.

The Price — and Opportunity — of Instability

Fossil fuels aren't just highly flammable, they can also require doing business with the very countries the US is often in conflict with. Political instability often leads to price spikes. Take, for example, the recent conflict in Libya.

"Libya is a big oil producer, but not the biggest one," says Mabus. "But simply the disruption in Libya caused the price of oil to go up almost $30 a barrel."

That's no small hiccup for an organization that consumes 300,000 barrels of oil a day.

Even an increase of just one dollar a barrel can force a major reshuffling of funds, says Mabus. "Every time the price of oil goes up a dollar a barrel it costs the Navy an extra $31 million in fuel costs."

"The only place we have to get that is from our readiness account," he says, "so [there are] fewer flying hours, less training."

This sensitivity to price spikes has sent the military in what might seem an unlikely direction: It’s become a major investor in alternative energy.

Phyllis Cuttino directs the clean energy program for the Pew Charitable Trusts and is author of a recent report on the military and alternative energy, From Barracks to the Battlefield: Clean Energy Innovation and America's Armed Forces.

She says whatever the military can do to reduce fuel use, it's doing. According to the report, over the last four years the military has tripled its investment in technologies like biofuels, solar panels, and electric vehicles, to $1.2 billion a year.

"The Department of Defense is not doing all this work in biofuels and efficiency, for example, because they are green, or because they are environmentalists," says Cuttino. "They are doing it because they want to increase effectiveness and reduce costs."

New Partnerships in Silicon Valley

That’s been a boon for people like Bob MacDonald, the CTO and co-founder of Skyline Solar, in Mountain View, California. Skyline's solar arrays are relatively low-tech, made from off-the-shelf components and are easy to assemble.

Bob MacDonald helped get Skyline Solar its $1.58 million military contract

A few years ago, MacDonald saw that the military was looking for clean tech companies like his to partner with. He flew to Washington to present Skyline's product. He says it was a bit intimidating.

"There was a lot of brass," he recalls, "literally, a lot of stripes and shoulder adornments around the table. I kept it simple. Sir, yes sir."

MacDonald soon realized his audience had a lot in common with the venture capitalists he does business with out here in California. The military officials liked that Skyline's components are easy to source and that they're portable. An added benefit is the stealth effect, says MacDonald: Solar panels are a lot quieter than a diesel generator.

Macdonald has a $1.58 million contract to try out his arrays on two US military bases, one in Texas, one in Southern California. If the pilot is successful, he’d like to see his systems operating overseas, powering remote bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Solazyme, in South San Francisco, is also benefiting from military investment.

The company's algae-based biofuel is being tested in Seahawk helicopters, as well as Navy vessels in Virginia and other parts of the country. CEO Jonathan Wolfson says the $8 million military contract is less than a quarter of his company's revenue, but it sends a powerful message to other investors.

Jonathan Wolfson is CEO of Solazyme, which produces algae-based biofuel for the US Navy

"I mean, eight years ago we were five people with a completely delusional dream," says Wolfson. "So go from that to [being partnered with] an entity like the military, which is very, very disciplined and demands an enormous level of discipline out of its suppliers. It does really good things to help a company like Solazyme."

Bridging the "Valley of Death" Between Innovation and the Market

Wolfson says by the sheer force of its purchasing power, the military can transform a technology from cutting edge to mainstream. He points out that it's happened before.

"People forget that the Internet they go log onto every day was funded by the Department of Defense. They forget that the entire semiconductor industry was [built up] by they Defense Department. They were the ones that got the first orders and got the first plants built."

The Solyndra Effect

Lately, in Washington, the words “clean technology” have become a political flashpoint. At a September 22 hearing focused on the bankruptcy of Fremont-based solar panel maker Solyndra. Issa, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee railed against the Obama Administration's investments in alternative technology.

"The Obama Administration has systematically waged a war on carbon-based energy in pursuit of new green energy," said Issa. "Jobs have not been produced in a sustained fashion or in the number promised and bills of taxpayer dollars have done little to truly stimulate the economy."

Issa and other Republicans have argued government should avoid investing in clean tech all together. And this has put Navy Secretary Mabus in a curious position: A high level military official turned into one of clean tech’s most vocal defenders. He says as the head of the US Navy, that’s his job.

"We’re doing this to become a better military, to make us better war fighters. We’re doing this as a matter of security, of energy security and national security. The fundamental purpose of our doing this is so that we will be better at the mission that the US has given us."

Mabus says his goal is that by the year 2020, the Navy and Marine Corps will get at least half its fuel from non fossil-fuel sources.

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.

Extreme ultraviolet composite solar image from NASA's SDO.
Credit: NASA/SDO

"If that was a scoop of ice cream, what kind would it be?" I asked the 7-year-old girl visiting our 20-inch telescope's dome.

A pensive look crosses her face, as if she were standing at the counter of an ice cream parlor looking at the list of flavors. "Mint chocolate chip," she decides.

The girl was looking at a new video display recently installed in the observatory at Chabot Space & Science Center, which shows up-to-the hour, time-compressed movies made from the spectacular solar imagery coming out of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

And it really does resemble a big, luminous, writhing ball of colorful ice cream (though what "writhing ice cream" is, I'm not certain; use your imagination).

Kept up-to-date by an Internet feed from Lockheed's Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, the display at Chabot is showing visitors visions of our Sun unlike anything that has preceded it.

SDO was launched last year, and since then has been capturing high resolution, multi-wavelength visible and extreme-ultraviolet imagery at very frequent intervals. Its array of extreme-ultraviolet imaging telescopes (the "AIA" instrument) captures the energetic UV emissions from the Sun's hot atmosphere, revealing in extraordinary detail the Sun's busy and complicated magnetic activity: hot active regions, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, magnetic loops and arcs, and prominences.

The various images taken at the different wavelengths are blended together into an exquisitely colorful, nuanced, and delicious movie of a day of the life of the Sun (and with about 24 hours of images compressed into a few seconds, you really can see a day of its life!).

SDO was built to give us a much more detailed picture of what makes the Sun tick as we enter the 24th Solar Cycle, which started in the last few years. A Solar Cycle is the period over which solar magnetic activity rises, climaxes, and falls again. Solar Cycle 1 started around the year 1755, and in the intervening centuries we've been through 23 cycles, which have averaged pretty reliably at about 11 years long each. (Solar Cycle 1, by the way, wasn't the first; that's just when they started numbering them, shortly after their discovery.)

Over the past few years, the Sun has been pretty quiet; our solar telescopes at Chabot have seen few sunspots (markers of regions of magnetic activity), and even the Sun's energetic atmosphere has been more or less quiescent, with only the occasional prominence or filament ("clouds" of cooler gases confined by solar magnetic fields) visible through special "Hydrogen-Alpha" filters.

But that's all changing now. Through our visible light telescopes, beautiful groups of sunspots have started making regular appearances, crossing the Sun's face as the Sun slowly rotates in space. Sunspots appear darker than the surrounding visible surface of the Sun, being a couple of thousand degrees cooler—but they are still quite bright; if we blocked off all of the Sun's light except that shining from an average sized sunspot (average meaning Earth-sized), it would appear as bright as the Full Moon on a clear night.

Through our Hydrogen-Alpha telescopes, prominences and filaments are becoming far more numerous, and more amazingly huge than over the past few years of minimal solar activity.

And the SDO movie display is revealing to us a great deal of activity—hot spots of magnetic mayhem spouting from within the Sun and surging into the atmosphere. With the peak of solar activity of Solar Cycle 24 expected to occur sometime in 2013, we're in for at least a couple of years of ever-increasing fireworks on the Sun, with all the related space weather storms, auroral light shows, and cell phone interference that comes with it.

What flavors of Sun are we serving then? Well, we have vanilla of course, served up by our little Sunspotter visible light telescopes—vanilla is my favorite ice cream…. And the Hydrogen-Alpha scopes scoop burgundy cherry and bubblegum in nice spoon-sized portions (bubblegum not your taste? Try some of ours…).

Imagery from the old and reliable SOHO satellite solar observatory offer blueberry, key lime, butter brickle, and strawberry. And the new SDO movies provide our newest menu items: mint chocolate chip, pistachio and black cherry, rainbow sherbet, and blueberry walnut banana supreme…or whatever unusual and mindboggling combination that comes to your mind when you look at them!

Come on up to Chabot for a taste! Napkins not provided….

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A 2 MW battery the AES Huntington Beach power plant.

Energy storage (through batteries) is something we use everyday in our cell phones and computers. So it may be a little surprising that when it comes to the electric grid, storing energy is something that's rarely done.

California's grid is designed to deliver electricity on a real-time basis. Every four seconds, the grid operators at the California Independent System Operator have to ensure that the energy supply meets the demand in the state – something that's known as "balancing the grid." (You can check out today's electricity forecast on their site). As a result, they coordinate the one piece of the system that they have control over: the generators, like natural gas plants.

Luckily, most generators produce a steady power supply. But California is adding increasing amounts of solar and wind power to the grid each year.  Since the output of a solar or wind farm depends on the sun or wind, the power they produce is variable (here's a time-of-day profile of renewable energy on the grid today).  That causes problems for the grid operators on a number of levels.  Wind farms produce most of their power at night, but that's when demand for power is lowest. Solar farms using photovoltaics can drop off substantially when the sun disappears behind clouds. And large solar thermal farms ramp up extremely fast when they are first hit by the sun in the morning.

Energy storage is one of the ways that utilities and grid operators can address this intermittency.  By having some extra electricity on hand, they can smooth out the bumps caused by these renewables.  Just how to store energy is another issue.  Here are some of the ways it can be done.

Pumped Hydro

In the energy storage world, this is as old school as it gets.  Hydro power uses water and gravity to generate electricity.  Storage is added by pumping that water back uphill to the reservoir, so it can generate power again.  Of course, it takes electricity to run the pumps, but usually this is done a night when there is cheaper or excess power on the grid. California's largest pumped hydro facility is PG&E's Helms Pumped Storage Project outside of Fresno, which has a 1.2 gigawatt capacity (for more on how it works, check out this powerpoint). PG&E is reportedly looking at 2 gigawatts of new pumped storage at two other sites in California.

Batteries

There are a number of different kinds of batteries that can be used in grid-scale installations. I visited a 2 megawatt battery in Southern California that uses lithium-ion cells, much like a hybrid car uses. Southern California Edison is working on an 8 MW battery project near the Tehachapi wind farms.  But lithium-ion technology has plenty of competitors, many of which have been awarded federal stimulus funding.  The primary barrier for batteries is the cost. A Beacon Power flywheel.

Flywheels

This technology uses rotational energy to store power. Flywheels have an internal rotor that uses electricity to spin at high speeds.  When energy is needed, the rotor slows down and generates electricity through a motor.  This is used for what's known as "frequency regulation" on the grid.  Since they can charge and discharge power on a second-to-second basis, flywheels can smooth out the short-term fluctuations on the grid. Beacon Power has installed flywheels in Tehachapi, California as part of a demonstration project there.

Compressed Air

Using energy produced at non-peak times (at night), compressed air energy storage projects pump air into large underground caverns. When demand for energy is high, it's released to run power turbines. PG&E is now planning a 300 MW compressed air facility in Kern County.

Of course, for all these technologies, cost is major issue, not mention the siting and planning considerations. For a good comparison, check out thesetechnology comparison charts from the Energy Storage Association.

Listen to Energy Storage: The Holy Grail radio story online and check out the rest of our stories in the 33×20 renewable energy series.

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California has set a goal for its utilities to get a third of their electricity from clean sources by 2020. But just to put that in perspective Germany, a world leader in solar production, hopes to reach 100-percent by the year 2050. And thanks to national government support, Germany might be on track to reach that goal. At the opening session of Intersolar today, Hans Josef Fell, who helped start a photovoltaic revolution in Germany and is a member of the German Parliament, says it is a national renewable commitment that has made a difference. Roof top solar in Germany, for example, covers nearly 20 percent of single family homes and, according to Fell, nearly 60-percent of multi-family homes and businesses have solar on the roof. During the current economic crisis, Fell says, renewable energy has been the biggest job driver in Germany.

Discussion of large scale solar growth opportunities took up a big chunk of the first day at Intersolar. Market analysts, utilities and developers joined on the dais to discuss ways to help big solar grow, especially in California. The take away here, the biggest obstacle is not finding land or overcoming a slow permitting process but updating transmission lines. A representative from Sunpower says interconnection with the grid and more capacity is essential for medium and large scale solar projects to move forward.

Tomorrow, Intersolar takes up urban renewable projects and the ins and outs of doing solar business in California.

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As part of our ongoing series "33 by 20," we conclude a look at the Panoche Valley, south of Hollister, which is finding itself in the center of one of those debates. Andrea Kissack reports.

KISSACK: Ringed most of the year by dry, rolling, scrub covered hills, this ranchland in rural San Benito County gets 90-percent of the solar intensity of the Mojave Desert. But the Mojave, with its protected federal lands and desert tortoises, has turned out to be a nightmare for big solar entrepreneurs. For the Cupertino-based company Solargen, Panoche Valley seemed a better bet for a 420-megawatt solar array that would power about 120,000 homes. PG and E already has transmission lines running right through the valley and five cattle ranchers have agreed to sell their land. But to its critics the company's plan to cover part of the valley in panels doesn't seem like such a green idea.

KIM WILLIAMS: They would like to build an industrial project that extends the entire length of the valley. Once you take the vegetation off the soil, the high winds are just going to be whipping up the top soil and creating dust.

KISSACK: Kim Williams moved to the tranquil Panoche Valley about four years ago from the Bay Area to run an organic egg business called Your Family Farm.
[Sound of Williams talking to her hens]

WILLIAMS: When you travel around California there are not many valleys that you say I am stepping back into time, this is amazing.

KISSACK: Panoche Valley's unique landscape also turns out to be rich in wildlife. The valley floor is teaming with creatures, some of them endangered like the San Joaquin kit fox, and the blunt nose leopard lizard. More than 130 species of birds have also been observed in the area, including bald eagles. Looking out at the project site, Brandon Hill, President of the Fresno Audubon Society, says the valley has too much biodiversity for a big solar plant.

HILL: When you are taking up four thousand acres plus you are basically destroying the habitat, much of it is under panels or converted into roads and it is going to drastically change the habitat out there.

KISSACK: To find out just what is out there Solargen's investors have spent over seven million dollars to gather information for a required Environmental Impact Report. More than twenty biologists have spent much of the past year searching out every fox den on the project site, canvassing creek beds and geo-tagging lizard scat.

KORPOS: Does anyone have an anemometer to measure the wind?

KISSACK: Today, in high winds, wildlife biologist Michelle Korpos leads her team through a barbed wire fence and onto an adjacent parcel called "mitigation land" – about eleven thousand acres that Solargen would set aside for wildlife to offset the impact of the project.

KORPOS: Presumably the species can disperse from the site because the mitigation lands are contiguous to the site. And the larger mammals like the kit fox and badger, they can make their way over the hills into little Panoche valley which offers greater biodiversity and topography.

KISSACK: These biologists are taking a multispecies conservation approach – which could speed up the permitting process. The San Joaquin kit fox, for example, thrives in grazing areas and if it can do well in the mitigation lands, it's assumed so can other grassland species. But not everyone agrees. In fact, local environmentalists are concerned that the surveys are being rushed to meet the deadline to qualify for federal tax credits. Chicken farmer Kim Williams says she is all for solar — just not big arrays.

WILLIAMS: You could do smaller solar fields around cities as well as utilizing all rooftops and shade and parking areas and bus stops.

KISSACK: Energy analysts say California can't meet its clean power goals without big solar farms and that line of thinking has some surprising supporters.

BOYLE: There are a few of us who have been working very closely with the generators and increasingly with the state and federal regulators trying to find a pathway through these conflicts.

KISSACK: Barbara Boyle oversees clean energy solutions for the Sierra Club. She thinks the :us vs. them" approach that has helped win a lot of environmental debates, in the past, needs to change when it comes to siting clean energy projects.

BOYLE: We also need to get out there and identify where are the good places for solar and wind to go so they know when they invest hundreds of millions of dollars in their proposals they are going to a place that has a high probability of getting permitted.

KISSACK: In the Panoche Valley Charlie McCullough steps out of his modest home and looks over the hills behind him. He and his brother are among the ranching families that have agreed to sell land to Solargen, in his case, for several million dollars.

MCCOLLOUGH: Everybody in the valley is mad at us for bringing the solar in. I'm going to hate to see a bunch of panels out there, too but I know that we have to have solar. If you can't have it here, you can't have it anywhere.

KISSACK: The San Benito County Board of supervisors is expected to vote on the project before the end of the year. To see a map of solar intensity throughout the U.S, go to KQED.org/33×20. I'm Andrea Kissack, KQED Public Radio.

Where did California go wrong? And as other states try to learn from its lessons, does the Golden State have any hope of reaching its next ambitious target – 33 percent renewable by 2020? Follow KQED’s environmental and science initiatives, QUEST and Climate Watch as we explore the obstacles to achieving California’s ambitious renewable energy goals. Over the next several months we will explore some of the challenges including: finding a home for big solar and wind farms, energy storage, California’s complex permitting process and where to build new transmission lines.

Can California get one-third of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020? Stay tuned to our series 33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown.

We’re launching the series this week with a story from Lauren Sommer about how we got here and how far we have to go. But what are your questions about renewable energy? What would you like us to cover in the months ahead? Leave us a comment and let us know!

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Live solar observing at Chabot Space & Science Center

Our weekend daytime observatory volunteer team has assembled their own live solar observatory, using a SolarMax 70 hydrogen-alpha filter telescope, a video camera, a wireless transmitter, and a large flat-panel display screen—and now that the weather is beginning to cooperate, their offering to our visitors will take place on a more regular basis.

I was up there last Sunday to see the system at work, and was very impressed. With the telescope and wireless transmitter set up outside on the observatory deck, the image of the Sun captured by the video camera was transmitted into the dome of our large telescope, Rachel, where a receiver caught the signal and piped it into the large display monitor attached to the central pier.

Even though there were no sunspots that day—and sunspots are what people generally expect to see, if anything—the Sun put on quite a show in the "hydrogen alpha" wavelength of light (a select red color emitted by hot hydrogen in the Sun's atmosphere). While the Sun's visible surface is populated by features like granules (convection cells), sunspots, and faculae, the h-alpha scope revealed a layer of the Sun's atmosphere, the chromosphere ("sphere of color", named for the bright red light emitted by the hydrogen gas).

We observed several filaments and two or three prominences on this day, even though the Sun was relatively quiet and showing little surface sunspot activity.

Filaments and prominences are the same thing, really: "clouds" of hydrogen gas in the Sun's chromosphere, shaped and contained by the force of solar magnetic fields. When seen at the edge of the Sun's disk, these clouds appear as bright flame-like structures against the dark background of space, and we call them prominences. When seen within the Sun's disk, they appear as dark streaks and strands, the cooler gases in the clouds silhouetted against the brighter surface of the Sun; in this case we call them filaments.

Each of the little puffs of prominence we saw—like bonfires surging up from the edge of the Sun—were actually enormous structures, several times the size of the Earth. And we saw them change as well; in only minutes, the structures would shift and form new shapes, reminding us that the Sun is a very active and dynamic object, always on the go.

Solar activity is now on the rise, after a multi-year lull of quiet as we passed through the bottom of the 11-year solar cycle. We are seeing sunspots on more occasions, which are revealing areas of rising magnetic activity. The activity should only increase going forward, and is expected to reach a crescendo ("solar maximum") sometime around 2012 or 2013. Then, as was the case a decade ago when Chabot Space & Science Center opened, we can expect to see a dozen or so sunspots at any given time, and many more filaments and prominences.

I hope you can make it up to Chabot on a sunny weekend afternoon and see what our volunteers are up to. Forget about that sunny beach; come up to Chabot to learn about the object that makes that beach sunny!

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Is spectacle Copenhagen's only lasting legacy?

Between the aquarium of drowning-delegate sea-level rise protesters, the chicken flock of animal rights protesters, and the cocktail party of fur-coated protest protesters, there will certainly have been a lot to see these past two weeks in Copenhagen during the latest United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Unfortunately, however, spectacle may be the talks’ only lasting legacy. Rainforest advocates and tropical countries alike may have won a small victory with a deal to pay countries to keep their forests intact, and the U.S.’s pledge to raise $100 billion to help poor countries combat climate change is encouraging. Still, a binding resolution anywhere near the scope of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol seems a pipe dream as the talks come to a close by the 18th. It really makes you wish for the all-encompassing silver bullet solution that everybody can agree upon and painlessly enact.

The original silver bullet, of course, is exactly that: a bullet made of silver. An invaluable part of the standard monster-fighting arsenal, it can be used as needed against werewolves, vampires, and all manner of other ghouls. Ironically, however, society seems too sophisticated to accept even this original folkloric incarnation. Contrary to what you might remember from childhood, Twilight’s Edward says that vampires can only be killed by being shredded into pieces and burned. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula the protagonists decide that the only satisfactory way of killing one particular vampire is by driving a stake through its heart, followed by cutting off its head, followed by stuffing the dead mouth full of garlic.

Still, even if the silver bullet remains elusive, the alternative energy industry has no shortage of good ideas, many of which even come close to the ideal.

Nuclear power is closer to a silver bullet than perhaps any other single technology. Cold war memories of the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island reactor failures have dramatically colored American opinion on nuclear energy, and there may be legitimate global concerns about China’s exploding reactor industry. Nevertheless, nuclear fuel contains more than a million times more energy than gasoline gram-for-gram, a statistic that is hard to ignore, particularly if the proper safety measures are taken. France took note of this and now derives as much as 40 percent of its energy needs from nuclear plants. This is at least partly the reason why France emits only about one fourth as much carbon dioxide per capita as does the U.S.

Solar power may still need some breakthroughs in terms of cost and efficiency, but new ideas of plants are springing up all the time and there is no shortage of new ideas or research in the field. Gasoline alternatives such as ethanol suffer at present from the side effects of coming from food crops such as corn, but major efforts are underway at Berkeley and elsewhere to develop useful automobile fuels from plant material that would otherwise be wasted, such as corn stover. Research leading to more cost and energy efficient batteries (see Jim Gunshinan’s recent post) has the potential to revolutionize the automobile industry as well.

Perhaps I shouldn’t mince my words about cutting emissions. Even with technological advances it will be hard and painful and will rest upon a lot of belt-tightening. But technology can help, and perhaps make it slightly easier for the world’s leaders to commit to some new kind of binding resolution in future global talks. Here’s to the UNFCCC in 2010.

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