welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public visit our website for our program very readable books on renewable energy harvests the wind of two thousand and twelve and harness the sun twenty fifteen philip warper graduated from harvard college in one nine hundred seventy eight and joined the staff of then senator charles percy where he pioneered legislation to promote renewable energy later after receiving his degree from harvard law school he joined the washington based environmental law institute he was involved for them in a number of important environmental projects in the middle east and then returned to boston to become president of the conservation law foundation new england's oldest and largest environmental watchdog group mr warburg was very involved in the proposed cape wind project in massachusetts nantucket sound this experience and the frustration with wind power slow progress in new england generally motivated him to write harvests the wind in two thousand and twelve account of his travels and discussions with people of all levels of engagement in wind power development then in his second book of travels and discussions harness the sun he investigates the range of solar technologies at the local and more regional levels and he considers the impact of solar energy on diverse communities both books provide perspectives of all sorts of people from many areas and the books are very interesting accounts of the prospects of renewable energy before you even got your log degree and new mention that you were engaged in the massachusetts effort for wind energy and got quite frustrated what frustrated you and then how did that lead to the book please well i am a proud new englander and i've often thought that we really are at the cutting edge of doing the right things environmentally and heading up the conservation  i expected that we would be able to move renewable energy forward on a scale that could make a difference here in this in light in corner of the country and i was very disappointed to find that various powerful actors including someone i had long respected as one of the stalwarts of environmental protection senator ted kennedy s were vehemently opposed to the cape wind project largely because of their concerns about the visual impact of that wind farm on their open ocean vistas which struck me as a rather myopic perspective views of the the overarching challenge of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and dressing the challenge of climate change right and so you thought well i'm going to write a book is that the i did you did it in a most unusual way could you give us an account there of how you sort of thought this book out began hearing about when this was in two thousand and eight two thousand and nine and i began to hear about wind farms being built in somewhat improbable corners of the nation places like kansas south dakota wyoming where the politics would not necessarily have suggested that they would have been at the cutting edge of developing renewable energy technology but there they were and i actually started out in the corner of kansas with a wonderful name cloud county kansas where one of the first very large wind farms in kansas was built back in two thousand and eight and i spent quite a bit of time there getting to know the farmers the ranchers the educators the local business boosters just to understand what wind power could bring to that community and what motivated them to embrace this technology and why did they embrace it then i mean they apparently didn't have much of a problem is that the idea well i think there's a kind of rugged pragmatism that pervades much of the heartland and just as they were pioneering farmers in the late eighteenth hundreds they regard when technology as an important pioneering technology a pragmatic technology one that can bolster their farm incomes when you have grain and cattle prices going up and down you have the wind that blows fairly constantly and people welcomed the annuity of the wind turbines on their property it also was a great jobs provider in a rural town the where farm jobs were on the wane and so it was fascinating to me to see what had happened to the cloud county community college which created a wind technology training program and i bet so oversubscribed that the challenge of the director of that program was to keep people in the two year degree program long enough that they could get their degree because the industry was so eager to snap them up and get them out in the field building wind farms and i have to ask in that area it's sounded from the book that people were not so concerned about looking at these things and you had brought up that this was a problem here in massachusetts so what it was or why this different you expect people to be more conservative more resistant  that other corner of the country well i think if you look at kansas there are places that embrace when there are places that are vehemently opposed to our in central kansas and western kansas where there is a lot of agriculture i think the turbans are almost seen as a very large farm implement if in fact one of the ranchers i interviewed said that he views his wind turbans as a kind of very large weathervane because you can see which way the winds are blowing so  apply his pesticides and his fertilizers so i think there is that kind of pragmatic these are important economic tools and just as we have altered the landscape through our farming and our ranching this is a new addition to the landscape one that will bring revenues one that will bring economic stability and work communities climate change does not really come up very much and conversely i don't this isn't about environmental idealism this is really about energy independence and about fiscal responsibility i say i see now that was a little while back when well solar to the wind has really evolved rather quickly what are some of the issues around that with the turbines and large scale or small scale has it improved to let's what's the situation first just want to that said kansas today gets about twenty one or twenty two percent of its total power needs from wind so we're looking at a state that has really made a fundamental shift away from coal technology and to ward when technology so that's a very auspicious sign one of the things that's happened with wind technology over the past several decades really is that what were once very unreliable crude implements developed during a feverish period of developing a new technology in the late one nine hundred seventy s and early one nine hundred eighty s have become very sophisticated refined tools much larger in scale one of the problems in the seventy's and eighty's i think were that the proponents of wind technology tended to be fairly small scale scrappy entrepreneurs but the research and development dollars that the federal government was providing  were going to really developing very large scale turbans that were not being built during that era at all so the research was in the short term rather irrelevant and so what was being put in the field was not tested in a thorough manner a lot of them broke down at a certain point we switched from using american technology to using danish technology because the danes were much more pragmatic in developed these rugged when turbans almost as farm implements rather than as aeronautics and it's that was one of the most interesting points that you said that the in the united states the technology was developed by the aeronautical industry and in denmark where they're like eighty percent or something now and wind energy but from the get go apparently they had designed more carefully the world leader in wind turban manufacturing danish company was active then active now so the danes have really held preeminence they get about forty percent of their total power needs from wind today their goal is by two thousand and fifty to be one hundred percent reliant upon non carbon fuels so they're moving in the right direction they're really a pioneer in pushing us toward a post  fuel future right they have that's pretty exemplary there over there it's not that the weather is not that great and i love it so they put us to shame we bet there but then you have two things in here i mean to scale is one's very local that option as opposed to these huge wind farms can you tell us a bit about that do we have options in terms of different we chance of the country well i think that one of the very interesting distinctions between solar and wind is that while wind technology really does work better at a large scale solar can be applied to everything on down to the household level one of the reasons why wind works better at a utility scale is that the winds are better at a higher altitudes and there's a rule called the cube rule which basically says that wind power is the cube of wind speed so if you're building that hole or when turban you're going to get much better at strike and have yet another rule says that the swept area is called the swept area rule the area that the wind turban sweeps the the rotor sweeps  determines how much power you get from that turban so if you increase the length of a blade as in the radius of a rotor by a relatively small amount you get a disproportionate increase in the productivity of that winter local level it's your idea and another issue at the local level is that there are issues with noise from winter and yeah not necessarily from the smaller ones but you do want a let's say healthy distance from the nearest industrial scale when turbaned so citing wind farms becomes a very very important issue and is often a very contentious issue yes that has been the most contentious that we hear through the media and so on what is the issue there is there a real issue i think that with any environmental nuisance it's important not just to look at the average person but i look at the most sensitive populations and  there are some people who do find winter benoist disturbing and i think that that needs to be taken into account so that there is a minimum distance between the nearest house for example and the nearest wind when  developers have become smarter about this localities have developed citing guidelines i think that the wind industry really because it developed so quickly kind of got ahead of the regulatory infrastructure and now the regulatory infrastructure catching up and saying well let's for the sake of the industry as well as the sake and of the well being of individuals let's create the necessary guidelines so that we won't have angry neighbors right this seems to be much less of an issue in countries like denmark where there's a lot of people are for it but they there are people that do complain about say noise or something or other but that's always going to be imagine a case but in general  suggest about regulations maybe this was better planned in the first place and people were better prepared before things were laid down in terms of the general expense of  installing large wind farms and then that pay back over time to reduce the energy costs and stuff what's the situation now with wind well a very important metric is the lifecycle cost of the winter and because what happens with renewable energy technology such as solar and wind is that the upfront costs are considerable but once you build the technology you have zero fuel costs and very low operating costs so if you look at the lifecycle costs of wind farms today they are fully competitive with for example a new and natural gas  over the lifecycle of that wind farm can be as low as three four five cents per kilowatt hour right now gas plants are in the five to eight cent per kilowatt hour range there once yeah that's down the line what you're saying is so there that it's going to pay off oh yes right you mentioned also tornado country that you have to worry about the regions where you install these things what's the story that  had never thought about it i've not heard of a wind turbine being knocked out by a tornado it may have happened clearly that that is a very real risk to people who live in many parts of the country wind would be so nice correct yeah and if you actually look at the the wind belt in the country it extends from the dakotas on down through texas which corresponds to where you end up seeing a lot of tornadoes occurring so there is that possibility but it's a relatively minor risk at least according to what has happened so far and a house is at risk a business is at risk lots of things are at risk with tornadoes and perhaps a wind turbine might be at risk as well wind farms tend to have several dozens sometimes hundreds of winter been so if you knock out one or two winter bins you're still left with a substantially functioning  d farm unlike a power plant where if it goes down it goes down i if i could just ask you so the about that one people have pointed out that with our grids every now and then the city of new york goes black or something happened not terribly long ago you know but there's always that danger we are urban population increasingly and then we depend on that grid absolutely and when something goes it it's disaster would we have this with wind well i think with wind you still would have that risk in that you are reliant upon long range transmission often to carry that w let's say the farmlands of kansas to chicago or wherever it might be used one of the ways that solar technology which will talk it out in a few minutes i think is very very helpful is that you can be centralize the production and the use of electricity such that the risks of an entire network going down can be reduced but when when turbans are part of a broader infrastructure for providing electricity so there would be some of that over ability ok one more question the location location with with this in terms of conservation plans and and native american lands and so on which you brought up in these cases what was your judgment when you went around the country talking to people there are some very real conservation concerns that i think again the wind industry has gotten a lot smarter about addressing bird mortality is a very real issue at some wind farms you need to cite wind farms hopefully where there aren't endangered bird species but there is some risk to bird life  high rise buildings kill birds cars exaggerators it's that pollution yeah as one scientist indicated to me your average household catch kills over a billion no some facilities to detect oncoming incoming flocks of birds for example bats are a concern as well that what some wind farms have done is they shut down during periods of very low wind when they're not going to get much productivity anyway and it's during those low wind periods that insects are flying our fatso suing them as i say and also during the sunset hours insects tend to be out and  to reduce wind turbine operations in those periods as well where there are vulnerable about species so in west virginia for example they've tried some of this and with great positive effect in terms of vastly reducing the danger to bad life well what you've suggested then is that with careful planning with careful regulation you can attend to most of the problems and benefit in the end it's not a question we ever ask with wyoming is that they have created a sage grouse core area protection program that is set aside a fifth of the stage as a no go area for wind farm development ironically they allow groups the large ones well known ones made deals with oil companies so you could do you know fine we'll give you some money we'll go going to drill nothing will go wrong and of course it really affected the population that we're trying to sa but it more these questions will be raised i suppose in a different way well that is really good about the about the wind and evidently you anticipate that we'll develop this technology in a more effective way all the time and i think we will develop it offshore yes and i that meant to ask that as a matter of fact the what's the difference for or the advantage or disadvantage for offshore and onshore what we're now looking at here in new england is building on the far side of nantucket sound as opposed to in the uk it sound so we're talking about probably ten or fifteen miles beyond the nearest landfall therefore the issue of the visual encroachment that was such a concern with the cape wind project would not really be a concern at all and there are relatively few wildlife concerns you have to make sure there aren't migratory bird species that are passing on to the area for example and during construction there are concerns about marine mammals what the danes have found is that dolphins for example do flee from an area during construction but they come back given the after thought construction so there are some issues but offshore wind offers enormous potential a study was done by the national renewable energy laboratory it estimated that we could get about ten times  total current power needs from land based wind and another four times our current power needs from offshore wind resources so these are prodigious resources that we really need to tap and that was so mean that's relatively safe given the high winds or storms that they would build into the technology some protection that way but that's very exciting that they could do this and benefit so hugely w benefit from twenty years of experience in denmark and germany and in england with developing offshore wind technology so these technologies are not new they're tried and true and we will be implementing them a very nice technology for entrepreneurs it seems to me that it's very you're doing something that's very benefit mishel it's very exciting there's a new development every two weeks and it's just great well after that you're finished with the wind and then you've got on to solar and you edited that you were not an advocate originally and now you're a proud owner of solar panels and so on what ca change well when i was finishing up the wind book people asked me so will your next book be about solar and my my flip response at the time was that if i wrote a book about solar i'd have to call a doom song say this but i felt that the odds of solar developing were very slim at that point solar was very expensive yes a serious issue yeah and since that time the price of solar has come down by about fifty percent the technology is improved the efficiencies are going up and we have a thriving solar industry today so i ate my words and i my wife and i decided to put solar on our home we now get about seventy five percent of our total power needs from the sun and that includes the nightly charging of a plug in electric vehicles so it's made a very big difference in our lives our daughters aren't thrilled with the fact that we don't operate our dryer anymore there are some advantages we've taken but it makes you much more aware of the producing and the power you're consuming and that's i think a very healthy thing so we started with our home and then i began to look in various parts of the country everything from warehouse roofs to football stadiums  to open desert solar farms to urban brownfield yes solar farms and what's great about solar is there's a multiplicity of applications for solar we're just beginning to tap that that's your idea that we're just beginning it's and it's gotten so much better so fast and there's plenty of sun you know for the time being one of the things you it was the use of brownfields this is we tend to turn our backs on our brown fields brown fields are everything from former mining areas the former factory sites to landfills that have been closed they're the kind of ugly corners of the nation that would rather forget about it so contaminated that you can't really build on the correct that out so there are a great opportunity to develop utility scale solar power this is happened in massachusetts on a number of landfill sites i visited a brownfield solar in chicago in the heart of the south side of chicago neighborhood called the west pullman neighborhood this is a factory site for international harvester machinery that fled the neighborhood  back in the eighty's and left a horribly contaminated site exelon came in in two thousand and eight cleaned up the site to a degree and installed a solar  installation that now generates enough electricity for about fifteen hundred households every added local jobs so it's a good example of what you can do with a very degraded site there are lots of other examples that i could give in california there's a rocket fuel testing facility owned by aerojet rocketdyne they've polluted the groundwater terribly and they've recently installed a solar array that is now providing power for the pump america's land a program and that program has looked at over one hundred thousand brownfield sites and it estimates that if we were to tap the full solar potential of those sites we could be getting about three times total power needs from the sun so we're talking about a prodigious energy resource that if we just did that we could be moving away from fossil fuels but there are a lot of other things we can do with solar that are accessible and offer lots of advantages as well and you have there a difference of scales that could be very local indeed right so that you have practically independence on their own i remember when they started in germany people were selling their electricity back to the  energy plants that were their excess solar energy or in terms of scale what are we talking about like you have these huge solar fields and you have very small things well one of the great things about residential solar and solar on let's say a warehouse roof is that through a mechanism called net energy metering we can sell our excess electricity back to our local utility it's a great advantage to people who have invested in in putting in solar facilities the sun is sometimes shining when you don't need the power sometimes you need the power when the sun isn't shining and so it allows you to interact very flexibly with your local utility and that's certainly what we do here in massachusetts it's what many many states are doing now in terms of offering that net energy metering opportunity and those  installations can be as small as the twenty three panels we have on our residential roof on up to the white rose food storage warehouse in new jersey which has covered an entire roof that extends for a quarter of a mile with solar panels and generates ninety percent of its power from the sun so it's very scalable and you have fields to write that down there is and so you could have huge fields of the soul first solar panels and so on to your ice like arizona and well those are utility scale projects that are operating on a different model so they're operating much as a conventional power plant operates in that they generate a certain amount of power it is sold on the wholesale power market i think and it is of a scale equivalent to a large power plant so for example one facility that i visited is called the california valley solar ranch it's built in san luis obispo county it generates enough electricity for one hundred thousand california households it's a giant facility  considered vulnerable species that they wanted to make sure weren't harmed during the construction of that field they collected those species built what were called temporary condos for the and temporary dens for the  minimize the environmental impact of their very substantial solar project and i want to emphasize that we tend to talk about clean energy and dirty energy i like to talk about cleaner energy and dirtier energy in that there is no such thing as totally clean energy there are impacts of renewable energy and we just have to manage them responsibly well this is one of the interesting things that you've brought out both in both books is is this planning which  we're moving in a rational direction at long last i mean we've had centuries of other kinds of planning of war as or without asking any questions about who were intruding on and now this is changing the way we think it can be done so this has been very interesting again this is where you have brought up like native american territory which i don't know if people are aware of how those communities have been with oil and gas could you give us a little background there and tell us about the solar how they responded to the possibility of solar but again it's a very new technology so i think they're proceeding cautiously they also are cash poor so they can't just jump at you invest for travis but one community i visited it's the more piute tribe in southeastern nevada it's a very small tribe of less than four hundred people but they are very land rich they have about seventy two thousand acres of land and two thousand acres to two thousand times two because they're two different solar farms they've decided to build some photo c solar capacity and they are selling that power actually into the southern california grid so they're providing electricity to greater los angeles let's say and they too were very careful about how they protected local species so in that case the desert tortoise was the primary focus of concern it's and it's a threatened species under the u s endangered species act they trans located about seventy five tortoises fitted them with monitoring devices and placed them in a conservation area that was i think six thousand acres a very large conservation area and they found over the course of a long period of tracking them that only one of those trans located tortoises died and was killed as a result of a coyote attack which could have happened about where it was originally so that was a success story and they are now generating a very significant source of income from that solar facility again they didn't have the capital to build it themselves so they lease the land to a solar developer and they're getting lease payments from that solar developer ok but it's not the kind of environmental and community abuse that they had i think made them very uneasy probably it makes continues to make them very because they have been exploited so badly by the oil and the industry with this particular tribe immediately adjacent to the tribal land it is a very large coal plant that they have been fighting to get close down and it will close down good there are other areas for example the navajo are very heavily dependent upon employment by the coal industry some of the largest coal fire power plants in the country are a good job a homeland and so they are nervous about rocking the boat visa v that very important source of income it's a very major revenue stream for the tribal economy and it's also a major jobs provider and it's also obviously been a major problem in terms of the health of the new trailer after that or a so they're caught between a rock and a hard place a little bit but i suspect that they will begin to recognise the huge advantages of solar energy and recognise that it may be time to move away from some of their dependence upon reading but again it's a sort of a negotiation in a more honorable way animal a rational way that they're doing this so you're optimistic now about solar and presumably wind and then in terms of that country as a whole how do you read our additive why are you been so slow slower than any developed nation and the president has been trying to move us along and they're still getting resistance what's your take now how are we going to go forward well i think one of the encouraging things about both solar and wind is that in states that aren't ideologically aligned with the president's agenda viz of the climate change we're seeing solar and wind take off so for example in texas ten percent of that state's power now comes from wind and texas is the largest electricity consumer in the country it's not the largest th population of the biggest consumer of power so ten percent of that state's power is very considerable kansas is a very conservative state it gets twenty one percent of its power today from wind if you wyoming is thinking of developing solar wind there are some very large parcels of land ranch land that they may well develop as wind farms to bring wind into southern california actually that market and so it kind of defies political nor i guess it is a very red state so yes and there are some good things happening at the state level one of the great catalysts to both solar and wind is the renewable portfolio standard which is a minimal amount of electricity that a state determines must come from qualifying renewable sources california not surprisingly is in the lead in this regard it requires that by twenty thirty fifty percent of that state's power must come from renewable resources and that does not include large scale hydro so we're talking about a fundamental transfer gasometer and revenue of all that yeah so we've been stymied at the national level and at working at lee the president i think with his clean power plan was very much on the right track and that it's been slowed down but i think the economics are moving significantly away from coal in any case and i think we will see a lot of those plants shut down we're already seeing a lot of shutdown in the agreement proposal i suppose that canada the united states and mexico north and north america will try think it is twenty thirty at the really it's a decade away or something rather they're going to have a large percentage of this but they are including among renewa nuclear energy and hydropower both of which have lots of problems do you think that might change down the line that this that they're as i being that as solar and wind become much more efficient at all the time and much easier to deploy do you think maybe they'll change and get rid of the net new claire temptation and hydropower you know give them one of the time new clear to me is a very very precarious technology for whole variety of reasons not the least of which is that we live in a politically incredibly told she was times and for the united states to be perpetuating that technology and then at the same time telling other nations that they can't do so i think smacks of hypocrisy and invites abuse of a very very vulnerable technology we are producing weapons grade materials and facilities that pose a very real threat to the world to tell people that i think you wrote a letter to the editor an op ed something  for the new york times and that's on this event page i believe but it was this warning exactly excuse me yeah no i think nuclear is a kind of temptation we think of it just as we did in the fifty's as a kind of panacea  could develop the next generation of nuclear plants then we can move forward and we don't bother with all this solar and all this wind and i think it's a it's an illusion and i think it's a very dangerous illusion and from a purely economic standpoint right now wind and solar are significantly cheaper than building a new nuclear power well if you don't have stuff to bear a you don't have very dangerous waste also true but even if you set that aside upfront costs of building one of these plants nuclear should take a hard look at the economics before they move in that direction i said that's a pretty negative and then hydro power which still people are still out there talking about it although that i don't know if if it's well known that has a environmental impact that is just terrible yes there are there are small scale hydro opportunities that are very very different than building a mass of them that floods an entire ecosystem and so i think we have to kind of buy from him or her an hydro there is the temptation right now to import large quantities of canadian hydro quebec hydro into new england so that we can meet our climate change obligations here in massachusetts for example and it's a very dicey dialogue that is going right going on right now in the massachusetts senate well after all of this i see that we're getting to low on time here but in the future you think that there renewables are we're getting there definitely getting there we might catch up with other developed nations as well i should say actually that the united states in terms of solar technology right now technology we are also among the world leaders china has more installed wind capacity but we actually produce more wind power because i have been much more systematic in making sure that we build a wind farm it can be talking to a great number of people here and abroad and so you get pros and cons you and it's interesting to hear these voices it's a different approach to doing  this kind of a project and we very much appreciate your sharing it with us i hope you'll keep us posted it when you start the next project by all means and thank you very much for joining us thank you for having best of luck thank you