Wave power

 Water is 784 times as dense as air. You may have experienced this at the beach by getting knocked down by a relatively small wave. Some inventors have been at work taking advantage of this power.

In all the talk about new sources of renewable energy, solar and wind power have dominated the conversation, with biofuels coming in third. Hydroelectric power is a long established renewable energy option, but limited to very specific locations and restricted by environmental concerns. Wave power is just starting to show its potential, with a few installations on the coasts of Europe.

There are three basic types of wave power generators: bobbing buoys, bending buoys, and water column devices.

Bobbing buoys are basically big floats, either under water or on the surface. They travel up and down with the waves and transfer the energy of their motion though rods or cables to generators fixed to the sea floor or in the buoy itself. Ocean Power Technologies is developing the latter type of device and is in the early stages of a 1.39 MW project off the coast of Spain.

Bending buoys float on the surface and undulate with the waves, bending at their hinge points and transferring power with pistons that resist the bending. There is only one manufacturer of these right now, Pelamis.

Water column devices are installed on the shore, with a large diameter tube extending below the surface of the water. When a wave comes in, the rising water pushes a column of air up the tube and through a turbine. As with the bending buoys, there is only one company developing this model, Wavegen.

There are also a few companies developing a kind of modified hydroelectric system where waves are guided into a narrow area to make them taller. They splash over a wall and then are run back through the wall to a lower level through turbines.

Wavegen has the longest track record, with its 500-kilowatt LIMPET installation on the coast of Islay in Scotland. It has been feeding the island grid since 2000. Before that, an experimental 75 kW unit operated from 1991 to 1999. Wavegen just received approval in January for a 4-megawatt near-shore installation in Siadar Bay on the Scottish Island of Lewis.

Here’s a clip of the exhaust port on an installation on the Island of Pico in the Azores.

Pelamis has had more recent successes, with a 2.25-megawatt installation just off the northern coast of Portugal. They also have a 3-megawatt facility in development off the Orkney Islands just north of the Scottish mainland and a 5-megawatt installation planned for the west coast of Cornwall.

Here’s a video of one of their sea trials:

There are two significant benefits of wave power, to my mind. One is its relative predictability compared to wind and solar. The oceans are like a great flywheel for energy. Since wave energy devices are dependent on an oscillating energy source, they have inertial or pressure storage built in to make up for that oscillation. Arrays of wave power collectors average out their output. This means that wave power doesn’t suffer from the momentary power variations imposed on wind and solar by wind gusts or passing clouds. This means that wave generated power outputs tend to vary slowly and predictably by the hour or day.

The second significant benefit of wave power is its density. The Wavegen installation in Islay was designed for wave intensities of 25 kilowatts per meter of shoreline. That works out to a megawatt per 40 meters (131 feet). It doesn’t take a lot of shore or breakwater to produce serious power. The northern Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada offer a potential bonanza of clean, consistent power.

The State of Maine, for example, has 3500 miles of coastline. If one-half of one percent of that, 17.5 miles, were used for wave power generation it would amount to over 700 megawatts. There must be at least 17.5 miles of breakwaters and seawalls in Maine that could accommodate oscillating water column devices, and it would take up no shoreline at all if the floating devices were used.

Wave power is still in its early stages and needs to be accelerated through the inevitable period of technological diversity, shakeout, and further development of surviving designs. The U.K., Portugal, and Spain are leading the way in wave power development. The U.S. and Canada should look to our coasts for power and promote the technology on this side of the energy-dense Atlantic.

Cashocracy

I am hearing and reading the same theme over and over again in the news. The latest was an article on Alternet about why we can’t buy new cars online. The summary was that auto dealers donate something like $66 million to political campaigns every year and politicians don’t want to offend them. This is no great shock to anyone.

Why is Medicaid forbidden to negotiate drug prices with the drug companies, costing the taxpayers billions? Well, the drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on campaign donations (through their executives) and lobbying.

Why haven’t the automobile fuel efficiency standards been raised since the Reagan administration? Well, the automobile and oil companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on campaign donations (through their executives) and lobbying.

Why has all the bailout money so far gone to help huge banks and their stockholders instead of ordinary people? Well…

I’ll make it simple, with a form. Why don’t we (Insert rational government policy here)? Because (Insert name of relevant industry) spends (Insert astronomical sum of money) a year on campaign donations and lobbying.

I’ve written about this before, but it deserves repeating. All out present efforts to reform government policy within the present electoral structure are essentially futile. I forgot who said it, but there is a saying that it is impossible to convince a man of something if his paycheck depends upon not being convinced. The vast majority of our elected representatives are utterly dependent upon thousand-dollar donations from millionaires to get reelected. We have a cashocracy.

This has a twofold effect. The more gross effect is intimidation. Business groups have used targeted donations to intimidate politicians who have misbehaved. (Meaning “acted in the general public interest”) The more insidious effect is what I call the money filter.

The Public Interest Research Group studied congressional primaries and issued a report called “The Wealth Primary.”  The basic conclusions were that, on average,

• Whichever candidate spent the most money in a primary won, 9 times out of 10.
• The high spending candidates outspent the number two spenders 3 to 1.
• Most of the money came in $500 to $1000 chunks from millionaires.

The upshot? If you have opinions that dismay, offend, or alarm millionaires, you have perhaps a 1 in 10 chance of success in a primary. In reality, the second and third place spenders also rely on those chunky millionaire donations, so consider your chances far worse than that. The tiny minority of wealthy donors acts as an unofficial and undemocratic nominating committee. The rest of us get to choose between their ideologically screened choices.

The answer is simple but difficult. We need to equalize political clout across the economic spectrum. In a previous essay I proposed that we limit political contributions to a days wages at minimum wage – about $50 today - and have the government multiple-match each donation at something like 5 to 1, making it $300. It would cost us about $2 billion a year, but the savings in reduced corporate handouts would save us over a hundred times that much. It would also get around Supreme Court decisions striking down what they considered unacceptably low limits on political contributions. The people at Freakonomics proposed what they call Patriot Dollars. Every registered voter would get a debit card charged with $50 per election cycle, payable only to officially registered candidates. It would be the only legal way to donate to a campaign, and would cost about the same as my proposal.

Either way, it comes down to this: Bill Gates and the guy who mows Bill Gates’ lawn would have the same financial clout in Washington.

The difficulty lies in using a group of officials dependent upon and filtered by the big money system to get rid of the big money system. It is going to take focus and single-issue voting. Whatever issue is our personal favorite, we will have to drop it temporarily in favor of electoral reform, with campaign finance reform at the top of the list. Whatever their level of filtration or corruption, our “representatives” in Washington require our votes to be there. If a majority of voters make our votes absolutely dependent on mandatory public campaign financing, they’ll have to listen. It’s going to take a movement on par with the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s, only beyond all the usual social divisions. Once we get an electoral system that listens to the majority rather than the tiny minority with money, then we can get back to debating each other over policy priorities.

I’m going to start by making a donation to Public Campaign, an organization dedicated to the principle of clean money elections. What about you?

Just a thought on $20 billion

A couple of headlines have jumped out at me lately. One is about the $20 billion in bonuses that executives from bailed out banks have collected recently. The other is the jobless numbers for January. 598,000 people lost their jobs last month, a number close to the entire population of Vermont. These numbers have a relationship.

The median household income in this country is around $50,000. Considering that about three-quarters of the households in the U.S. are two-income households, $33,333 each would put a couple comfortably above the median. Why did I pick $33,333? Round numbers. At that salary, a million dollars would pay 30 people for a year.

What about that $20 billion in bonuses? It would pay 600,000 people $33,333 each for a year. In other words, the chunk of bailout money that banks slipped into the pockets of their executives could have been used to keep those 598,000 unfortunates in work for another year, with a little left over.

This ties right in to President Obama’s proposed $500,000 cap on executive salaries at bailed out banks. Every million that these guys earn is 25 median incomes. We need that money for job creation, not plumping Swiss bank accounts. If I threw lightning, these executives would earn median income and not a dime more until their appallingly mismanaged companies got off the federal teat. In the real world, I’ll take the $500k cap.

It’s CEO Season

There is much wailing and snarling in the news media and blogosphere right now about the estimated $21 billion in bonuses enjoyed by bailed out banking executives. Commentators have directed additional anger at the sports team sponsorships and executive jet purchases by these same billion-dollar welfare recipients. I join wholeheartedly in the snarling. The remedies for these offenses are obvious – ban bonuses, sponsorships, and frivolous purchases.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz recommends nationalizing the failing banks and thereby force them to behave in a manner consistent with our national interest. I am all for this. This would end the perks, fire the jerks, and also allow us to force a cramdown of troubled mortgages. In a previous post I noted that home prices, adjusted for inflation, were almost double historical levels in 2007, and way out of whack with median income levels. A cramdown would reduce the principle of all those troubled mortgages to a sustainable level and transform all those mortgages with time-bomb interest rate hikes into long term fixed interest loans. The banks would end up with 50% of something instead of 100% of nothing. Then that $400 billion of worthless mortgage backed securities would be worth perhaps $200 billion. Nationalization would wipe out bank stockholders, but that’s the risk one takes on Wall Street. Let’s face it, those stocks aren’t looking at a bright future right now anyway.

Another big issue is revenue. The U.S. government is about to borrow $800 billion to stimulate the economy and try to keep us from swirling down the economic drain. I have advocated stimulus with payback, but there is still a shortfall. There is a cheap way to stick another $100 billion a year in the national coffers, and I’d recommend that you contact your elected representatives in Washington about it.

Find and prosecute millionaire tax cheats. According to Senator Carl Levin (D, Michigan) the Treasury loses about $100 billion a year because millionaires (and billionaires) hide their money in illegal offshore accounts. The international banking firm UBS is under investigation for creating these accounts, and there are many others out there willing to stash money in shell companies for rich Americans. If the IRS could get an extra few million and the authorization to let loose the dogs on millionaire tax cheats the return on investment would be 10,000 to 1.

The outrage is fresh and hot, and the momentum is out there. This is an opportune time for kicking some ass and closing some loopholes for those in the income stratosphere. They made a killing getting us into this mess. Aside from merely obeying the law, it is only fair that they pay proportionately for getting us out of this mess.

Inaugural Indicators

I promised a post on the lead-pipe clues about policy that President Obama put in his inaugural address. History and Obama’s left-handed signature have passed me by on a couple of subjects.

As you probably have read elsewhere, Obama signed an order that will close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba within the year. He also ordered the closing of all secret detention centers run by the CIA and ordered an end to torture of detainees. All these were directly foreshadowed in his address.

“At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbears, and true to our founding documents.”

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

Obama has established himself as not only a scholar of the Constitution, but also one who respects the Constitution.

He also has imposed serious restrictions on the hiring of former lobbyists to posts that involve their former clients. He tipped that one as well: “And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

What else can we expect?

Obama will make renewable energy, energy efficiency, and global warming a priority.

“…each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.”

“With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.” (This one also presages some anti-proliferation work with Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan.)

“…nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.”

We can expect a return to multilateralism and diplomacy.

“Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations.”

This will include an end to the “Axis of Evil” approach to our adversaries. Most likely this will include a warming of relations with Iran.

“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Here is the one that gladdens my heart:

“We will restore science to its rightful place,…”

This applies to many policy areas, including global warming, stem cell research, sex education (abandoning abstinence-only), and environmental protection. Can we hope for rational drug policy? Probably not quite yet.

A related, overarching theme is one of pragmatism trumping ideology. He explicitly stated this in terms of government intervention.

“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.”

“On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

“…the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”

There is more. He mentioned humanitarian foreign aid, and Hillary Clinton, our new Secretary of State, opened her tenure with a commitment to increasing such aid. He alluded to issues of labor and wages, and the distribution of the benefits of our economy. Congress has already delivered an equal pay bill to his desk and a union organizing bill should soon follow.

I’m feeling reasonably optimistic. We’ve gone from desperately losing ground and grinding our teeth in frustration to actual progress in a week. If President Obama delivers on a quarter of this I’d be happy, and I think he’ll do much better.