Getting
to Climate Recovery
World experts gathered
at SOLAR 2006 to examine real ways we can address global warming
today.
By Chuck Kutscher
SOLAR
2006, the American Solar Energy Society’s annual conference, was
held in downtown Denver July 7 – 13. With 1,897 registered attendees
and over 100 exhibitors, it was the largest national solar energy
conference in over 25 years. The conference
began Friday, July 7, with the dedication of a new photovoltaic
(PV) system on this year’s ASES Legacy School, the Del Pueblo
Elementary School in Denver. This event was followed by many workshops
and tours held over the weekend. Sunday was a special day devoted
to the public with dozens of free consumer workshops on subjects
such as solar hot water, PV, radiant floors, energy conservation
and small wind systems. More than 1,500 members of the public
took advantage of the workshops and toured the exhibit hall.
The theme of the conference was “Renewable Energy:
Key to Climate Recovery.” We took this theme seriously, devoting
many plenary sessions and forums to it.
Examining the Crisis
The formal conference began with a Sunday night plenary session.
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar and
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Director Dan Arvizu
spoke to the global warming theme. Steve Chalk of the Department
of Energy described the Solar America Initiative, and former senator
Tim Wirth closed out the session. Wirth’s impassioned plea
to finally address global warming brought the audience to its
feet.
The Monday morning plenary was devoted to the
science of global warming. Pioneer climate modeler Warren Washington
of the National Center for Atmospheric Research showed computer
model animations of how the Earth’s climate is changing. NASA’s
top climate change scientist, James Hansen, described the
paleoclimatic evidence of warming in ice cores and warned that
unless we begin very soon to act on the global warming problem,
we will face much higher sea levels and increasingly severe weather
conditions, and many species will become extinct. Monday night
featured a forum by CEOs of major renewable energy companies and
the annual Emerging Architecture session, which focused this year
on the homes built by teams of college students for the 2005 Solar
Decathlon.
The Tuesday morning plenary continued on the climate
change theme. National Geographic Magazine Associate Editor Dennis
Dimick showed a series of color photographs from recent issues
of his magazine on the topics of global warming, the carbon cycle
and oil. His dramatic images of the consequences of global warming
now occurring around the world — including melting glaciers, storm
damage and drought — drove home the seriousness of the crisis.
In the same session, renewable energy expert Don Aitken
described a German study showing how concentrating solar power
could provide large amounts of electricity in the Mediterranean
region, while pioneering solar energy scientist Frank Kreith
outlined renewable energy progress being made at the U.S. state
level and described Brazil’s ethanol success story.
At the awards banquet on Tuesday evening, NREL’s
multi-talented Larry Kazmerski presented a history of PV.
The highlight of his presentation was a hilarious video featuring
the faces of various ASES folks attached to cartoon bodies playing
’60s pop tunes updated with solar lyrics.
Renowned passive solar architect Ed Mazria
kicked off the Wednesday morning plenary by explaining how critical
a role the buildings industry plays in reducing carbon emissions.
He presented his proposal that U.S. buildings be carbon neutral
by 2030. Princeton Professor Rob Socolow described his
elegant “wedges” approach for dividing the needed carbon reductions
into manageable pieces. As he put it, an enormous task is divided
into individual monumental efforts! Denis Hayes of the
Bullitt Foundation wrapped up the session with a sobering observation
of how slow society has been in responding to a crisis that we
have been warned about for decades. He argued that we need to
stop talking about the need to tackle global warming and just
do it!
Demonstrating the Promise of RE/EE
A key part of the conference was a special track of nine presentations
(with three each on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday) that presented
analyses showing how each of the renewable technologies (concentrating
solar, PV, wind, biomass, biofuels and geothermal) and energy
efficiency (in buildings, transportation and industry) could reduce
carbon emissions by 2030. At what had to be the best-attended
closing luncheon in many years, I had the pleasure of summarizing
the outstanding analyses done by the special-track speakers from
NREL, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Rocky Mountain Institute.
I showed that to be on track for the carbon reductions needed
to limit future temperature rise to 1ºC above the year 2000 value,
we need to offset between 1,000 million and 1,200 million tons
of carbon per year by 2030.
NREL Graphical Information Systems specialist
Donna Heimiller had generated a set of U.S. maps, with
each showing the location of a renewable resource and its carbon-reduction
potential. As each resource is added to the map, a rising bar
chart shows the corresponding carbon offsets, until the total
reaches 1,300 million tons of carbon per year — more than the
target. I showed the same results in the form of wedges on a graph
and also a pie chart indicating the relative contributions. The
results are preliminary and authors are now working on revisions
to assure greater consistency between the studies.
Implementing Change
Many people who attended told me the conference provided them
with a newfound appreciation for the global warming crisis and
gave them additional motivation to pursue their work on renewable
energy. Now we must build on the momentum that the conference
provided.
This
fall we will publish the nine papers and related conference materials
in a special report. We all need to work together to get out
the message that global warming is a serious problem, but we have
solutions and we must start implementing them. As climate change
experts James Hansen and Warren Washington warned, time is running
out.
Dr. Chuck Kutscher ( ckutscher@ases.org
) is a Principal Engineer/Group Manager of the Thermal Systems
Group at NREL. He is a CRES founding member and life member, and
he was general chair of the SOLAR 2006 Conference. Reprinted with
permission from Solar Today magazine. For more on the conference
and a link to Solar Today, see the ASES website at: http://www.ases.org
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