History > 2011 > USA > Weather / Nature / Environment (I)

Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff,

Environmental Advocate,

Dies at 81

December 29, 2011
The New York imes
By BRUCE WEBER

Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, a Georgian aristocrat and a lifelong New Yorker who became an environmental watchdog in posts in and out of government, died on Monday in his home on the Upper East Side. He was 81.

The cause was esophageal cancer, his son Andrew said.

A prince whose family nobility dates to the 15th century in the Eurasian kingdom of Georgia (now an independent republic that shares borders with Russia, Turkey and the Black Sea), Mr. Sidamon-Eristoff was a kind of supercitizen conservationist, performing innumerable decision-making roles in jobs dealing with the environment in and around New York City.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay, he was the city’s highway commissioner. He later became the head of its Transportation Department, dealing with quality-of-life issues that city officials are still coping with today, among them the installation of bike lanes, the inspection of subways, the relief of traffic in Midtown Manhattan and plans for tollbooths for the East River bridges.

Over 15 years, Mr. Sidamon-Eristoff, who was known as Connie, served under three governors as a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, beginning in 1974 with his appointment by Gov. Malcolm Wilson.

From 1989 to 1993, during the George Bush presidency, Mr. Sidamon-Eristoff headed the Environmental Protection Agency’s New York region — officially Region 2, encompassing New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and eight tribal nations. He oversaw programs dealing with the control of air and water pollution, industrial discharges, toxic substances, pesticides and ocean dumping, as well as the federal Superfund for the cleanup of hazardous waste sites.

In that role, he was a chief advocate for a controversial program in which New York City would receive a waiver from a federal order that all cities filter their water. Mr. Sidamon-Eristoff argued, against considerable opposition within the E.P.A. itself, that the city should compensate upstate communities for limiting development that was endangering the city’s reservoirs.

“The water staff were very much at odds with the New York region,” William K. Reilly, the administrator of the E.P.A. at the time, said in an interview Wednesday. “When I sided with Connie to not require surface water treatment, I thought I was buying two or three years for New York City. He brokered the deal, and to my astonishment it worked. It works today.

“It resulted in preservation of an intact and clean water supply. It protected land and preserved landscapes, and it saved New York City more than $2 billion in filtration costs. In conferences around the country it is now routinely cited as one of the iconic deals where you put rural and urban interests together to the advantage of both.”

Prince Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff was born in Manhattan on June 28, 1930, and grew up both in the city and in Highland Falls, N.Y., along the Hudson River near West Point.

His father, Prince Simon Sidamon-Eristoff, was an Imperial Russian Army officer during World War I and, in a brief period of Georgian independence, the chief of staff of the Georgian Army; he emigrated to the United States after the Bolsheviks invaded Georgia in 1921. (The hyphenated name, a Russianized version of the original Georgian, Sidamoni-Eristavi, is a family name plus a title. Eristavi, in Georgian, translates loosely as “head of the people,” Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff said.)

In the United States, Prince Simon married Anne Tracy, a descendant of John Bigelow, an American diplomat in the mid-19th century.

Young Connie went to the Millbrook School in Dutchess County, N.Y., and studied geological engineering at Princeton before serving in the Army in the Korean War and receiving a Bronze Star. After earning a law degree from Columbia in 1957, he worked as an executive assistant for Mr. Lindsay, who was then a congressman, and helped organize his subsequent campaign for mayor. His first job in the Lindsay administration was as an aide in charge of dispensing patronage.

In the 1990s, Mr. Sidamon-Eristoff became chairman of Audubon New York, the first state office of the National Audubon Society, which led the way for other state offices. That allowed the organization, which promotes the protection and management of birds, wildlife and their habitats, to become more locally oriented.

“He gave us a level of gravitas that enabled us to take off,” Albert E. Caccese, executive director of Audubon New York and a vice president of the National Audubon Society, said. “It was just a fledgling organization that didn’t know where it was heading until he created a course for it.”

In addition to his son Andrew, Mr. Sidamon-Eristoff is survived by his wife, the former Anne Phipps, whom he married in 1957; a sister, Anne Sidamon-Eristoff; two other children, Simon and Elizabeth; and eight grandchildren.

“He was one of those effective leaders who was also lovable,” Mr. Reilly, the former E.P.A. chief, said, adding: “He was a heavyweight. He had integrity, and he had excellent judgment.”

“But he was also extraordinarily good company,” Mr. Reilly said. “He was my wife’s favorite dance partner.”

    Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, Environmental Advocate, Dies at 81, NYT, 29.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/nyregion/constantine-sidamon-eristoff-environmental-advocate-dies-at-81.html

Reindeer Are Fading Into Holiday Myth

December 23, 2011
The New York imes
By JUSTINA C. RAY

Toronto

CHRISTMAS is tied to the magical north and to the reindeer — creatures of mythical power that fly through the night across the world, helping to distribute happiness and good will. But reindeer do exist — we call them caribou in North America — and these animals and their home in the boreal woodlands and on the barren-ground tundra are in trouble.

For the past decade, I have been conducting aerial surveys of caribou herds. As I sit strapped in small planes in minus-20-degree temperatures, it amazes me that that they survive against the challenges of their environment — particularly the females. These animals spend most of the year on the move and live in places that seem intolerably harsh. They undertake long journeys of hundreds or thousands of miles and return to give birth in the same traditional areas. Such large-scale migrations are an ecological phenomenon that, sadly, is fast disappearing across the planet.

Much of the far north is commonly thought to be wilderness. But this situation has been changing rapidly over the last decade. Caribou require a great deal of space to survive, but the clearing of land for one development project after another, combined with the building of roads and other means of access for resource exploration, are bringing about profound changes to their habitat and making it easier for hunters to reach them.

A changing climate is adding additional stress. More winter rain and ice make it difficult for them to dig for the food that lies under the snow. The timing between caribou arrivals on calving grounds and spring plant growth, calibrated over thousands of years, are more and more mismatched, threatening calf survival. Unpredictable weather patterns are increasing mortality as well, and the escalating intensity and frequency of fires in forests and on the tundra present an additional threat.

During the past century, caribou have vanished from at least 40 percent of their southern range. They are no longer found in Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island or New Brunswick. Many populations are currently in decline, some by as much as 85 percent over the past 10 years alone. Nevertheless, caribou migrations continue to represent one of the last great wildlife spectacles on earth.

Sadly, the wild lands that support caribou are up for grabs. The epicenter of their range is in the vast hydrocarbon-rich reaches of western Canada and Alaska, where millions of barrels of oil await extraction for markets in North America and Asia. We can’t get the oil out fast enough, and as a result, almost every caribou population in the boreal forests of northeastern British Columbia and Alberta is rapidly losing ground.

In the barren lands of the far north, where caribou numbers have undergone natural fluctuations over decades, the question is whether the declining populations will have the chance and the space to rebound as their ranges, particularly their calving areas, face mineral exploration, mine, oil and gas development, and a changing climate. In these regions, caribou hold tremendous cultural importance to northern people. Stresses on this species reverberate in the daily lives of those who share their range.

Scientists who study caribou are gaining a better understanding of what these animals need to survive, and how they respond to changes in their landscape. That knowledge suggests we move with considerably more restraint in the development of wild places that support this great animal. With comprehensive planning, we can maintain landscapes to safeguard caribou populations before all that remains of this Yuletide symbol of the natural world is a wintry dream from our childhood.

Justina C. Ray, a wildlife biologist, is executive director

and senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.

    Reindeer Are Fading Into Holiday Myth, NYT, 23.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/opinion/reindeer-are-fading-into-holiday-myth.html

Lead From Old U.S. Batteries

Sent to Mexico Raises Risks

December 8, 2011
The New York imes
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

NAUCALPAN DE JUÁREZ, Mexico — The spent batteries Americans turn in for recycling are increasingly being sent to Mexico, where their lead is often extracted by crude methods that are illegal in the United States, exposing plant workers and local residents to dangerous levels of a toxic metal.

The rising flow of batteries is a result of strict new Environmental Protection Agency standards on lead pollution, which make domestic recycling more difficult and expensive, but do not prohibit companies from exporting the work and the danger to countries where standards are low and enforcement is lax.

Mexican environmental officials acknowledge that they lack the money, manpower and technical capacity to police a fast-growing industry now operating in many parts of the country, often in dilapidated neighborhoods like the one here, 30 miles northwest of Mexico City.

Batteries are imported through official channels or smuggled in to satisfy a growing demand for lead, once cheap and readily available but now in short global supply. Lead batteries are crucial to cellphone networks, solar power arrays and the exploding Chinese car market, and the demand for lead has increased as much as tenfold in a decade.

An analysis of trade statistics by The New York Times shows that about 20 percent of spent American vehicle and industrial batteries are now exported to Mexico, up from 6 percent in 2007. About 20 million such batteries will cross the border this year, according to United States trade statistics, and that does not take into account batteries smuggled in as mislabeled metal scrap or second-hand goods. In September, more than 60 18-wheelers full of old batteries crossed the border each day, trade records show.

Spent batteries house up to 40 pounds of lead, which can cause high blood pressure, kidney damage and abdominal pain in adults, and serious developmental delays and behavioral problems in young children because it interferes with neurological development. When batteries are broken for recycling, the lead is released as dust and, during melting, as lead-laced emissions.

Lead battery recyclers in the United States now operate in sealed, highly mechanized plants — like labs working with dangerous germs. Their smokestacks are fitted with scrubbers, and their perimeters are surrounded by lead-monitoring devices.

But for much of the past decade, at the vast recycling compound of Industrial Mondelo here, batteries have been dismantled by men wielding hammers, and their lead melted in furnaces whose smokestacks vent to the air outside, where lead particles can settle everywhere from schoolyards to food carts. Officials of the plant, which has been given more than a dozen citations and fines for lead emissions and improper storage of dangerous materials, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The recycling factory has put a neighborhood of children at serious risk of lead exposure, said Marisa Jacott, director of Fronteras Comunes, an environmental group in Mexico City. Ms. Jacott wants to test young residents living near the plant but lacks the money to do so. The town’s elementary school is on the same block as the recycling plant, which recently moved the bulk of its operations to a larger facility elsewhere. Lead pollution remains in the ground for decades.

A sample of soil collected by The Times in the schoolyard showed a lead level of 2,000 parts per million, five times the limit for children’s play areas in the United States set by the Environmental Protection Agency. In most states, that would rate as a “significant environmental lead hazard” and require immediate remediation, like covering the area with concrete or disposing of the soil.

“If we export, we should only be sending batteries to countries with standards as strict as ours, and in Mexico that is not the case,” said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of Occupational Knowledge International, a San Francisco group devoted to reducing lead exposure.

One Border, 2 Standards

While Mexico does have some regulation for smelting and recycling lead, the laws are poorly enforced and even licensed plants are allowed to release about 20 times as much lead as their American equivalents, said Mr. Gottesfeld, who has studied the export trade.

Some American companies recycling in Mexico say that they already exceed that country’s requirements and that they intend to bring their Mexican plants up to American standards. But there is no way to ensure that will happen. The E.P.A. says it “does not inspect, monitor or verify the Mexican facilities.”

Which is why doctors and teachers in Mexico are demanding testing in a country that has little or none. At her community clinic on the outskirts of Guadalajara, Dr. Lourdes Pérez Ramírez said that she routinely saw children with seriously delayed development and that she was convinced that lead poisoning from a nearby recycling plant might play a role, although she cannot prove it, because studies have not been done. “I think there is danger from the lead,” she said, “but to find it you have to look. You have to look!”

Although lead batteries have long been classified as hazardous waste, the E.P.A. only last year began requiring that American companies report their exports — but already, even that minimal system is not achieving the agency’s goal of safer recycling. Exporters must estimate how many batteries they intend to transfer out of the country in the coming year and specify the recipient plant. That paperwork is sent to Semarnat, the Mexican counterpart to the E.P.A., which is responsible for accepting or rejecting the shipments. In 2010, Semarnat never refused.

Then each March, American companies are supposed to tally how many batteries were actually sent, but this year only 3 out of 10 exporters complied.

The E.P.A. declined to speak publicly on the export trade, instead explaining in a statement that its role was “limited to processing” the paperwork for the new battery tracking system.

Many people familiar with the industry said more needed to be done.

“We’re shipping hazardous waste to a neighbor ill equipped to process it and we’re doing it legally, turning our heads, and pretending it’s not a problem,” said Robert Finn, chief executive of RSR, a Dallas-based lead recycler that operates solely in the United States, and is concerned about the loss of raw materials to Mexico.

Sergio Herrera, deputy director for industrial inspection at the Mexican legal agency that oversees environmental compliance, known as Profepa, said regulating the battery trade was an “important priority,” but early efforts to control it have mostly exposed the daunting size of the task. A recent government survey found that 19 of 20 recycling plants did not have proper authorization for importing dangerous waste, including batteries. And a retrospective review of truck manifests turned up 142 illegal shipments containing millions of spent car batteries that had not been detected at the border.

Acumuladores de Jalisco, the recycling plant near Dr. Pérez Ramírez’s clinic, operates without the proper authorization to recycle imports and when it was last inspected in 2006, was found to lack storage for even “one fifth of the hazardous waste it generates.” Yet there is no record of any fine, or follow-up, which Mr. Herrera called “a deficiency on our part in not verifying our procedures.” The recycler did not respond to repeated interview requests.

Along the border, where American vigilance focuses on drugs and illegal immigrants, there is little effort to stanch the flow, with the Customs and Border Protection agency dealing “mostly with imports,” said Erlinda Byrd, an agency spokeswoman, though she noted there had been some spot checks for illegal waste exports. This year, the Mexican government trained more than 200 of its border agents on better detection of illegal shipments of batteries and other electronic waste.

But most illegal activity is discovered by accident: the criminal division of the E.P.A. says it has recently opened investigations into three cases of illegal battery exports, the first such cluster. All resulted from tips, often from American companies trying to operate within government rules, agency officials said.

In Mexico, a truck from Texas was impounded in October after a border agent noticed it was dripping acid. It contained 1,800 spent batteries. The truck’s paperwork indicated that it was heading for a licensed recycler, but the driver told the police he was really taking it elsewhere. Another case involved 22.5 tons of batteries sent from Texas whose lead had already been resold to buyers in China.

The amount of lead shipped from Mexico to China has nearly tripled in three years to an estimated 150 million tons in 2011, according to government trade statistics. Mexico’s production of lead from mining has increased only minimally since 2007.

 

‘A Putrid Mist’

Chronic lead poisoning in children is hard to diagnose because the symptoms are fairly common, among them low I.Q. and attention issues. Without blood test results, a definitive diagnosis is impossible. Few labs in Mexico offer lead testing and the cost — about $100 — is beyond the reach of poor families.

After Mariel Landeros developed seizures last year in her first months of life, her family worried that the battery recycling plant across from her home in Naucalpan de Juárez was to blame.

Industrial Mondelo has been recycling batteries for nearly a decade, but production has grown manyfold in the last few years. “As soon as they started, there was a putrid mist over the town,” said Mariel’s aunt, Irma Landeros Aguirre.

She had become increasingly concerned about the problems of her own daughter, Krystell, now 16, who suffered from nosebleeds and stomachaches, and lagged years behind her peers in school. Krystell had been referred for tests and was on a medley of drugs to control her behavior. But she had never had her blood tested for lead.

So when the baby exhibited serious neurological problems, the family visited the National Institute of Pediatrics in Mexico City. Mariel’s first test came back at 18.4 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood when she was 2 months old, well above what doctors consider safe for children. At 4 months, the level had gone up to 24.8. The doctor prescribed powerful medicine to bind the lead in her body so that it can be cleaned out by her kidneys.

According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Blood lead levels of 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood in young children can result in lowered intelligence, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced attention span, hyperactivity and antisocial behavior.” An advisory task force in the United States has recommended remediation for children to 5 micrograms.

It is difficult to prove that lead battery recycling is the culprit in any one poisoning case, because there are other sources of lead exposure, like lead-based paint or ceramic pottery. But performing crude battery recycling close to where people live is a frightening combination, experts say.

Outside Acumuladores de Jalisco, the recycler at the edge of Guadalajara, open-air restaurants and a farmers’ market sidle up to the factory’s dirty brick wall. Fruits and vegetables are piled on crates and children play on the ground. A sample of that dirt tested at an accredited lab in the United States contained a lead level of 485 parts per million, a rate unsafe for play areas, let alone food handling.

Lead Is Gold

The American car battery industry likes to boast that it has the highest recycling rate for any commodity — 97 percent of the lead is recycled — and most states have laws mandating that stores take back old batteries. Whether deposited at the store where they were purchased or with a local mechanic, used batteries are redirected to recycling plants, where the real goal is not environmental stewardship but extracting the precious lead that is the gold of a protean trading system where traceability is impossible.

The provenance of any one battery is hard to ascertain because big stores like AutoZone and Wal-Mart put their own brand names on batteries that may be manufactured by various companies. Similarly, some large battery manufacturers like Johnson Controls and Exide Technologies take back their batteries and operate some recycling plants themselves. But they sometimes send batteries out to external recyclers, and buy lead from these outside recyclers for their battery-making operations.

At some point in their existence many used batteries are sold to middlemen who ship or sell them for lead extraction to the cheapest processor — increasingly, in Mexico, despite the transport cost — so the lead can be reused or resold. The price of lead scrap sold on trading Web sites has varied from 25 to 40 cents a pound in the past year, up from 5 cents a pound a decade ago. The lower the cost to extract the lead, the bigger the profit — a reality, experts say, that encourages smuggling and has fueled a black market in batteries.

Federico Magalini, a researcher at the United Nations University who is trying to quantify the illegal lead trade, said batteries were ideal for smuggling because — unlike bulky refrigerators or computer monitors —they are compact and loaded with lead. “If you want to make a lot of money you can just smash the plastics, throw the acid wherever you want, and sell the lead at a high price,” he said.

But the increasing export of lead batteries has hobbled many American recyclers, especially smaller players, who now say they have only enough spent batteries to run one shift a day, resulting in layoffs. “Our industry is built on the ability to keep that material here,” said Bruce Cole, executive vice president, strategy and business development, of Exide, one of the largest domestic manufacturers and recyclers.

Already hurt by the recession, American recyclers are now also suffering from the cost of tougher regulation. The E.P.A. has reduced allowable lead levels in both smokestack emissions and ambient air by a staggering amount in the last three years because of a growing appreciation of the devastating effect that even low levels of lead have on health. American recyclers estimate the cost of compliance for a typical plant at $20 million.

Companies are being forced to make difficult decisions.

Exide, which has five recycling plants in the United States, does no recycling in Mexico, according to Mr. Cole, who said it was “not in our interest” to “skirt regulations.”

Some battery brokers have begun trucking their goods to independent smelters south of the border instead of to American plants.

Johnson Controls, the Milwaukee-based battery giant, trucked hundreds of thousands of spent batteries to its own recycling plant in Mexico last year, according to E.P.A. export notices. The company runs one licensed recycling plant in Mexico and is completing construction of a second; it is also building a new recycling plant in South Carolina.

Alex Molinaroli, a senior executive at Johnson Controls, said its plants in Mexico far exceeded that country’s regulatory standards and that they would be upgraded to meet the new American standards when they take full effect in 2013. “We don’t have a Mexican standard or a U.S. standard or a German standard,” he said. “We have our one standard globally, which today is being driven by the E.P.A.”

Although Johnson Controls has won praise from the E.P.A. for environmental innovation in the United States, its Mexican recycling plant does not face the same regulatory scrutiny.

Working in the Dark

Mexico does have some regulations governing lead exposure, and many plants hire doctors to monitor lead in the blood of workers. But the results are not made public or even disclosed to the workers themselves. If the levels come back high, employees are sent home for several days with an analgesic for the bone pain that typically accompanies adult lead poisoning, said Ms. Jacott, of Fronteras Comunes, who has spent two years interviewing workers. There are no requirements for monitoring lead levels beyond the factory.

Residents who live near the Acumuladores de Jalisco plant said they had been told by the government that the ground water was contaminated with lead, and they tick off maladies they attribute to lead exposure.

The men who disassemble the batteries end each shift covered in dust from their work and must shower and change before they leave, said the wife of one worker, who said that the factory doctor took good care of the men. “Anyway,” she said, “there are not many other jobs around here.”

Environmental advocates and domestic recyclers say the onus should be on the United States to make sure its old batteries do not become Mexico’s health problem. Some say a system is needed for inspecting foreign recyclers so they can be held to American standards. But one group, Slab Watchdog, has called on companies like Wal-Mart — which sells a huge share of the nation’s batteries and prides itself on environmentally friendly operations — to guarantee that their batteries are recycled domestically.

The company’s spent batteries, a spokeswoman said, now go to Johnson Controls — the company that last year sent by far the most batteries to Mexico.

 

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York,

and Karla Zabludovsky from Mexico City.

David Agren contributed research from Guadalajara, Mexico.

    Lead From Old U.S. Batteries Sent to Mexico Raises Risks, NYT, 8.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/science/earth/recycled-battery-lead-puts-mexicans-in-danger.html

As Water Levels Drop,

Texas Drought

Reveals Secrets of the Deep

November 29, 2011
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

MARTINS MILL, Tex. — For more than three years, the lake on Jack Mewbourn’s ranch here held a secret at its murky bottom: A 1999 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. His grandson was the first one to notice the top of the car peeking out of the water. It wasn’t luck, or even fate. It was drought.

The water level in the seven-acre lake has dropped about five feet from a lack of rain. Stand on the grass lining the lake’s edge today, and in any other year you would be standing nearly waist-deep in water.

On a recent Saturday, Mr. Mewbourn, a longtime rancher in this rural unincorporated community about 90 minutes southeast of Dallas, took a boat to the middle of the lake with two of his grandsons. They confirmed that the object they thought at first might be a barrel was indeed a car. Mr. Mewbourn called a local constable, and with the help of a diver and a tow truck, the vehicle was slowly dragged out. Inside, still buckled into the driver’s seat, were the remains of Brenda Kay Oliver, who had been missing since July 2008.

Ms. Oliver’s relatives said she had never recovered from the trauma of her 19-year-old son’s suicide. He had drowned himself in a nearby lake. The authorities believe Ms. Oliver, 55, took her own life by driving her car into Mr. Mewbourn’s lake, about a mile from where her sister, the last person to see her alive, had been living at the time.

Mr. Mewbourn and the Van Zandt County constable, Pat Jordan, have found themselves in recent days calling a cruel thing like a drought a strange sort of blessing. “If it wouldn’t have been for the drought,” Mr. Jordan said, “she’d probably still be in the car in that lake.”

The historic drought that has devastated crops and forced millions of Texans in small towns and large cities to abide by mandatory water restrictions has had at least one benefit: As lake levels have dropped around the state, objects of all kinds that had been submerged for years, decades and even centuries are being revealed.

Some of the discovered items are common debris like computer monitors, tires and sunken boats. But much of it has attracted the attention of historians, anthropologists, criminal investigators and, in one case, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Long-submerged marble tombstones from the 1880s have become visible in the receding waters of Lake Buchanan in Central Texas. Near the Texas-Louisiana border, the grave sites from an early 19th-century cemetery have turned up at one drought-stricken lake. Pat Mercado-Allinger, the director of the Texas Historical Commission’s archaeology division, said one water authority estimated having roughly 200 previously unreported archaeological sites resulting from lowered lake levels.

“The drought in Texas has been so severe and so widespread, across essentially the entire state, that we’re hearing reports from all over,” said Ms. Mercado-Allinger, who was reluctant to discuss precise locations of many sites because of concerns for looting. “There are artifact collectors out there and looters who look for opportunities and go add to their personal collections or mine the sites. We have to be very careful.”

At Lake Georgetown north of Austin, where the water level has dropped 23 feet, fishermen found a human skull at the edge of the water last month. The Georgetown police initially thought it might be related to the 2002 disappearance of a 19-year-old woman, but the skull was ultimately found to be of historical, not criminal, significance. It is believed to be the skull of an American Indian man that is hundreds or thousands of years old, and is being studied in a lab by anthropologists at Texas State University in San Marcos.

In East Texas at Lake Nacogdoches, which has dropped 12 feet in the drought, residents stumbled onto a much larger object in late July. It was a spherical aluminum tank, four feet in diameter, that was cracked on top and sat in the mud at the lake’s edge. NASA officials later determined that it was a piece of debris from the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry in 2003, killing the seven astronauts aboard.

The debris, one of 18 cryogenic tanks used to store the oxygen and hydrogen that provided electrical power to the shuttle, was put on a truck and driven to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Only one of the 18 tanks remains missing, a NASA spokeswoman said.

At Richland-Chambers Reservoir in north-central Texas, which has decreased more than eight feet, a post-Civil-War-era cemetery of freed slaves has emerged along the shoreline. The wooden coffins and the remains of more than 20 African-Americans, most of them children, have been found. A skull was first discovered in 2009 after the lake level dropped, but when the waters rose again, the site was submerged, forcing local amateur historians to wait.

“Everybody hates the drought, but I needed the drought,” said Bruce F. McManus, chairman of the Navarro County Historical Commission. “I knew it was there.”

Despite periodic rainstorms, lower temperatures and even snowfall in Amarillo late last month, Texas remains in the midst of one of its worst droughts.

From January through October, statewide rainfall totaled 10.77 inches, about 15 inches below average. The year that ended in September was the driest in Texas since at least 1895, when statewide weather records begin, breaking the previous record low set in 1956 by 2.5 inches.

“It’s the most severe single-year drought on record,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “There literally is no point of comparison.”

Professor Nielsen-Gammon said that the drought would persist and that most of the state would be experiencing major drought through next summer. “We have so much rainfall to make up, it’s unlikely to be made up in the spring and summer,” he said.

The water levels at many of the state’s man-made lakes have become a drought barometer. Lake levels have decreased statewide by as little as a few feet to as much as 50 feet or more. Some lakes are completely dry, and others are close to it. Lake E. V. Spence in West Texas, which normally has a maximum depth of 108 feet, is less than 1 percent full.

In Canton in East Texas, the drought has hurt Donna McWilliams as it has other Texans — she and her husband lost trees and sold off cattle because of a lack of hay — but it also helped her. She is the sister of Ms. Oliver, whose body was found in Martins Mill.

Ms. Oliver’s relatives had mailed fliers with her picture to homeless shelters and clinics, and put them up in local restaurants and pharmacies, always hoping, always wondering.

“I guess ‘closure’ is the word,” said Ms. McWilliams, 60, one of Ms. Oliver’s two sisters. “Now we don’t have to wonder anymore. I do think the drought is a negative, but if there’s anything that can happen good out of a drought, it’s this, and it’s a blessing.”

    As Water Levels Drop, Texas Drought Reveals Secrets of the Deep, NYT, 29.11.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/us/texas-drought-is-revealing-secrets-of-the-deep.html

The Solyndra Mess

November 24, 2011
The New York Times

The Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee appear to have hit the pause button on their investigation into the failure of Solyndra, a solar panel maker that entered bankruptcy proceedings in September, defaulting on a $528 million federal loan.

What have we learned? Nobody comes out of this looking good. Not the Obama administration, which appears to have misread the market in its eagerness to proclaim that it was creating green jobs. Not the Republicans, either, as their partisanship turned a legitimate inquiry into a circus of broad accusations aimed more at tarnishing the administration than contributing to a serious discussion of energy policy.

The Republicans hoped to prove that the Solyndra loan was a political favor to wealthy investors with Democratic ties, chiefly George Kaiser, an Oklahoma billionaire. They have not made this case. There were plenty of other private investors, some of them Republicans. In sworn testimony to the committee, Steven Chu, the energy secretary, denied knowing who Mr. Kaiser was when he signed off on the loan in September 2009 and said it had been “made only on the merits.”

Nor have the Republicans succeeded in showing President Obama’s green energy strategy to be a flop. About 40 projects have received loans under a clean energy program authorized by Congress in 2005 and incorporated in the Obama administration’s 2009 stimulus package. Only two have failed, Solyndra and Beacon Power, a battery company in upstate New York that borrowed $39 million. These defaults represent just 1.3 percent of the $37.6 billion loan portfolio. The biggest bet to date is an $8.33 billion loan guarantee for a nuclear plant in Georgia.

Even so, the hearings have raised legitimate questions about the Solyndra deal. Solyndra was the first beneficiary of the loan program and seemed to be an ideal candidate — a company with a new technology and lots of venture capital — for an administration eager to show results. So eager, in fact, that the White House appeared willing to ignore warnings from its own experts about rising competition in the solar panel market. E-mail exchanges released by Republicans from August 2009, as the loan neared approval, show that some officials in the Office of Management and Budget were beginning to worry that Chinese companies could threaten Solyndra’s sales with cheaper units; one official asked that “the announcement be postponed.” But those worries were dismissed, and the loan announcement went ahead as planned.

Those fears were not unfounded. By May 2010, when President Obama visited the company to trumpet green energy, the market had weakened and Solyndra was showing cracks. Yet the White House remained deeply invested in Solyndra’s success; according to one e-mail from an investor quoted by the Republicans, it asked the company to delay announcing layoffs until after the November 2010 elections. Given Solyndra’s prominence, layoffs would obviously have been embarrassing.

One other issue involves Mr. Chu’s decision to subordinate Solyndra’s loan to a new round of private financing last February, allowing private investors to move ahead of taxpayers in the event of a default. Republicans say this was illegal, but Mr. Chu says he had been assured by the loan program’s chief counsel that it was proper because new financing was essential to keep the company solvent.

Last month, the White House asked Herbert Allison Jr., a former assistant Treasury secretary, to undertake a 60-day review of the loan program and assess the health of other companies that received loans. The Republican inquiry has raised valid questions, but it has also unfairly tried to exploit one bad bet to discredit public investments in renewable technologies. As the investigations continue, Congress must not lose sight of the bigger picture: the need to invest in promising alternatives to fossil fuels.

    The Solyndra Mess, NYT, 24.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/opinion/the-solyndra-mess.html

4 Dead and Dozens Hurt

as Storms Pound the Southeast

November 16, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) — A strong storm system that produced several possible tornadoes hit the Southeast on Wednesday, damaging dozens of homes and buildings. At least four people were killed and dozens more were injured.

Suspected tornadoes were reported in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina, and thousands of people were without power as trees and power lines were downed.

In South Carolina, three people were killed and five injured when a likley tornado swept through a rural community near Rock Hill, about 20 miles south of Charlotte, N.C. In north Georgia, an unidentified person was killed when a tree fell on a sport utility vehicle

In eastern Alabama, a suspected twister splintered trees and demolished mobile homes at a pair of housing parks near the Auburn University campus. Less than seven months ago, a massive tornado roared past the campus of archrival University of Alabama in the western part of the state.

It was the worst bout of weather for the state since about 250 people were killed during the tornado outbreak in April. Both campuses were spared major damage this time.

In Rock Hill, Simone Moore told The Herald newspaper that she was sitting on her back porch when she saw the tornado touch down and then quickly move back up. She said after the storm passed, she noticed a nearby trailer had vanished.

"Everything's gone," Moore said. "Even the cows in the pasture."

As weather service experts fanned out to assess damage, Auburn graduate student Staci DeGeer didn't have any doubts about what sent a pair of trees crashing through her mobile home at Ridgewood Village.

"It's tornado damage. I'm from Kansas; I know tornado damage," said DeGeer, who wasn't home at the time. "It's kind of hit or miss. There will be two or three (trailers) that are bad and then a few that are OK."

Trees fell on homes in southeastern Mississippi, where Jones County emergency director Don McKinnon said some people were briefly trapped. Mobile homes were tossed off their foundations. In all, 15 people were hurt in the area.

As the weather moved east, tornado warnings and watches were issued in Georgia and South Carolina.

At least 10 people were injured when a possible tornado ripped through an area south of Lexington in North Carolina, destroying one building, damaging several others and leaving thousands without electricity.

Forecasters said a cold front stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Northeast was to blame. Temperatures dropped in some areas from the low 70s to the 50s as the front passed, and winds gusted to near 30 mph.

Damage was reported in several parts of Alabama. In Sumter County, in the west-central part of the state, an elderly woman was in her home as a tree crashed into it. She had to be taken to the hospital.

In Tuscaloosa, home of the University of Alabama, the day was a harsh reminder of the threat of violent weather for communities still recovering from the killer tornadoes.

"It makes you sit up on the edge of the chair a little more," said Tom Perryman, who works for the school system in Tuscaloosa County, which was hard hit in April.

Some 130 miles to the east, the ailing oaks at Toomer's Corner on the Auburn campus, were OK. An Alabama fan is suspected of poisoning the famous trees in February.

Nearby, DeGeer's dog Jack rode out the storm in her mobile home without injury, but the trailer itself didn't fare as well.

"It looks like I redecorated with a wilderness theme. There are trees through my house," she said.

In southern Louisiana, a suspected tornado hit a neighborhood in Houma, splintering a home. Crews helped clean up storm debris near a school and the Red Cross sent workers to help with damage assessments.

___

Johnson reported from Birmingham and Associated Press writer Jay Reeves contributed to this report from there.

    4 Dead and Dozens Hurt as Storms Pound the Southeast, NYT, 16.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/11/16/us/AP-US-Severe-Weather.html

Re-election Strategy Is Tied

to a Shift on Smog

November 16, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — The summons from the president came without warning the Thursday before Labor Day. As she was driven the four blocks to the White House, Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, suspected that the news would not be good. What she did not see coming was a rare public rebuke the president was about to deliver by rejecting her proposal to tighten the national standard for smog.

The half-hour meeting in the Oval Office was not a negotiation; the president had decided against ratcheting up the ozone rule because of the cost and the uncertainty it would impose on industry and local governments. He clearly understood the scientific, legal and political implications. He told Ms. Jackson that she would have an opportunity to revisit the Clean Air Act standard in 2013 — if they were still in office. We are just not going to do this now, he said.

The White House announced the decision the next morning, infuriating environmental and public health advocates. They called it a bald surrender to business pressure, an act of political pandering and, most galling, a cold-blooded betrayal of a loyal constituency.

“This was the worst thing a Democratic president had ever done on our issues,” said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters. “Period.”

The full retreat on the smog standard was the first and most important environmental decision of the presidential campaign season that is now fully under way. An examination of that decision, based on interviews with lobbyists on both sides, former officials and policy makers at the upper reaches of the White House and the E.P.A., illustrates the new calculus on political and policy shifts as the White House sharpens its focus on the president’s re-election.

Industry groups and their Republican allies praised the move, which leaves a far more lenient ozone rule in place for at least a year. But then they reeled off a dozen other proposed environmental, labor and health regulations they also wanted killed.

In the weeks since that decision, the administration has made a number of other environmental decisions, sending mixed messages that left both environmentalists and industry lobbyists perplexed.

Two major clean air rules have been delayed, at least temporarily. The Interior Department announced a significant expansion of offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico over the next five years. Last week, the administration bowed to pressure from protesters, environmental groups, and residents and officials in Nebraska in announcing that it would delay a decision on the bitterly contested Keystone XL oil pipeline until after the 2012 election. Taken together, the moves mark the White House’s growing awareness of the costs of environmental regulation in a battered economy.

The ozone decision pitted Ms. Jackson, a Princeton-trained chemical engineer and self-described “New Orleans girl,” against the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley, a son and brother of bare-knuckled Chicago mayors who was brought in to help repair relations with business and Congress. It also shows the clout of Cass R. Sunstein, the legal powerhouse who serves, mostly behind the scenes, as the president’s regulatory czar with the mission of keeping the costs of regulation under control.

While Mr. Daley has recently given up some responsibilities at the White House, he remains the administration’s conduit for business interests.

The ozone decision was jarring because it was wholly unexpected. Ms. Jackson considered resigning but soon abandoned the idea as a futile gesture.

Many of the president’s supporters remain unsettled, fearing that the ozone decision meant he was abandoning environmental issues. But White House officials cite two major vehicle emissions rules, the pipeline delay and the president’s stated promise to carry through on other clean air measures as evidence of the administration’s devotion to their causes.

 

Revisiting a Law

In his inaugural address, Mr. Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place” in making government environmental policy. He also pledged to revisit environmental rules set by the administration of George W. Bush that his administration felt were too weak.

The standard for ozone was last set in 2008 by the Bush administration at a level of 75 parts per billion, above the range of 60 to 70 recommended by the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel at the time, but never enacted. Environmental and public health groups challenged the Bush standard in court, saying it would endanger human health and had been tainted by political interference. Smog levels have declined sharply over the last 40 years, but each incremental improvement comes at a significant cost to business and government.

So Ms. Jackson asked health and environmental groups to hold their lawsuit in abeyance while she reconsidered the ozone standard, a job she expected to complete by the summer of 2010. Until then, an outdated ozone standard of 84 parts per billion, set by the E.P.A. of the Bill Clinton administration in 1997, remained the law.

Delay followed delay until the spring of this year, when Ms. Jackson determined that the standard should be set at 65 parts per billion to meet the Clean Air Act’s requirement that it be protective of public health “with an adequate margin of safety.” At 65 parts per billion, the agency calculated, as many as 7,200 deaths, 11,000 emergency room visits and 38,000 acute cases of asthma would be avoided each year.

Ms. Jackson knew that standard would cause political heartburn at the White House, so before submitting it she met with Mr. Daley at least three times in June to try to deal with any concerns. Mr. Daley, rightly sensing the uproar from business and local governments at the cost of meeting such a standard, sharply questioned the costs and burdens as well as the timing of the new rule but never explicitly asked her to hold off or pull back.

Ms. Jackson went back to her suite in a large office complex off Pennsylvania Avenue to huddle with aides and tweak the proposal.

She returned to Mr. Daley with a compromise, agreeing to settle for a somewhat weaker standard, at the upper limit of the recommendations of the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory board, as well as measures to provide significant flexibility in compliance.

Ms. Jackson thought she had a deal. In early July she sent the White House a 500-page package with a detailed cost-benefit analysis for what she assumed would be routine vetting and approval.

“We were absolutely, 100-percent certain we were going to get this ozone rule,” one senior E.P.A. official said.

 

Counteraction

The business community and its Republican allies in Congress went to war.

The ozone rule became a symbol of what opponents called a “regulatory jihad” and brought out a swarm of industry lobbyists and Republicans in Congress who identified it as one of their top targets. They organized letter-writing campaigns, ran ads in journals seen by Washington policy makers and put the ozone rule at the top of the list of administration environmental initiatives they wanted repealed in the fall. They claimed the rule would cost $90 billion a year — far above E.P.A.’s estimates — and put much of the industrial heartland out of business. Local and state officials complained to Congress and the White House that they lacked the resources to enforce the new rule. Even some Democratic lawmakers warned the White House that the regulation would damage their re-election prospects.

Against all this, there was no one lobbying strongly within the White House for the tougher standard. Carol M. Browner, a former E.P.A. administrator who had served as the White House coordinator for energy and environmental policy, left earlier this year as Mr. Daley was taking over because she sensed those issues were taking a back seat to economic and political concerns.

Mr. Daley abolished her job, leaving no one in the current White House who speaks as forcefully on environmental issues as she did.

 

Another Voice

In charge of Mr. Obama’s effort to reduce regulatory costs and burdens was Mr. Sunstein, on leave from teaching at Harvard and a onetime colleague of Mr. Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School. One of the most respected liberal legal scholars of his generation, he is known for his at-times unconventional thinking on regulation and economic behavior.

Mr. Sunstein had his pick of jobs in the new administration. He chose the obscure regulatory affairs office as a potential laboratory for his sometimes iconoclastic views. He has challenged the utility of command-and-control-style federal regulation and has written favorably of programs to “name and shame” polluters as a way of getting them to clean up their operations without enforcement actions or fines. He has sought creative ways to encourage responsible economic and environmental behavior without using the heavy hand of the state.

Mr. Sunstein never really warmed to the proposed ozone rule, not least because it would, by law, be subject to revision again in 2013. He also noted that in nearly half of the E.P.A.’s own case studies, the cost of the new rule would outweigh the benefits, raising additional alarms.

One outside adviser, who watched the process closely but declined to be identified for fear of losing access to policy makers, said the ozone rule provided the perfect opportunity for Mr. Sunstein to make his mark.

“Cass was itching, itching, itching to send a return letter,” the adviser said.

 

Early Objections

Although she was under intense pressure from business and Congressional Republicans over the proposed rule, Ms. Jackson believed the White House would back her. In mid-July, she hosted a delegation of trade group officials at E.P.A. headquarters so they could present their concerns. Among those present were leaders of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable and the American Petroleum Institute.

They tried a hard sell, according to R. Bruce Josten, the chief lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce, noting that the new rule would push hundreds of counties out of compliance with the Clean Air Act and force them to devise costly new air pollution control plans. They suggested she wait until the next review in 2013.

“Lisa is very smart, cordial, friendly,” Mr. Josten said of Ms. Jackson. “She listened to us, but then talked about how important it was to do this, the lung thing, the asthma thing, the kids’ health thing. She felt it was important to go ahead.”

Mr. Josten added: “The funny thing was nobody wanted to come right out and say, ‘Are you guys thinking this through? Your boss is up for re-election next year, do you really want to shut down industrial permitting? You’re going to have a major negative impact on the economy.’ ”

The executives left frustrated. Ms. Jackson knew their efforts were just beginning.

 

Maneuvering

The business lobbyists started working the White House, securing a series of meetings with mid-level staff members in July. Mr. Daley and Mr. Sunstein agreed to meet with them on Aug. 16, the same day they were to meet with public health and environmental groups.

For the West Wing gathering that day, Jack N. Gerard, the pugnacious head of the American Petroleum Institute, brought maps showing the areas that would be out of compliance with the proposed regulation in a vivid swath of red states across the Midwest and along the East Coast, states that Mr. Obama won in 2008. They did not need to spell out the implications.

“The maps were on the table,” said Khary Cauthen, director of federal relations for the petroleum group and a White House environmental adviser in the Bush administration. “One of the C.E.O.’s had a whole spiel he was going to do, ‘This is so bad here, so bad there,’ but Daley shut him up. He was like, ‘I got that.’ ”

John Engler, the former Republican governor of Michigan and president of the Business Roundtable, noted the burden to state and local officials. “I told him, ‘When there’s a cloud over your head about whether you’re going to be able to meet the new standard, you’re likely to lose new business to some other state,’ ” Mr. Engler said, referring to Mr. Daley.

Mr. Daley was well aware of state and local concerns. One of the strongest appeals came from North Carolina, a state Mr. Obama narrowly won in 2008. The state’s governor, Bev Perdue, a Democrat, argued against the new ozone rule. Her air quality director, B. Keith Overcash, wrote the E.P.A. pleading for a delay. “Lack of employment, loss of health care, and in some cases, loss of a home, also affect the health of our citizens,” he said.

“The governors had a big role,” Mr. Engler said. “They were very helpful.”

A few hours later, the other side gathered around the same table in the Roosevelt Room. Mr. Daley, Mr. Sunstein and Gina McCarthy, the top clean air official at the E.P.A., sat at the table; a half-dozen more junior aides lined the walls.

Charles D. Connor, president of the American Lung Association and a childhood friend of Mr. Daley’s, opened by discussing the adverse health impacts of ozone. He introduced Monica Kraft, a pulmonologist at Duke University and the president-elect of the American Thoracic Society.

“I told them that we thought a 70 p.p.b. standard was appropriate for health reasons and laid out the statistics on deaths associated with progressively higher levels of ozone,” Dr. Kraft said. She emphasized the damage smog does to the lungs of even healthy young children.

Mr. Daley listened politely, then asked, “What are the health impacts of unemployment?” It was a question straight out of the industry playbook.

Another member of the group introduced polling data showing strong public support for tougher air rules. Mr. Daley cut him off with an expletive, saying he was not interested in polls.

Daniel J. Weiss of the Center for American Progress presented data showing little difference in employment and economic growth in areas required to adopt stricter ozone standards than those that did not. Mr. Daley nodded but said nothing.

As the meeting was breaking up, Mr. Daley said, “As you know, it’s a very difficult economic time.”

Still, the group left believing that the rule would go forward.

 

The Decision

The timing turned out to be terrible. The White House was locked in an ugly battle with Republicans over raising the debt ceiling, job creation had stalled and the presidential campaign was already under way with a singular focus on Mr. Obama’s stewardship of the foundering economy. The president was preparing a speech on job creation to a joint session of Congress even as he was considering a regulation that many — including governors of politically pivotal states like North Carolina and Ohio — warned could cost thousands of jobs.

For the next two weeks, none of the parties, including the E.P.A. leadership, heard anything from the White House about ozone. Mr. Obama returned to Washington from vacation near the end of August with a heavy menu of economic decisions before him. He wanted the ozone matter behind him and called Ms. Jackson into his office on Sept. 1 to break the news.

“There was always a notion that they were looking for a regulation to use as an example of the reform initiative, a poster child, and this was potentially it,” said a senior E.P.A. official who asked not to be identified on a matter involving discussions with the White House. “We knew one was coming. We just didn’t know which one.”

Since Mr. Obama took office, Mr. Sunstein’s agency has reviewed more than 1,800 rules. Most were approved with some changes and set into law. About 130, including 11 from the E.P.A., were voluntarily and quietly pulled back for further work.

Only one — the ozone standard — was so publicly rejected.

Mr. Sunstein would not discuss his communications with the president, but Mr. Obama is known to prefer concisely written memos to long oral briefings. The president’s brief public statement turning back the proposed ozone rule closely mirrored Mr. Sunstein’s letter to Ms. Jackson.

In an interview, Mr. Sunstein said the rejection of the rule resulted from a long and detailed analysis.

“This decision was made on the merits and not on politics,” he said. “There isn’t an agreement to do things until the process runs its course. There is sometimes a surprise.”

In a letter rejecting her standard, he reminded Ms. Jackson of the president’s executive order in January that all proposed regulations “must promote predictability and reduce uncertainty.”

Although Mr. Sunstein was not present in the Oval Office when Mr. Obama delivered the news to Ms. Jackson, Mr. Daley was there, but stayed mostly silent.

    Re-election Strategy Is Tied to a Shift on Smog, NYT, 16.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/science/earth/policy-and-politics-collide-as-obama-enters-campaign-mode.html

A Gold Rush of Subsidies

in Clean Energy Search

November 11, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS

WASHINGTON — Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on a former cattle ranch and gypsum mine, NRG Energy is building an engineering marvel: a compound of nearly a million solar panels that will produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes.

The project is also a marvel in another, less obvious way: Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project. Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009.

The government support — which includes loan guarantees, cash grants and contracts that require electric customers to pay higher rates — largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come. The beneficiaries include financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, conglomerates like General Electric, utilities like Exelon and NRG — even Google.

A great deal of attention has been focused on Solyndra, a start-up that received $528 million in federal loans to develop cutting-edge solar technology before it went bankrupt, but nearly 90 percent of the $16 billion in clean-energy loans guaranteed by the federal government since 2009 went to subsidize these lower-risk power plants, which in many cases were backed by big companies with vast resources.

When the Obama administration and Congress expanded the clean-energy incentives in 2009, a gold-rush mentality took over.

As NRG’s chief executive, David W. Crane, put it to Wall Street analysts early this year, the government’s largess was a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and “we intend to do as much of this business as we can get our hands on.” NRG, along with partners, ultimately secured $5.2 billion in federal loan guarantees plus hundreds of millions in other subsidies for four large solar projects.

“I have never seen anything that I have had to do in my 20 years in the power industry that involved less risk than these projects,” he said in a recent interview. “It is just filling the desert with panels.”

From 2007 to 2010, federal subsidies jumped to $14.7 billion from $5.1 billion, according to a recent study.

Most of the surge came from the economic stimulus bill, which was passed in 2009 and financed an Energy Department loan guarantee program and a separate Treasury Department grant program that were promoted as important in creating green jobs.

States like California sweetened the pot by offering their own tax breaks and by approving long-term power-purchase contracts that, while promoting clean energy, will also require ratepayers to pay billions of dollars more for electricity for as long as two decades. The federal loan guarantee program expired on Sept. 30. The Treasury grant program is scheduled to expire at the end of December, although the energy industry is lobbying Congress to extend it. But other subsidies will remain.

The windfall for the industry over the last three years raises questions of whether the Obama administration and state governments went too far in their support of solar and wind power projects, some of which would have been built anyway, according to the companies involved.

Obama administration officials argue that the incentives, which began on a large scale late in the Bush administration but were expanded by the stimulus legislation, make economic and environmental sense. Beyond the short-term increase in construction hiring, they say, the cleaner air and lower carbon emissions will benefit the country for decades.

“Subsidies and government support have been part of many key industries in U.S. history — railroads, oil, gas and coal, aviation,” said Damien LaVera, an Energy Department spokesman.

 

A Case Study

NRG’s California Valley Solar Ranch project is a case study in the banquet of government subsidies available to the owners of a renewable-energy plant.

The first subsidy is for construction. The plant is expected to cost $1.6 billion to build, with key components made by SunPower at factories in California and Asia. In late September, the Energy Department agreed to guarantee a $1.2 billion construction loan, with the Treasury Department lending the money at an exceptionally low interest rate of about 3.5 percent, compared with the 7 percent that executives said they would otherwise have had to pay.

That support alone is worth about $205 million to NRG over the life of the loan, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times by Booz & Company, a strategic consulting firm that regularly performs such studies for private investors.

When construction is complete, NRG is eligible to receive a $430 million check from the Treasury Department — part of a change made in 2009 that allows clean-energy projects to receive 30 percent of their cost as a cash grant upfront instead of taking other tax breaks gradually over several years.

Californians are also making a big contribution. Under a state law passed to encourage the construction of more solar projects, NRG will not have to pay property taxes to San Luis Obispo County on its solar panels, saving it an estimated $14 million a year.

Assisted by another state law, which mandates that California utilities buy 33 percent of their power from clean-energy sources by 2020, the project’s developers struck lucrative contracts with the local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, to buy the plant’s power for 25 years.

P.G.& E., and ultimately its electric customers, will pay NRG $150 to $180 a megawatt-hour, according to a person familiar with the project, who asked not to be identified because the price information was confidential. At the time the contract was awarded, that was about 50 percent more than the expected market cost of electricity in California from a newly built gas-powered plant, state officials said.

While neither state regulators nor the companies will divulge all the details, the extra cost to ratepayers amounts to a $462 million subsidy, according to Booz, which calculated the present value of the higher rates over the life of the contracts.

Additional depreciation tax breaks for renewable energy plants could save the company an additional $110 million, according to Christopher Dann, the Booz analyst who examined the project.

The total value of all those subsidies in today’s dollars is about $1.4 billion, leading to an expected rate of return of 25 percent for the project’s equity investors, according to Booz.

Mr. Crane of NRG disputed the Booz estimate, saying that the company’s return on equity was “in the midteens.”

NRG, which initially is investing about $400 million of its own money in the project, expects to get all of its equity back in two to five years, according to a statement it made in August to Wall Street analysts.

By 2015, NRG expects earnings of at least $300 million a year before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization from all of its solar projects combined, making these investments some of the more lucrative pieces in its sprawling portfolio, which includes dozens of power plants fueled by coal, natural gas and oil.

NRG is not the only company gobbling up subsidies. At least 10 of the 16 solar or wind electricity generation projects that secured Energy Department loan guarantees intend to also take the Treasury Department grant, and all but two of the projects have long-term agreements to sell almost all of their power, according to a survey of the companies by The Times.

These projects, in almost all cases, benefit from legislation that has been passed in about 30 states that pushes local utility companies to buy a significant share of their power from renewable sources, like solar or wind power. These mandates often have resulted in contracts with above-market rates for the project developers, and a guarantee of a steady revenue stream.

“It is like building a hotel, where you know in advance you are going to have 100 percent room occupancy for 25 years,” said Kevin Smith, chief executive of SolarReserve. His Nevada solar project has secured a 25-year power-purchase agreement with the state’s largest utility and a $737 million Energy Department loan guarantee and is on track to receive a $200 million Treasury grant.

Because the purchase mandates can drive up electricity rates significantly, some states, including New Jersey and Colorado, are considering softening the requirements on utilities.

Brookfield Asset Management, a giant Canadian investment firm, will receive so many subsidies for a New Hampshire wind farm that they are worth 46 percent to 80 percent of the $229 million price of the project, when measured in today’s dollars, according to analyses for The Times performed by Booz and two other two industry financial experts. (The wide range reflects a disagreement between the experts on the future price of electricity in New Hampshire.)

Richard Legault, the chief executive of Brookfield Renewable Power, the division that oversees the Granite Reliable project in New Hampshire, declined to discuss his profit expectations in detail, but said the project might not have happened without government assistance.

“When everything has come together, it is a good investment for Brookfield, it is no doubt,” Mr. Legault said. “We are quite happy with it.” (Brookfield is also the owner of the small park in Manhattan that is home to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.)

Even companies whose business has little to do with energy or finance, like the Internet giant Google, benefit from the public subsidies. Google has invested in several renewable energy projects, including a giant solar plant in the California desert and a wind farm in Oregon, in part to get federal tax breaks that it can use to offset its profits from Web advertising.

Industry executives and other supporters of the subsidies say that the public money was vital to the projects, in part because financing for renewable energy projects dried up during the recession. They also note that more traditional energy sectors, like oil and natural gas, get heavy subsidies of their own. For example, in the 2010 fiscal year, the oil and gas producers got federal tax breaks of $2.7 billion, according to an analysis by the Energy Information Administration.

“These programs just level the playing field for what oil and gas and nuclear industries have enjoyed for the last 50 years,” said Rhone Resch, president of Solar Energy Industries Association. “Do you have to provide more policy support and funding initially? Absolutely. But the result is more energy security, clean energy and domestic jobs.”

Michael E. Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas, Austin, said renewable energy subsidies were a worthy investment. “It is a form of corporate welfare that is consistent with other social goals like job creation, clean air and boosting a domestic source of energy,” he said.

 

Overflowing Breaks

Obama administration officials said the subsidies were intended to help renewable-energy plants that were jumbo-sized or used innovative technology, both potential obstacles to getting private financing. But even proponents of the subsidies say the administration may have gone overboard.

Concerns that the government was being too generous reached all the way to President Obama. In an October 2010 memo prepared for the president, Lawrence H. Summers, then his top economic adviser; Carol M. Browner, then his adviser on energy matters; and Ronald A. Klain, then the vice president’s chief of staff, expressed discomfort with the “double dipping” that was starting to take place. They said investors had little “skin in the game.”

Officials involved in reviewing the loan applications said that Treasury Department officials pressed the Energy Department to respond to these concerns.

Officials at both agencies declined to discuss the anticipated financial returns of the clean-energy projects the federal government has agreed to guarantee, saying the information was confidential.

But Energy Department officials said they had carefully evaluated every project to try to calculate how much money the developers and investors stood to make. “They were rejected, if they looked too rich or too risky,” Mr. LaVera, the Energy Department spokesman said.

In at least one instance — NRG’s Agua Caliente solar project in Yuma County, Ariz. — the Energy Department demanded that the company agree not to apply for a Treasury grant it was legally entitled to receive. The government was concerned the extra subsidy would result in excessive profit, NRG executives confirmed.

In other cases, the agency required that companies use most of the Treasury grants that they would get when construction was complete to pay down part of the government-guaranteed construction loans instead of cashing out the equity investors.

“The private sector really has more skin in the game than the public realizes,” said Andy Katell, a spokesman for GE Energy Financial Services, which like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other financial firms has large investments in several of these projects.

But there is no doubt that the deals are lucrative for the companies involved.

G.E., for example, lobbied Congress in 2009 to help expand the subsidy programs, and it now profits from every aspect of the boom in renewable-power plant construction.

It is also an investor in one solar and one wind project that have secured about $2 billion in federal loan guarantees and expects to collect nearly $1 billion in Treasury grants. The company has also won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to sell its turbines to wind plants built with public subsidies.

Mr. Katell said G.E. and other companies were simply “playing ball” under the rules set by Congress and the Obama administration to promote the industry. “It is good for the country, and good for our company,” he said.

Satya Kumar, an analyst at Credit Suisse who specializes in renewable energy companies, said there was no question the country would see real benefits from the surge in renewable energy projects.

“But the industry could have done a lot more solar for a lot less price, in terms of subsidy,” he said.

Eric Lipton reported from Washington and Clifford Krauss from Houston.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 18, 2011

An article on Saturday about public subsidies for renewable energy projects described incorrectly the earnings that the utility company NRG projected by 2015 from its solar projects. The company told investors that it expected the projects to generate $354 million annually in Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization; it did not project “more than $300 million a year in profits.” (While Ebitda is one common method of viewing profitability, “profits” is more typically used to describe pretax income, which the company said would be $49 million a year.)

    A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search, NYT, 11.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/business/energy-environment/a-cornucopia-of-help-for-renewable-energy.html

The Dark Side of the ‘Green’ City

November 6, 2011
The New York Times
By ANDREW ROSS

Phoenix

THE struggle to slow global warming will be won or lost in cities, which emit 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. So “greening” the city is all the rage now. But if policy makers end up focusing only on those who can afford the low-carbon technologies associated with the new environmental conscientiousness, the movement for sustainability may end up exacerbating climate change rather than ameliorating it.

While cities like Portland, Seattle and San Francisco are lauded for sustainability, the challenges faced by Phoenix, a poster child of Sunbelt sprawl, are more typical and more revealing. In 2009, Mayor Phil Gordon announced plans to make Phoenix the “greenest city” in the United States. Eyebrows were raised, and rightly so. According to the state’s leading climatologist, central Arizona is in the “bull’s eye” of climate change, warming up and drying out faster than any other region in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southwest has been on a drought watch 12 years and counting, despite outsized runoff last winter to the upper Colorado River, a major water supply for the subdivisions of the Valley of the Sun.

Across that valley lies 1,000 square miles of low-density tract housing, where few signs of greening are evident. That’s no surprise, given the economic free fall of a region that had been wholly dependent on the homebuilding industry. Property values in parts of metro Phoenix have dropped by 80 percent, and some neighborhoods are close to being declared “beyond recovery.”

In the Arizona Legislature, talk of global warming is verboten and Republican lawmakers can be heard arguing for the positive qualities of greenhouse gases. Most politicians are still praying for another housing boom on the urban fringe; they have no Plan B, least of all a low-carbon one. Mr. Gordon, a Democrat who took office in 2004, has risen to the challenge. But the vast inequalities of the metro area could blunt the impact of his sustainability plans.

Those looking for ecotopia can find pockets of it in the prosperous upland enclaves of Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and North Phoenix. Hybrid vehicles, LEED-certified custom homes with solar roofs and xeriscaped yards, which do not require irrigation, are popular here, and voter support for the preservation of open space runs high. By contrast, South Phoenix is home to 40 percent of the city’s hazardous industrial emissions and America’s dirtiest ZIP code, while the inner-ring Phoenix suburbs, as a legacy of cold-war era industries, suffer from some of the worst groundwater contamination in the nation.

Whereas uptown populations are increasingly sequestered in green showpiece zones, residents in low-lying areas who cannot afford the low-carbon lifestyle are struggling to breathe fresh air or are even trapped in cancer clusters. You can find this pattern in many American cities. The problem is that the carbon savings to be gotten out of this upscale demographic — which represents one in five American adults and is known as Lohas, an acronym for “lifestyles of health and sustainability” — can’t outweigh the commercial neglect of the other 80 percent. If we are to moderate climate change, the green wave has to lift all vessels.

Solar chargers and energy-efficient appliances are fine, but unless technological fixes take into account the needs of low-income residents, they will end up as lifestyle add-ons for the affluent. Phoenix’s fledgling light-rail system should be expanded to serve more diverse neighborhoods, and green jobs should be created in the central city, not the sprawling suburbs. Arizona has some of the best solar exposure in the world, but it allows monopolistic utilities to impose a regressive surcharge on all customers to subsidize roof-panel installation by the well-heeled ones. Instead of green modifications to master-planned communities at the urban fringe, there should be concerted “infill” investment in central city areas now dotted with vacant lots.

In a desert metropolis, the choice between hoarding and sharing has consequences for all residents. Their predecessors — the Hohokam people, irrigation farmers who subsisted for over a thousand years around a vast canal network in the Phoenix Basin — faced a similar test, and ultimately failed. The remnants of Hohokam canals and pit houses are a potent reminder of ecological collapse; no other American city sits atop such an eloquent allegory.

 

Andrew Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University

and author of “Bird on Fire: Lessons From the World’s Least Sustainable City.”

    The Dark Side of the ‘Green’ City, NYT, 6.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/opinion/in-phoenix-the-dark-side-of-green.html

Thousands Still Without Power

in Connecticut

November 5, 2011
The New York Times
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

This has been an excellent week to own a hardware store in Connecticut.

Russell Hunter, who owns Pfau’s Hardware in West Hartford, said that after a bizarre fall snowstorm knocked out power to nearly one million people in his state and millions more throughout the Northeast last weekend, his store was cleaned out of all storm-related supplies. They went at about five times the normal rate of sale, with everything from batteries to oil lamps to gas grills flying out the door as fast as he could order them.

But despite the windfall profits, even Mr. Hunter is running out of patience for the chill and the darkness because he has no power in his own house.

“At home, it’s getting sort of old,” Mr. Hunter said on Saturday. “And cold! People are really angry that it should take this long.” He was also a victim of his own sales success.

“I took home two bundles of firewood,” he said of his own preparations, but later in the week he “wanted two more, and we didn’t have them.”

After a week of wearing heavy coats indoors and sleeping on the couches of more fortunate neighbors, about 143,000 customers served by the state’s largest electricity carrier, Connecticut Light and Power, were still without power by Saturday evening while the repair work was all but complete in most other states.

Connecticut Light and Power was scrambling to meet its self-imposed deadline of having 99 percent of its customers back online by midnight on Sunday, and while utility representatives expressed confidence that they would hit their mark, others seemed more skeptical.

“They’ve missed their own target,” Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut said on Saturday morning, noting that the company had projected it would have fewer than 200,000 customers out by the beginning of the weekend, while the actual number hovered around 215,000.

On Friday, Mr. Malloy announced plans for an investigation into the preparation and repair efforts of Connecticut Light and Power and the state’s other major utility, United Illuminating Company, to be led by James Lee Witt, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Clinton.

“Anything less than the 99-percent-restored number is unacceptable, and C.L.&P. knows it,” Mr. Malloy said. “And I’m sure that they’ll try anxiously to meet that number.”

Connecticut residents were not alone in shivering. More than three million customers across the Northeast lost power last weekend as wind and heavy snow uprooted trees and sheared branches off others, which snapped power lines as they fell.

But in most states, like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, just a few thousand homes and businesses were still in the dark on Saturday. In Connecticut, giant oak trees were still resting on power lines, and many parts of the state looked as though a tornado had passed through recently.

“It still looks like a war zone,” said Rosalie LaCapra, a law firm office manager who lives in Woodbury. “Trees are hanging on by a thread. As you drive under them, you hold your breath.”

Shelters and warming centers were still operating in town halls and public schools across Connecticut. Liddy Adams, a shelter volunteer in Washington, Conn., said the Army Corps of Engineers had dropped by on Saturday to deliver water and meals ready to eat. She said that about 25 people had been spending the night at the shelter, and that about 40 had come in for three meals a day.

Ryan Broderick, who was still powerless at his home in Bristol, said that he and his wife had been forced to improvise all week, showering at the public school where he teaches history and psychology and sleeping on couches and in guest rooms at the homes of his parents and in-laws.

Even the relatively well known have had to cope without power in inventive ways, including the actress Mia Farrow, whose home in Bridgewater was completely in the dark for two days until a bare-bones generator allowed her to flush the toilet and turn on a light or two. But she has continued to use Mother Nature as a refrigerator.

“We put our perishables in a dog crate and put it outside,” she said. “Everything’s stayed pretty fresh for the most part.”

Katie Blint, a spokeswoman for Connecticut Light and Power, said that 831,000 customers had lost power. She added that the number represented 77 percent of the utility’s customers and was the largest power loss in its history — 26 percent more than lost power during Tropical Storm Irene this summer. (An additional 52,000 homes and businesses served by United Illuminating also lost power in the snowstorm, but they were restored by Tuesday night, according to a spokesman.) The enormity of the problem did elicit sympathy from some customers — especially those whose power had been restored.

“It’s easy for us to criticize, but this job they have out in front of them is daunting,” said Ms. LaCapra, the Woodbury resident who got power back on Friday. But the six days she spent without lights and running water taught her sympathy for another group.

“I now have an appreciation for the early settlers,” Ms. LaCapra said. “I felt like a pilgrim.”

 

Elizabeth Maker contributed reporting.

    Thousands Still Without Power in Connecticut, NYT, 5.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/nyregion/in-connecticut-thousands-still-without-power.html

Storm Has Vermont Scrambling

to Find Beds for Mentally Ill

November 4, 2011
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

WATERBURY, Vt. — Among the casualties of the flooding that ravaged Vermont during Tropical Storm Irene was a faded brick hospital that housed the state’s most seriously ill psychiatric patients.

Eight feet of water from the Winooski River inundated the century-old building on Aug. 28, forcing the 51 residents, most of whom had been sent there involuntarily, to the upper floors. The next day, they were evacuated by bus to temporary placements around the state.

Two months later, the Vermont State Hospital remains closed — for good, Gov. Peter Shumlin says — and the state is grappling with how to care for acutely mentally ill residents.

“We really have kind of an unprecedented situation on our hands,” said Jill Olson, a vice president of the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, an advocacy group, “where the highest level of care for a mental health situation in Vermont just washed away.”

In a strange way, the disaster presented an opportunity that many state officials and mental health advocates had been seeking in vain for years. The state hospital had so many problems that the federal government decertified it in 2003; state leaders had been vowing to close it ever since, but were stalled by indecision about what to build in its place. “All of us thought that it was so shabby and so old and so difficult to make safe that it was time to replace it,” said Dr. Robert Pierattini, chief of psychiatry at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, the state’s teaching hospital. “But I don’t see any evidence that we can get by without a state hospital.”

While other states have shuttered psychiatric hospitals and sharply reduced the number of beds in an effort over the decades to place mentally ill patients in less restrictive environments, virtually all have kept at least one open, according to the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors Research Institute. And none have had such an abrupt closure as Vermont’s hospital, which has forced the state to create alternatives at breakneck speed instead of the years it usually takes. The short-term result is patients requiring intensive psychiatric care scattered at facilities not equipped to handle the newcomers.

Fletcher Allen and the Rutland Regional Medical Center agreed to temporarily take some patients who would otherwise go to Vermont State Hospital, but they question how long they can continue, citing a rise in staff injuries and a chaotic environment on their psychiatric units. “It comes with an unacceptable level of risk,” Dr. Pierattini said. “We will make do for now, but what is our plan for creating a new system of intensive mental health care?”

Thomas W. Huebner, president and chief executive of Rutland Regional, said his hospital has needed to use emergency medication or restraints on agitated patients seven times more often in the 10 weeks since the floods than they normally do in a whole year. One challenge, he said, is that Vermont’s legal standard for allowing involuntary medication is among the strictest in the nation. And while every patient who refused treatment used to go to the state hospital, some are now at Rutland Regional and Fletcher Allen, where providers are not used to handling them.

“Much of the stress is just constantly monitoring the level of chaos versus calm and gauging what people can tolerate,” Dr. Pierattini said.

One thing seems certain: Vermont will have fewer acute-care beds for mentally ill patients from now on. While the old hospital had 54, state officials want to cut the number to roughly 30 and expand community-based services.

For now, the Brattleboro Retreat, a private psychiatric hospital, has agreed to devote 14 beds to patients who would otherwise go to the state hospital, with the state pledging $3.5 million for required renovations.

A handful of patients who were involved in criminal cases have been at a state prison in Springfield since the storm because they require more security than other temporary quarters can provide, said Patrick Flood, deputy secretary for the Vermont Agency of Human Services. The state will likely move them to a “more appropriate” building on the grounds of another prison in Windsor, he added. The state is also seeking a temporary location for roughly 15 beds, possibly at a former school for the disabled outside Burlington.

In the meantime, Mr. Flood said, the state was moving quickly to expand the kind of community-based programs that advocates say have been sorely lacking in Vermont. They include housing for people suffering from mental illness, transitional facilities for those who no longer need to be hospitalized but still need care, and so-called wraparound services to prevent hospital stays in the first place.

“It’s stuff we know how to do, but now we’re going to invest more money in it,” Mr. Flood said. “We have an opportunity now to build a system that will actually meet our needs and work well.”

He added, “Community services can’t totally replace the need for inpatient services, but it can bring down the demand quite a bit.”

But advocates for people with mental illnesses say that while the plan sounds good in theory, they fear Vermont will not be able to guarantee the financing needed to sustain it year after year.

“If you look at the history of the state, whenever there’s a budget crisis we cut community mental health,” said State Representative Anne Donahue, co-chairwoman of the State Legislature’s Mental Health Oversight Committee.

Mr. Flood said Vermont spent about $24 million a year on the state hospital — money that could now be invested in community-based care. The total will actually be more, he said, because many of the community programs will get federal matching funds that the state hospital had not qualified for after it was decertified in 2003. “State funding goes up and down all the time,” he said, “but I believe we have no choice but to make sure whatever system we put in place now is stably funded.”

Money aside, some mental health providers are worried that 30 beds will not be enough to meet even a small state’s needs. Under the worst-case scenario, Ms. Donahue said, acutely mentally ill people could quietly get diverted into the corrections system, a frequent occurrence in populous states like California and Florida but not, so far, in Vermont.

She also fears that a permanent, albeit smaller, replacement for the state hospital will never get built; Mr. Flood said there was no “definite plan” to do so.

“I just don’t want to see pieces put into place that are going to shape the status of mental health care for the next 50 years in Vermont that are bad policy decisions,” Ms. Donahue said, “simply because we have an emergency right now.”

Mental health workers hope that the 14 beds at the Brattleboro Retreat and roughly 15 at Fletcher Allen and Rutland Regional will suffice for the winter, when demand for psychiatric care often rises. “What if suddenly we don’t have enough capability in the system?” said Dr. Robert E. Simpson Jr., chief executive of the Brattleboro Retreat. “Right now we’re just poised with anxiety because not all the capable pieces are in place.”

At Rutland Regional, Mr. Huebner said that disruptive patients who would otherwise be at the state hospital were “driving out” others who needed treatment but could not tolerate the environment. They included an 18-year-old suffering from depression who decided to leave after one night in Rutland Regional’s psychiatric unit, he said.

“If a concrete plan emerges soon we can hold on,” Mr. Huebner said. “We’ve got everyone’s attention now, but there’s still a lot to be figured out.”

    Storm Has Vermont Scrambling to Find Beds for Mentally Ill, NYT, 4.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/health/shortage-of-beds-after-irene-shut-a-vermont-mental-hospital.html

Taming Unruly Wind Power

November 4, 2011
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD

For decades, electric companies have swung into emergency mode when demand soars on blistering hot days, appealing to households to use less power. But with the rise of wind energy, utilities in the Pacific Northwest are sometimes dealing with the opposite: moments when there is too much electricity for the grid to soak up.

So in a novel pilot project, they have recruited consumers to draw in excess electricity when that happens, storing it in a basement water heater or a space heater outfitted by the utility. The effort is rooted in some brushes with danger.

In June 2010, for example, a violent storm in the Northwest caused a simultaneous surge in wind power and in traditional hydropower, creating an oversupply that threatened to overwhelm the grid and cause a blackout.

As a result, the Bonneville Power Administration, the wholesale supplier to a broad swath of the region, turned this year to a strategy common to regions with hot summers: adjusting volunteers’ home appliances by remote control to balance supply and demand.

When excess supply threatens Bonneville’s grid, an operator in a control room hundreds of miles away will now dial up a volunteer’s water heater, raising the thermostat by 60 more degrees. Ceramic bricks in a nearby electric space heater can be warmed to hundreds of degrees.

The devices then function as thermal batteries, capable of giving back the energy when it is needed. Microchips run both systems, ensuring that tap-water and room temperatures in the home hardly vary.

“It’s a little bit of that Big Brother control, almost,” said Theresa Rothweiler, a teacher’s aide in the Port Angeles, Wash., school system who nonetheless signed up for the program with her husband, Bruce, a teacher.

She said she had been intrigued by an ad that Bonneville placed in the local paper that asked consumers to help enable the grid to absorb more renewable energy, especially wind.

“We’re always looking at ways to save energy, or be more efficient or green, however you want to put it,” said Ms. Rothweiler, who worries about leaving the planet a livable place for her 21-year-old daughter, Gretchen. Bonneville paid for the special technology, which runs around $1,000 per home.

The initial goal of Bonneville’s pilot program is to gain experience in charging and “discharging” the water heaters and space heaters to see how much response operators can count on as the use of these thermal batteries expands.

Mark K. Lauby, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which enforces standards on the grid, said that such storage innovations would be “the holy grail” as the nation shifts to greater reliance on renewable energy.

While the threat of excess supply is most severe in the Pacific Northwest, other regions may land in the same situation in coming years because a surplus would threaten to destabilize the electric system as much as a shortage.

California, for example, is committed to getting a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

That would be harder if it had to turn off the wind machines on their best generating days to prevent the grid from being overwhelmed.

For decades, the Bonneville Power Administration rarely had a problem with excess supply. Its backbone is hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River, and while the operators must often run all of the falling water through its power-producing turbines for environmental reasons, the grid could adjust the supply by turning off fossil fuel plants.

That balance began to shift over the last few years as entrepreneurs built hundreds of wind machines nearby in the Columbia River Gorge, an area that utility executives now call a “wind ghetto.” While the wind turbines produce electricity far below their capacity most hours of the year, they get busy when a storm rolls through, which is when river flows are highest, too.

The agency can simply shut down the wind machines, and it did so intermittently this summer when excess power threatened the grid. But that angered the wind operators, who earn money from the electricity they sell and from tax and other credits based on their production.

This June, several wind companies appealed Bonneville’s policy to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, calling it discriminatory, and in August they filed a federal court challenge that is still pending.

For Bonneville, the full dangers of excess supply first hit home during the June 2010 emergency, when a severe storm whipped through the region. The transmission network had so much power that the agency turned off all its fossil fuel generation, gave electricity away to neighboring networks and even told the system’s only nuclear plant to slash its production by 78 percent, a highly unusual step.

The region squeaked through, but the agency was stretching its resources “to their limits,” said Doug Johnson, a spokesman for Bonneville. At one point the system was running almost entirely on renewable energy.

“This is probably about the only place in the country where that could happen,” said Michael Milstein, another spokesman with the agency.

The problem was complicated by environmental rules involving the hydroelectric dams.

The dams were built with spillways, or paths where operators can divert water without passing it through the power-producing turbines. But when the water goes through the spillways, it picks up nitrogen bubbles that can kill juvenile fish, so there are strict limits on their use.

Operators can usually keep the system in balance without excessive use of spillways, but in the June 2010 case, they were coping with as many as 2,000 megawatts of wind power, roughly double Seattle’s power use or what two nuclear plants can deliver.

Wind installations have grown since then. So Bonneville began advertising for volunteers to accept extra electricity, mainly homeowners with electric heat and with water heaters of recent vintage.

Plumbers install a mixing valve on the water heaters to keep the faucet temperature safe, and new wiring and a small computer keep track of energy flows.

The agency says that some 200 homes will soon have the adapted water heaters, space heaters or both. In hundreds more, it is installing more traditional controls that will allow it to turn water heaters off. Another utility in the region, Portland General Electric, is about to begin a similar program paid for by the federal Energy Department.

For the time being, the storage devices collectively can absorb the output of only a handful of wind turbines.

A 100-gallon home water heater can store about 26 kilowatt-hours, or about a day’s worth of electricity for a typical house, or less if the house relies on electricity for heat.

The ceramic bricks in the space heater can store 40 kilowatt-hours, or more in some larger configurations. The heat can be drawn off by passing air and delivered to living spaces by a fan, with the bricks also functioning as a thermal battery.

Some of this equipment dates from the late 1980s and was originally designed for offering “time of use” rates, so that a homeowner could buy electricity during hours when it was cheaper and store it. But coordination over a broad area by a utility to manage regional flows is new.

One nagging question is who will pay for the installations if they are carried out on a larger scale.

While Bonneville pays for them now, Philip D. Lusk, the power resources manager for the utility department of the city of Port Angeles — the Rothweilers’ retail supplier — said the agency might have to find additional ways of compensating consumers to get the thousands of volunteers it will eventually need to make the system effective.

If the installations are judged to benefit everyone because they improve stability, the cost might be spread among all ratepayers. But if Bonneville decides that they mainly benefit the wind generators because they never have to unplug their turbines, the agency could try to charge that industry.

Either way, said Mr. Johnson, the Bonneville spokesman, the agency will have to come up with a solution to “the cranky nature of wind.”

    Taming Unruly Wind Power, NYT, 4.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/business/energy-environment/
    as-wind-energy-use-grows-utilities-seek-to-stabilize-power-grid.html

When Each Bad Storm

Means More Dark Days

November 1, 2011
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME

First came the heavy snow in February that crushed the hangar and destroyed the vintage Piper J-5A airplane he housed in Dutchess County, N.Y. Then came the tornado in June that ripped out an ancient oak tree in his backyard in Roxbury, Conn. When Tropical Storm Irene blew through in August, another huge oak fell — this time on his house, blasting a hole through a back bedroom. In each case, electricity was lost.

So for Michael Frohne, a home improvement contractor and musician, his sinking sense of familiarity was understandable when the October northeaster, which he calls the Halloween hell storm, hit.

Once again, Mr. Frohne, who divides his time between homes in Roxbury and Redding, Conn., was left with enormous tree damage and without power — at either home.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Mr. Frohne, 63, said. “I’m going to Costa Rica in January, and I don’t know if I’m ever coming back.”

Along with the now-familiar candles, downed trees across the driveway and the thawing hamburger meat taken from the freezer and tossed in the trash, the region’s latest freak storm, which left three million people without electricity, has left something else in its wake: increasing unease about just what is going on and what it means for the vast majority outside the relative stability of an underground urban power grid.

No one can know for sure if this is just the eternally unpredictable chaos of weather on earth or it is something more ominous; call it the new abnormal. But in recent years, suburban and rural residents have found themselves facing multiple disruptions like Mr. Frohne’s. Experts say the violent weather of the past few years in the Northeast is stressing the 20th century above-ground utility grid as never before, along with the people who depend on it.

Few solutions are in sight. A report by the Edison Electric Institute updated at the end of 2010 said that over the past 10 years, at least 11 states studied putting utility lines underground — usually after devastating storms — only to find it too expensive. “To date, no state utility commission has recommended wholesale undergrounding of the utility infrastructure,” it concluded.

By Tuesday afternoon, 1.7 million customers in the Northeast remained without service, according to The Associated Press, many of them repeat victims of power failures that have left residents increasingly jittery with each new storm.

Sue Gress of New Canaan, Conn., said she tolerated the week spent without electricity to pump her well or run her refrigerator after Tropical Storm Irene, even though she had to lug a bucket of water from her swimming pool to flush her toilet, live mostly on peanut butter crackers and swim instead of showering.

But the warm weather two months ago seems a far cry from the snowstorm that drove her shivering from her home last weekend. And at 79 and living alone, Ms. Gress finds a stray crisis tolerable but definitely not a steady diet of them.

She worries that meteorological excess is becoming the rule.

“It’s global warming,” she said. “No one wants to believe it, but things are changing. There’s much more violent weather, and we’re not prepared to deal with it.”

At least this disruption did not go on as long. She got her lights back on Tuesday after three days.

After her own troubles this weekend, Susan Callahan of Summit, N.J., is for the first time wondering about her comfortable suburban life.

On Saturday night, a branch from one of the old trees that surround the house she has lived in for 30 years crashed down and ripped off part of her gutter and badly damaged the roof of her porch. Then on Sunday, her husband, John Callahan, trying to clean up the property, slipped on an icy stone and hit his head, and Mrs. Callahan had to brave debris-strewn roads to get him to a hospital emergency room, where he got six stitches.

On Monday, Mrs. Callahan drove to a State Farm insurance office in New Providence to file a claim, but the office was without power and closed. She left a note under the office’s locked door. It read, “Help.”

Having also lost electricity during the tropical storm, she admits to being a bit rattled.

“I called my friend who lives in New York City today and said, ‘When can we come move there?’ ” Mrs. Callahan said.

She was not really ready to move but said that for the first time she was thinking about whether it made sense to live in an environment less at the mercy of the weather.

“I don’t know what’s going on, with tsunamis and volcanoes erupting and earthquakes all over the world,” Mrs. Callahan said. “But things sure are weird.”

Others see more human failures than cosmic ones.

The utility Consolidated Edison “has gotten so unbelievably bad,” said David Kirschstein, an 83-year-old retired patent lawyer, who has been living in the same house in Chappaqua, N.Y., for 44 years.

“The winters used to be much worse, but even with the big snows, we had nothing like the outages over the past four or five years,” he continued. “I’m just sick of it.”

A year ago, Mr. Kirschstein bought his first generator, which came in handy when his power went out this weekend. “It seemed worth the money to get the generator because Con Ed is terrible,” he said.

In fact, for increasing numbers of people, a generator is seen as a necessity, if an expensive and imperfect one.

Eric Nowlin, vice president for customer service for Grainger, an industrial supply company, said his generator sales around Tropical Storm Irene were tenfold what is normal for that time of year, with people shopping at his stores when mass-market retailers like Lowe’s are sold out. He said during and after the tropical storm, Grainger sold “thousands and thousands” of generators.

“This kind of weather is becoming a fact of life,” he said. “People are saying, ‘I want to get a generator for the next time this happens.’ ”

The issues also go beyond electricity.

Martha Frankel, a writer who lives in West Shokan in the Catskills, said she and her husband lost a private bridge connecting their property to the main road after Tropical Storm Irene, which left them in the dark for 16 days. Then, a month later, heavy rains washed away the temporary replacement bridge.

“I think in the last year, we’ve had Irene, which could be the 500-year storm, plus three 10-year storms, a 50-year storm and a 100-year storm,” Ms. Frankel said. “When it rains, nobody sleeps on my road. The stream starts roaring, and there are thousands of trees in it. I’m not feeling particularly safe and comforted.

“We love this town, and we love our house and community. We always said we would die here. And now, I think, I don’t know.”

Elizabeth Maker contributed reporting from Connecticut,

Nate Schweber from New Jersey and Sari Botton

from the Catskills.

When Each Bad Storm Means More Dark Days, NYT, 1.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/nyregion/some-snowstorm-victims-not-new-to-losing-power.html