Solar Exceptionalism

My partnership just finished work on a commercial scale solar installation. It is a quarter acre of solar panels that should produce about 48,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. It was a complex piece of work, from design to final wiring. It also presented a difficulty in that we had to install it in December and January. Why would we do something like this in midwinter? Take a seat. I’ll spare you as many technical details as possible.

The owners of this system started out by applying for Vermont’s SPEED program, which requires utilities to pay a higher price for renewable electricity, up to a small percentage of their overall capacity. Response to this program was so overwhelming that the state ended up having a lottery to see who got on the list. Our clients got on the waiting list, but some people above them dropped out, so they made it onto the list last September. We immediately plowed into the permit and incentive process. Because of the structure of renewable energy incentives, we had a deadline of January 31, 2012 to complete the job, get the electrons flowing, and file the paperwork.

The first and foremost obstacle was the Vermont State Historic Preservation Office. The incentive money comes from the feds, and the feds demand a review of possible disturbance of a historic site. Ok, fine, but exceptional. More on exceptional later. Our client called SHPO every week for five weeks, each time leaving a message explaining the reduction of our timeline by one week. On the sixth week he called every day, and finally got a response. They would have to do a complete archeological survey. Game over. We’d never have time to do that and complete the job. Our client expressed himself forcefully on the subject of delay, and they said that they would send someone right over to look at the site. The next day a SHPO employee visited the site, looked around, and said, “Oh, this is no problem. Go ahead.” Six weeks. Face palm. We sprinted ahead.

I have some thoughts on Solar Exceptionalism. We ran into this last year with a client who wanted to put solar panels on the newly metal-roofed shed dormer on his house. Because his house is more than 50 years old, in order to apply for the incentives we had to hire a consultant to determine whether the historic value of the house would be ruined by solar panels. This was an old farmhouse that had additions, an added porch, picture windows, new metal roofing, dormers, and who knows what else tacked on. All of that was done with only an ordinary building permit, and some of it probably without. Nevertheless, the client had to pony up hundreds of dollars for a consultant to write a report on what anybody could see through binoculars. Then we could put solar panels on top of the new raised seam roofing.

Let’s take the example of a ranch house built in 1960. It just makes the 50 year rule. If it was my house I could add, subtract, or divide it any way I liked with nothing more than a standard building permit from the town. I could bulldoze the whole thing and load it into dumpsters. But I couldn’t put solar panels on the roof, or even in its vicinity, without a study and approval from SHPO. Not if I wanted the incentive money. Roughly a third of the houses in Vermont are over 50 years old, and few of them are pristine historic buildings. An insider’s note: no installer in his right mind would try to put solar panels on a slate roof. Historical value aside, the stuff is just too brittle to work with.

If I wanted to build a house on a piece of land, with only an ordinary town building permit I could dig a hole 20 feet wide by 30 feet long and 10 feet deep for the foundation. On the other hand, if I wanted to drill a posthole five feet deep for mounting a solar array, you guessed it; I’d need a full historical review.

Similarly, if I want to build a 5000 square foot Mc Mansion with three stories and a turreted tower and paint it hunter safety orange I can do so with an ordinary building permit. If my neighbors don’t like my design sense they can go ___________. However, if I want to install a six-foot square ground mounted solar array I need to send copies of my Certificate of Public Good application (including a visual impact assessment) to all adjoining landowners, the town planning commission, the town zoning commission, the town select board, the Public Service Department, the Public Service Board, and the utility, as well as SHPO. For one client I sent out fourteen information packets. His solar array was in a clearing in the woods next to his driveway and couldn’t be seen by anyone beyond his property line. That included his adjoining neighbor half a mile away across the river. Any one of them, whether they could see the array or not, had a right to stall the project. We had to wait a month for responses before proceeding with construction.

One of my business partners has expressed his impression that there are more people engaged  in shuffling papers than installing solar panels.

I’m not one of those deregulatory fanatics. Regulation of building projects, solar or otherwise, is right and necessary if we want to avoid ruining our environment or desecrating historic sites. However, we have a problem of proportion.

My general impression, formed over years in the renewable energy business, is that regulations concerning anything that produces power are scaled for multi-megawatt facilities. In a conversation with an official at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about small hydro permitting, he said (without irony), “Five watts or five megawatts, it’s the same process.” As much as anything I think this is a result of legislative inertia.

Forty years ago a new power plant was a huge thing – acres of buildings and tons of concrete. It used trainloads of coal or dammed a major river. The trend over the past few decades has been away from the centralized plant producing hundreds of megawatts and towards smaller, decentralized plants. Among these might be repowered hydroelectric sites producing tens to hundreds of kilowatts, or industrial rooftops and brownfield sites of the same scale. At the bottom of the power production scale is a few thousand watts of solar panels on a residential roof.

There have been advances in the rules regarding small power producers. The process for getting a Certificate of Public Good to generate solar power has been shortened to a few pages for residential systems. Still, there are threads trailing back to the days of megawatt power plants.

A local couple contacted me, interested in producing a few kilowatt-hours a day from a stream in a gulley on their land. I looked at the situation and figured they could get about 450 watts from a micro-hydro generator about the size of a toaster oven. That’s about 10 kWh a day, enough to run a frugal household. Most of the year about 80% of the water in the stream would run past the intake and down the gulley. They might have to throttle the machine back in August and September. So, great, right? Not so fast.

I had to get approval from

The Vermont Agency of Natural Resources (water quality permit)

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (interconnection license)

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (river modification permit)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency (environmental impact study)

I gave it a shot, just as an experiment. Everyone was very polite and helpful, in an unhelpful sort of way. ANR had no fixed process and recommended that I work things out with FERC first. (They are, apparently, on the road to a methodology now.) The guy at FERC (“five watts or five megawatts”) sent me information on publishing my project in the Federal Register and holding a series of stakeholder meetings with “parties with legal standing” and local indian tribes. It was looking like at least a year to get through the FERC process. He also sent me back to ANR, which sent me back to FERC, and so on. Army Corps sent me a ¾” thick book describing the process of obtaining an exemption to a permit for small projects. One teaspoonful of soil moved below the high water line of any body of water triggers their jurisdiction. The nice woman at USF&W said that they would be happy to send an inspector over for only $918 a day. She figured that it might cost $20,000 to get USF&W approval, which was more than the estimated cost of the hardware. So I gave up.

If I had been installing something on the scale of Hoover Dam, this all would have been chump change. It also would have been necessary, given the huge impact of a megawatt scale dam. I was proposing something the size of a toaster oven, so I had to express my regrets to the potential clients and move on.

It makes me think of the old saying that generals are always fighting the previous war. The practical scale of electrical generation has dropped by a factor of a thousand, but the law hasn’t caught on to that fact. All commercial sources of energy in the modern world live or die by regulation and subsidy. If we are going to make the transition to distributed renewable energy before we run headlong into shortages, permitting is going to have to change to deal with the new reality.

Feedback Loop

You may have noticed an article in the Washington Post comparing the popularity of various institutions to that of Congress. The approval rating of the U.S. Congress, at 9%, beats Fidel Castro (5%) and ties Hugo Chavez, but is below the approval for the concept of the U.S. going Communist, at 11%. The fact that at least one in ten Americans is willing to reverse the Cold War is interesting in itself. However, my focus is on Congress, and why even BP during the Macondo oil spill (16%) beats their approval rating.

I have written in earlier posts about the concept of hyperscopic life. (You may wish to review here, here, here, and here.) The short version is that a corporation fulfills all the qualities that scientists use to identify a living organism. My conclusion – if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, etc. The problem with corporations is that a duck is a lot smarter than a corporation but a corporation has political power.

Human beings serve corporations, and so naturally corporations have many of the characteristics of human beings. To be more specific, psychopathic human beings, as defined by their behaviors and psychiatric literature. One thing that humanity does very effectively is to modify our environment. We cut down forests, drain swamps, build roads, dam rivers, and blast the tops off of mountains. We build houses and breakwaters and other barriers against the forces of nature. Corporations modify their environment as well, but we must consider that their environment is both physical and legal. We might say that the legal environment is as physical to them as air, water, and land are to us. Law is also DNA and connective tissue to a corporation, meaning that it can modify both its internal and external environment.

As with the physical world, there is resistance to this modification. It is institutional, active, and consequential. By institutional I mean that human beings put into place legal strictures that limit corporate agency. These could be campaign finance laws, lobbying restrictions, conflict of interest laws, and transparency laws. By active I mean groups of citizens actively opposing corporate reach into legislation. By consequential I mean that corporations are too short sighted and narrow of vision to properly calculate the consequences of their actions. If either law or enforcement is inadequate they end up like Enron or Lehman Brothers, collapsing from the excess they pursued.

The tide turned for corporations back in 1976, with the Buckley vs. Valeo decision by the Supreme Court. The Court decided that donating money was the constitutional equivalent of political speech, thus making plutocracy official and ending our progress towards democracy. Corporations have gained ground continuously since then. It is a positive feedback loop. As they gain more political power they are able to reduce the resistance to their modification of their environment. This includes all three of the modes of resistance I outlined above.

The millionaires and billionaires who engage in symbiotic parasitism on the corporate herd have veto power over entry into politics. Candidates have to raise those two-thousand dollar donations in order to stand a chance. This restricts the boundaries of legislation to initiatives acceptable to corporate remoras, which means fewer restrictions on corporate power. Once enough presidents and senators have been elected this way, then the Supreme Court can be stacked, and the Constitution gets interpreted to benefit further corporate power. Witness the Citizens United decision.

Similarly, information (or, more likely, disinformation) is supplied to citizens by a shrinking handful of ever larger communications conglomerates. Citizens can’t oppose what they don’t know about, and they won’t oppose what they have been convinced is in their interests. The internet has provided some outlet for human voices, but the behemoths of the business are always making efforts to fence that in as well. The latest outrage is the ProtectIP/SOPA bills, which would allow the big media players to shut down competing sites without due process.

Even the consequential restrictions on corporate action have been buffered by massive government intervention. Instead of taking over bankrupt financial firms and writing down mortgages to market prices, the government just stuck a funnel in the top of the banking industry and poured in a trillion dollars.

So there is a feedback loop going on. The accelerating accumulation of power by corporations allows the increasing acceleration of their accumulation of power. The problem for corporations in this situation is that some restrictions are necessary to prevent them from destroying their own environment. The idiocy that culminated in the 2007 financial meltdown is one symptom of corporate self-direction. Another symptom is the congressional approval rating.

Corporations are so short sighted and so programmed for self interest that they habitually overreach. Eventually even the cleverest psychopath buries too many bodies in the backyard and it begins to stink. The stink of political corruption has gotten so obvious that even the propaganda efforts of corporate media can’t cover it. In good times a certain amount of corruption can make it past the public with a knowing eye roll, but when everybody knows (or is) someone who is one of the long term unemployed, and when everyone knows (or is) someone on the wrong end of an underwater mortgage, public consciousness shifts. As long as most people were on an upward economic trend, or at least there was a promise of upward mobility for the next generation, people could put up with their lot. Now we’re looking at structural unemployment and underemployment, while college has become too much of a financial burden for too many, with no reasonable guarantee of a benefit. Corporations and their elite parasites have simply sucked too much wealth out of the economy.

This has given them the power to change the economic rules so that they can suck out even more. Up to a point. Another symptom of the ever tightening feedback loop is the Occupy Wall Street movement, as well as dozens of other movements focused directly on taking power away from corporations. Review any number of opinion polls from the last decade and you’ll find that a consistent 75% (or more) of respondents say that big business and their lobbyists have too much power. The question is whether these various political movements can turn this sentiment into real action and a real power shift. The corporate grip on the means of communication and legislation is firm. On the other hand, who would have thought a couple of years ago that Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya would have pitched out their dictators? I have no conclusion here, except to note that the fight is out in the open now. I guess that’s half the battle.

Miles Per Hour

This is an old concept, first proposed by a writer named Ivan Illich in his book Energy and Equity.

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour.

The numbers are a bit out of date, so I thought I’d look up some contemporary figures. The results I found varied depending on the source, but generally clustered around the numbers I’ll use here.

Your average American drives about 13,500 miles annually and earns $31,250.

The average speed for a car in an urban area is between 20 and 25 miles per hour. It’s hard to find numbers for rural areas. In one sense they should be higher due to fewer stops and less congestion, as well as more time spent on highways. Then again, here in Vermont we spend a lot of time on unpaved back roads and in town centers where 35 mph is the limit. Most people are commuting less than 10 miles to work, most of which is on class 2 roads, not interstates.

The average cost of owning and operating a car these days, according to the Automobile Association of America, is $8,766. (That’s for a sedan. An SUV cost $11,239)I looked up a number of studies, and they all gave costs in the $7,500 to $9,500 range. This is, of course, the direct costs to the owner; purchase, maintenance, gasoline, taxes and fees. The fact that we drive polluting vehicles on subsidized roads with subsidized fuel and regularly smash into each other adds hidden costs spread across society. (More on that later) One problem: AAA used $2.88/gallon for fuel cost. The national average is around $3.27 (again AAA numbers) as I write, 13.5% higher. That increases the annual cost of driving for an average sedan by around $234, bringing the AAA annual cost right up to $9,000.

If our average American is driving 13,500 miles annually at, let’s be generous, 30 mph, that’s 450 hours per year in the driver’s seat. That same person is earning $15.62 hourly, so that $9000 cost is sucking up 576 hours at work. It is interesting to think that most Americans spend much more time earning money to drive than actually driving. There is other time associated with driving, including waiting around at the repair shop reading a 2002 issue of Bass Fishing Magazine, but I’ll be optimistic and add only 24 hours a year of general screwing around time. The grand total is 1050 hours, which works out to 12.86 miles per hour. That’s twice Illich’s estimate, but still not particularly impressive.

Your mileage may vary. A person with a high hourly wage and a small cheap used car driving a lot of highway miles will do better.

Then again, the hidden costs do change the picture dramatically. Various studies have pointed out that we do not directly pay the true cost of driving. Our taxes (property, state, and federal) subsidize road construction and maintenance, subsidize oil companies, and pay for the treatment of people with lung disease. We also pay for an aircraft carrier battle group cruising around in the oil shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean and generally mess about with oil producing countries around the globe. I have found numbers for the hidden costs of driving, if paid as a gasoline tax, from three to thirteen dollars per gallon.

Running the numbers again using the $3/gal hidden cost figure, the annual cost of driving jumps to $10,800, or 691 hours at median income. This brings our true miles per hour down to 11.6. Driving an SUV would bring it solidly under 10. You could do that on a bicycle.

To go back to Illich and complete his thought:

In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

576 hours is 28.8% of a 2,000 hour work year. 691 hours is 34.4%. Think about that – working over a quarter of your time for your car, mostly to get to work.

It makes me think of the Librarian, who doesn’t own a car and walks or bicycles a few minutes to work. She has a really beautiful bicycle, but it cost her perhaps one tenth of what a decent used car would cost. The maintenance costs are almost nil, and she’d have to spend money on fuel anyway. She is effectively saving herself about $10,000 a year.

Well, you say, all right for her, but there is 20 miles of car-clogged highway between my home and place of work, and the weather doesn’t always cooperate. True, but back to the Librarian. She lives in an apartment building that was built to house people who worked at a small factory (now housing) just around the corner. We used to do that in this country. Our urban geography was designed for people without cars. That was a policy of necessity. Later our legislators made the decision to zone workplaces separately from residences and to subsidize the infrastructure that supported automobile-centric policy. This was a decision, not inevitability. Such decisions can be reversed.

Such decisions will be reversed. The geology of oil will require this. It is inevitable. Given the amount of our lives we presently dedicate to supporting our automotive habits, it might not be so bad.

Negative Interest

For those of you who may have been losing sleep about the U.S. government deficit, I have a glass of warm milk for you. The esteemed Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has pointed out that we are now living in a financial bizarro world.

How would you like to take out a 5-year loan and have the bank pay you interest? Read that again. Sounds like insanity, doesn’t it? Well, things in Europe and elsewhere have gotten so shaky that this is exactly the situation in which the U.S. Treasury finds itself. Investors all over the world are looking for a safe haven, and America’s credit rating is so good that they are willing to pay for the privilege of storing their money here.

Treasury Real Yield Curve Rates, which translates as actual inflation adjusted interest when our government borrows money, have gone negative. Five-year Treasury Notes are paying something around -0.75 percent as of December 9^th. Seven year T-Notes are around -0.4% and ten year T-Bonds are hovering around zero. Free money, in other words. Beyond ten years the interest rates are soaring as high as 0.92%. That’s right, stop gloating about your 4% mortgage. Uncle Sam is borrowing at less than a quarter of that on a 30-year loan and making more money than your savings account on short term loans.

Interest rates aside, our debt to GDP ratio is 90%. That’s like someone with a $100,000 annual income having a $90,000 mortgage. It’s not an emergency, and the financial world recognizes this. We can tell that from the negative interest rates.

We are like a fisherman, in debt, with a leaky boat. Do we borrow more money and fix the boat so we can earn our way back into the black? Or do we stand on principle, refuse to borrow, and let our livelihood sink? When our fisherman can make money by borrowing money the answer is obvious.

Update on Monday, December 12, 2011 at 9:38PM by Minor Heretic

I received a correction from my friend The Broker, to wit: "Minutiae from the Peanut Gallery: Treasury Bills are obligations less than one year, Treasury Notes are one year to ten years, and Treasury Bonds are ten years and up (to thirty at present), although all of these are generically bonds."

Noted and corrected, with thanks.

Bernie Has Started It

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill to amend the Constitution in order to reverse the Citizens United decision and end corporate personhood. I recently posted a version of such an amendment as hashed out on an online forum, but I am perfectly happy with this one. It gets most of the job done. There would be some legislative battles even with the amendment in place, but this would be a death blow to corporate control of our government.

Here’s the link to Senator Sander’s website.

Here’s the relevant text, below. Enjoy. And get behind this. If you live in Vermont, send a letter of support to Bernie and a “Get with the program” message to Senator Leahy and Representative Welch. If you live elsewhere, send the link to your elected representatives and tell them to get with the program. I declare this a litmus test for all politicians – 99% versus 1%, democracy versus plutocracy, however you want to phrase it.

Send word of this bill to your friends and family all over the country. This is the deciding issue of our times: Who will govern, corporations or people? Either we win this battle or we lose all the rest with it.

3          ‘‘ARTICLE—

4          ‘‘SECTION 1. The rights protected by the Constitution

5          of the United States are the rights of natural persons and

6          do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability

7          companies, or other private entities established for busi

8          ness purposes or to promote business interests under the

9           laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.

10        ‘‘SECTION 2. Such corporate and other private enti

11        ties established under law are subject to regulation by the

12        people through the legislative process so long as such regu

13        lations are consistent with the powers of Congress and the

14        States and do not limit the freedom of the press.

15        ‘‘SECTION 3. Such corporate and other private enti

16        ties shall be prohibited from making contributions or ex

17        penditures in any election of any candidate for public of

18        fice or the vote upon any ballot measure submitted to the

19        people.

20        ‘‘SECTION 4. Congress and the States shall have the

21        power to regulate and set limits on all election contribu

22        tions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own spend

23        ing, and to authorize the establishment of political com

24        mittees to receive, spend, and publicly disclose the sources

25        of those contributions and expenditures.’’.