Angeles National Forest Wildfire - Center Mitigation Program

Center President was scoping Angeles National Forest on Thursday, May 30, 2012 and encountered the wildfire captured in the above video.  The Center is developing a program called "Cities To Wilderness," that seeks to increase participation of inner city folk with wilderness activities.

We are also proposing a wildfire mitigation program that involves the construction of several 10-megawatt woodchip-to-electricity plants located near wildfire areas.  The program involves precutting trees and brush in wildfire areas to create buffer zones that would limit the uncontrolled spread of wildfires.  The wood would be used as as fuel for the woodchip-to-electricity plants.

Some 2,000 homes were evacuated in Southern California as firefighters struggled to contain tens of thousands of acres of wildfire in Angeles National Forest.  The wildfire, which broke out near a Santa Clarita hydroelectric plant in the Los Angeles County on Thursday. A total of 2,100 personnel are now fighting the fire, with air tankers and helicopters deployed to the scene.  At least 19,500 acres burned in Angeles National Forest.

The fire destroyed six homes and damaged nine other buildings. At least three firefighters have reportedly been injured while trying to extinguish the powerful blaze. (RR, 6/2/2013)

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Portland General Electric's 5-Megawatt Lithium-ion Battery

5-megawatt lithium-ion battery system

Portland General Electric's 5-megawatt, lithium-ion energy storage system was shared as part of PGE's contribution to the Battelle-led Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project.

Half of PGE's $23-million portion of the regional project was paid for with U.S. Department of Energy funds. The regional demonstration is a five-year, $178-million project that launched in 2010.

The battery is part of a microgrid that will enable about 500 southeast Salem customers to tap into a power reserve during electricity disruptions such as blackouts. The battery and microgrid are examples of the innovative technologies and methods being tested through the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project.

The energy storage system will respond to regional grid conditions with the help of a key aspect of the demonstration called transactive control. Transactive control is based on technology from DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is managed by Battelle. The technology helps power producers and users decide how much of the area's power will be consumed, when and where. This is done when producers and users automatically respond to signals representing future power costs and planned energy consumption. The cost signals originate at Battelle's Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center in Richland, Wash. They are updated every five minutes and sent to the project's participating utilities, including PGE.

The automated signals allow project participants to make local decisions on how their piece of the smart grid project can support local and regional grid needs. Participants are now gathering data to measure how the signal can help deliver electricity more effectively, help better integrate wind power onto the power grid and more. The Salem battery will use the signal to coordinate its charge and discharge cycles with the power grid's supply and demand.

PGE's role: As an investor-owned utility that serves about 830,000 customers in 52 Oregon cities, PGE is testing several smart-grid technologies in the Salem area for the demonstration project. Beyond the energy storage system unveiled today, PGE is working to integrate renewable power sources to the power grid. It is also implementing a demand-response program with residential and commercial customers to help meet peak demand. All these resources will be optimized with the automated transactive control signal.  (Science Daily, 6/1/2013)

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9th Circuit Says Consent Decree Cannot Circumvent Rulemaking

A recent Ninth Circuit decision calls into question the government’s practice of using consent decrees in a judicial proceeding to set policy for parties nationwide in environmental matters. In Conservation Northwest v. Sherman (Conservation Northwest II), No. 11-35729, 2013 WL 1760807 (9th Cir. Apr. 25, 2013), the court makes a critical distinction between consent decrees which temporarily modify a rule to achieve a particular result in a particular case, and consent decrees which purport to have broader applicability. Specifically, the court held it is an abuse of discretion for a federal court to “enter a consent decree that permanently and substantially amends an agency rule that would have otherwise been subject to statutory rulemaking procedures.”

 

A number of commentators and legislators have called attention to the government’s practice of setting national policy through settlement of individual lawsuits that raise novel issues. Setting policy in this way is said to deprive affected third parties of the right to meaningfully participate in the rule making process. In 2012, Republican legislators proposed the Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act of 2012, which would have required that any party affected by a decree be given the right to intervene in the pending court action.  (More at: Marten Law, By Myles Conway and Daniel Timmons)

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White House Women’s Leadership Summit on Climate Change and the Environment

The White House held a forum on climate change today that included women from all over the country. The forum included 100 women leaders in a dialogue on the science of climate change, communication about the climate and energy challenges, policy solutions, and activism in  workplaces, careers, and communities.

Speakers:

Dr. Kathy Sullivan, Acting Administrator, NOAA
Chair Nancy Sutley, Council on Environmental Quality
Heather Zichal, Deputy Assistant to the President on Energy and Climate Change
Dorothy Robyn, General Services Administration
Kateri Callahan, President, Alliance to Save Energy
Nancy Pfund, Managing Director, DBL Investors
Frances Beinecke, President, NRDC
Cecilia Estolano, Estolano LeSar Perez Advisors
Reverend Sally Bingham, Regeneration Project

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FracFocus: Chemical Disclosure Registry

FracFocus is the national hydraulic fracturing chemical registry.

FracFocus is managed by the Ground Water Protection Council and Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, two organizations whose missions both revolve around conservation and environmental protection.

The site was created to provide the public access to reported chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing within their area. To help users put this information into perspective, the site also provides objective information on hydraulic fracturing, the chemicals used, the purposes they serve and the means by which groundwater is protected.

The primary purpose of this site is to provide factual information concerning hydraulic fracturing and groundwater protection. It is not intended to argue either for or against the use of hydraulic fracturing as a technology. It is also not intended to provide a scientific analysis of risk associated with hydraulic fracturing. While FracFocus is not intended to replace or supplant any state governmental information systems it is being used by a number of states as a means of official state chemical disclosure. Currently, ten states: Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, North Dakota, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Ohio and Pennsylvania use Fracfocus in this manner. Finally, this site does not deal with issues unrelated to chemical use in hydraulic fracturing such as Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM). This topic is beyond the current scope of this site.

FracFocus is a dynamic website that will evolve and expand over time. We welcome your comments and suggestions regarding the site. You can submit a comment or suggestion regarding this website from the Ask a Question page. The chemical data presented on this site has been submitted on a voluntary or regulatory basis by the participating oil and gas companies listed on the Links page who have agreed to disclose the information in the public interest. We hope you will find this site useful and informative.

Important Notes:

1. Participating companies have agreed to post records of wells fractured after the later of the date they registered to participate or January 1, 2011. Over the first full year of operation from April 11, 2011 to April 11, 2012 the FracFocus system recorded over 15,000 disclosures from a total of 231 participating companies. During the same period the FracFocus website had been visited more than 210,000 by over 145,000 individuals.

2. Questions about the fracturing of a specific well should be directed to the company whose name appears in the header of the fracturing record.

3. The listing of a chemical as proprietary on the fracturing record is based on the “Trade Secret ‡” provisions related to Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) found on the above link .

(FracFocus)

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Kraft Pulp Mills NSPS Review

EPA New Source Performance Standards Proposed Rule For Pulp Mills

The EPA is proposing revisions to the new source performance standards for kraft pulp mills. These revised standards include particulate matter emission limits for recovery furnaces, smelt dissolving tanks and lime kilns, which apply to emission units commencing construction, reconstruction or modification that are different than those required under the existing standards for kraft pulp mills.

The exemptions to opacity standards do not apply to the proposed standards for kraft pulp mills. The proposed rule also removes the exemption for periods of startup and shutdown resulting in a standard that applies at all times.

The proposed rule includes additional testing requirements and updated monitoring, recordkeeping and reporting requirements for affected sources. These differences are expected to ensure that control systems are properly maintained over time, ensure continuous compliance with standards and improve data accessibility for the EPA, states, tribal governments and communities.  (Federal Register, 5/23/2013)

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Tesla Automotive Repaid $465 Million Government Loan

Tesla Motors has repaid the entire remaining balance on a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy nine years earlier than originally required. 

Loan losses to date represent about 2 percent of the overall $34 billion portfolio. The other 98 percent of the portfolio includes 19 new clean energy power plants that are adding enough solar, wind and geothermal capacity to power a million homes and displace 7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year – roughly equal to taking a million cars off the road.

Key Statistics and Highlights of the Department’s Loan Portfolio:

Losses to date in the Department’s loan programs represent about 2 percent of the $34 billion portfolio and less than 10 percent of the $10 billion loan loss reserve that Congress set aside to cover expected losses in the programs.
Many of the nation’s largest and most innovative energy and transportation projects are supported by the Department of Energy’s loan programs, including:

• Several of the world’s largest solar generation facilities and thermal energy storage systems (Ivanpah, Agua Caliente, Desert Sunlight, Abengoa Solana, and Solar Reserve Tonopah)

• One of the world’s largest wind farms (Shepherds Flat)

• The first two all-electric vehicle manufacturing facilities in the U.S. (Tesla and Nissan)

• The first nuclear power plant to be built in the U.S. in the last 30 years (Vogtle)

In the auto industry specifically, these investments have made an enormous impact. In June 2009, for example, the Department offered more than $8 billion in conditional loan commitments to three companies -- Ford, Nissan and Tesla – to help retool, refurbish, and reopen American auto plants to produce the cars of the future. The results have been impressive:

• The Department provided a $5.9 billion loan to Ford Motor Company to upgrade and modernize thirteen factories across six states and to introduce new technologies to raise the fuel efficiency of more than a dozen popular vehicles, including C-Max Hybrid, Focus, Escape, Fusion, Taurus, and F-150 trucks, representing approximately two million new vehicles annually. This investment is supporting approximately 33,000 manufacturing and engineering jobs across the United States.

• In Smyrna, Tennessee, the first advanced battery packs produced in the United States are coming off the production line of Nissan North America’s production plant. These advanced batteries are powering U.S.-made all electric Nissan LEAF cars. The construction of the 1.3-million-square-foot, state of the art battery facility was made possible through a $1.4 billion loan from the Department of Energy.

• Tesla’s $465 million loan enabled it to reopen a shuttered auto manufacturing plant in Fremont, California and to produce battery packs, electric motors, and other powertrain components. Tesla vehicles have won wide acclaim, including the 2013 Car of the Year from both Motor Trend and Automotive Magazine, and Consumer Reports recently rated Tesla’s Model S as tied for the best car ever rated. Tesla has created more than 3,000 full-time jobs in California – far more than the company initially estimated – and is building out a supply chain that supports numerous additional jobs and technologies, and is bringing advanced manufacturing technology back to America.

It’s important to remember that these three loans were conditionally offered in June 2009, which was a time when many people believed that the industry itself might not survive. That was the same month GM filed for bankruptcy, and auto sales were 28 percent lower than the year before.  (DOE)

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