EARTH DAY 2010: CARIBBEAN EDITION - No 2

What do you get when you introduce energy efficiency to social networking?

You get Welectricity, an innovative, low-carbon web application that helps users track and reduce their electricity consumption at home.

The service, launched today by startup Welectricity Inc to mark Earth Day 2010, employs principles of psychology and behavioral economics to nudge householders to consume less energy.  The company blog calls it their "little contribution to the planet".  

A full press release is here and you can sign up to use the app at www.welectricity.com.

EARTH DAY 2010: CARIBBEAN EDITION - No 1

It’s Earth Day 2010.  Forty years on from the first, the day is being marked worldwide by countless events, project launches, meetings, speeches, press releases; actions big and small.

The Caribbean is not left out.  Our first earth-day-worthy post is that Senator Liz Thompson, former minister of energy and the environment in Barbados, has been nominated by the government to replace the outgoing executive secretary of the UNFCCC, the world’s climate change secretariat. 

The position carries the responsibility of coordinating a global response to what is probably the biggest and most far-reaching global development challenge of our time.  Liz is one of (at this point) nine respected climate leaders in contention. (Full disclosure: Liz is a colleague of mine and we are currently working together on sustainable energy consulting projects for a couple of governments in the Caribbean).

Each one of the nominees has the background and credentials to fill the post.  But the climate action website 350.org makes a great point, essentially about small being beautiful:

“Most important however is Ms. Thompson's unique perspective as someone from a small island state. Unlike her predecessor, she truly understands and can speak from the perspective of vulnerable communities and nations and bring their voice into every negotiating room.”

The Caribbean’s point of view, like that of other small island state regions, is represented by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS); a group that, in the words of its vice chairman Hugh Sealy (another colleague),

“has acted as the conscience of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol.  AOSIS has argued consistently that the litmus test of the success of the climate talks is the survival of small island states.  "No island left behind" and "1.5 (°C) to stay alive" are two of the clarion calls being made by AOSIS.”

For her part, Senator Thompson sees her candidacy as one that represents

“a great opportunity for small island developing states who are on the front line of the assault of climate change and whose survival may well be linked to our adaptation and mitigation strategies. The case of the Maldives graphically demonstrates how significant an issue climate change is for sustainability and survival.”

So, the stakes are clear from our point of view.  Voices such as Senator Thompson’s are needed in the halls of international power to be able to move the process in the necessary direction.  We wish her the best of luck.

MAKING EVERY EFFORT TO LOOK INTO THE PRESENT

The importance of geothermal energy to the Eastern Caribbean’s energy future came into sharp focus last week. 

In a March 22nd press release, West Indies Power, the private developer of the Eastern Caribbean’s first geothermal power project (being implemented on the tiny island of Nevis) announced that Scotiabank had signed on to finance the project, to the tune of US$30 million.

It was a remarkable announcement. A commercial bank? Financing a large renewable energy project? In the Caribbean?

What the seemingly amazing news proves is that renewable energy in the Caribbean is bankable on a commercial basis – and that geothermal is the game-changer in the Eastern Caribbean region. So essentially, St Kitts & Nevis will soon join the ranks of the few truly green, low-carbon countries in the world.

Congratulations to Nevis are in order – and, from the regional perspective, a few comments.

The first is that, in terms of geothermal energy potential, there’s nothing special about Nevis; the Lesser Antilles chain of volcanic islands has long been considered to have large geothermal energy resources. The US-based Geothermal Energy Association (GEA) in 1999 reported that there were 39 countries in the world that “could be 100% geothermal powered”. The eight Caribbean countries on that list are (in alphabetical order) Dominica, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Montserrat, St Kitts & Nevis, St Lucia and St Vincent & the Grenadines.

Gerald W Huttrer, a respected authority on geothermal energy (and one of the references for the GEA report) has ranked the islands in order of their geothermal development potential. Nevis is at number 5 – below St Vincent & the Grenadines (which is number 4) and St Lucia (number 2). Guadeloupe, ranked at number 1, already has 15 MW of geothermal power in operation, with plans to increase this to 47 MW by 2020.

But Nevis has come from behind to win the Eastern Caribbean countries race. The Nevis Island Administration first signed a memorandum of understanding with their developer in 2007 and exploratory drilling started in January 2008. By October of that year the geothermal resource had been proven and today – three years after the process started – construction of a 10 MW geothermal power plant on Nevis is about to commence.

The Dominica government has been aggressively pursuing its geothermal agenda, with two exploratory drilling projects in progress, one of which, in November 2009, delivered proof of large geothermal resources. But, despite having signed agreements at the same time as (or even before) Nevis, St Lucia and St Vincent & The Grenadines are still in the locker room; exploratory drilling has not even started on either island.

So here’s the summary of the situation. After decades of preliminary study and some recent specific explorations, it is now fairly clear that the region is sitting on potentially large geothermal resources. If proven, they will be more than sufficient to supply present and foreseeable demand for electricity on the respective islands. Add to this the fact that most of the fuel these islands import is used by vehicles, and the full implications of the story become clear.

Geothermal energy provides the prospect that, if we move to transition our light-duty vehicle fleets to hybrid and electric vehicles, we can replace almost all of our total fossil fuel imports with a green, indigenous energy source. This will eventually happen on St Kitts & Nevis.

The transport sector transition is already happening elsewhere according to Matthew Savage, a director of UK-based Oxford Consulting Partners, an energy, climate change and sustainability firm. At an energy policy workshop in St Lucia last week, Mr Savage opined that, by 2020, he would not be able to buy a gasoline or diesel-powered car from a mainstream car dealer in the UK. By then, he thinks, such cars will be manufactured on an ever-dwindling scale, replaced by hybrid and pure-electric vehicles.

This scenario represents a business opportunity that Caribbean oil companies should now be seriously examining. Their customers in St Kitts & Nevis will soon have the option to buy cars that fill up with electricity, even as some of our governments carry on with business-as-usual while continuing to “make every effort” to “look into” renewables.

I, RATIONAL MAN

What better topic to discuss on All Fools Day than rationality?

Last week, as part of a consultation on national energy policy in St Lucia, I made a presentation on energy awareness to a roomful of ‘energy sector stakeholders’. The audience was knowledgeable and involved. So, I requested a show of hands of people who knew roughly their electricity consumption at home, in kWh per day.

About 12% of the audience showed hands.

This would seem an unexpected outcome. Given the facts that a) many in the audience have some connection with energy and sustainability issues at work and b) they were attending a workshop on energy and sustainability issues, it should be a reasonable assumption that most of them would be aware of something as basic as their own electricity consumption at home.

Well, practically everything I have read over the past year about behavior suggests that such an assumption would be wrong - hence the outcome. And of course, the problem is obvious: if we don't know how much we are consuming, how can we take steps to reduce our consumption?

The field of behavioral economics, now enjoying a resurgence (ably assisted by such bestselling books as Nudge and Predictably Irrational), explains how surprisingly irrational we humans really are.

Seth Godin wrote a perceptive post about irrationality on his blog today, with an interesting example: 

"When Chris Blackwell introduced reggae to the rest of the world (Bob Marley!), it was irrational. That moment in time was the best time to be working with Bonnie Raitt or Jackson Browne, not some unknown spleef-smoking guys from a tiny island in the Caribbean. No amount of rational analysis would have led an investor to back Chris."

Godin’s post inspired me to write this one. Behavioral economists would call that an example of the Bandwagon effect.

THE SURPRISING CONNECTEDNESS OF GREEN FIGS

While doing two entirely different things today, it occurred to me what they have in common - and made me (again) reflect on the connectedness of things.

I was working on Welectricity (I'm working with Koombea, a great team of web app developers in Barranquilla, Colombia).

In between drafting page designs and content, and writing user stories for the developers, I was helping my wife Sherie prepare our Saturday lunch of green figs and saltfish.

Then the connection struck me: Green FIGS

Welectricity is certainly green, and figs = Feedback, Information, Goal-setting, Social proof. These are the four energy conservation influence factors that are at the heart of Welectricity!

Lunch (washed down with a few cold, green ones) was wonderful.

IT'S QUICK! IT'S NIMBLE! IT'S... NEVIS!

In July 2009, the Nevis Island Administration authorized Canadian developer Windwatt Power Ltd to proceed with plans to develop wind power on Nevis. Barely six months later, the developer is constructing the first phase of a planned 4.4 MW wind farm that will provide green electricity to the island.

The work now in progress, to erect 4 Vergnet GEV MP 275 kW collapsible wind turbines (like the ones on Guadeloupe), will install 1.1 MW of wind capacity and is scheduled for completion in June 2010. The developers have plans for an additional 3.3 MW to be installed in phase 2.

This comes hard on the heels of the Nevis geothermal project which, in its first phase, is intended to construct an 11 MW geothermal power plant on Nevis.

So all told, in the past two years Nevis has approved and commenced implementation of two large green energy projects with a total (phase 1) installed capacity of about 12 MW - which is 2 MW more than the current peak demand on the island!

On the face of it, this is remarkable progress – and it far exceeds what the other Eastern Caribbean countries have achieved in renewable energy (which, in most cases, has been nothing).

Nevis’ managers are justly proud of themselves. During a field visit in February to the Windwatt site at Maddens Estate, Carlisle Powell, the junior minister for natural resources and the environment in the Nevis Island Administration, noted that there has been “a tremendous amount of talk from St Lucia, St Vincent, and from St Kitts even, where they are planning an 8 megawatt wind farm but to the best of my knowledge there is none which has actually started. In Nevis we have done more than start – we have the equipment on site, we have laid out the site already, so we are on the way”.

Well said, Mr Minister.

A BRIEF YEAR-END ROUNDUP

A brief (and personal) review of a few things that happened in 2009 and a preview of 2010

Renewable energy in the Caribbean

One word: geothermal. It’s the game-changer in the Eastern Caribbean, but only a couple of our countries appear to have seriously recognized this. Those that have, are now well on their way to developing truly sustainable and energy-independent futures. Others are trying to catch up, and yet others are still at the lip-service, do-nothing stage of the game.

First out of the blocks was Nevis. Having started explorations in January 2008, their geothermal project achieved critical milestones during 2009 (proving significant energy potential and signing of a power purchase agreement with the local electric utility). The project developer is now scheduled to commence drilling of production wells in first quarter 2010. This will be followed by commencement of construction on the proposed 11 MW geothermal power plant, which will supply baseload power to the Nevis Electricity Company (whose 2009 peak demand was about 9 MW).

Dominica isn’t far behind – and they're dead serious about geothermal. The Dominica government commissioned two separate geothermal explorations on the island in 2008; so far one of these has (unsurprisingly) concluded that Dominica has the largest geothermal energy potential in the Caribbean. The next steps will be to perform exploratory drilling in specific locations in 2010, to prove the extent of the resource, and to inform the design of the power plant options, which vary from 2+15 MW to 4x30 MW. And that’s only one of Dominica’s geothermal projects.

The other countries? Let’s see what happens in 2010.

Copenhagen

Let’s file this under what didn’t happen. By most reports, the outcome of the climate change summit represented a failure of political will on the part of the leaders of the world’s two biggest polluters, and a few others. China appears to have been particularly intransigent and, some have claimed, largely responsible for the failure of the talks. And it seems a supreme irony that, just weeks after his administration officially declared greenhouse gases to be a public health hazard, President Obama was unable to make any significant pledge for America, the world’s largest per-capita culprit, to cut its emissions of the stuff. The question now is: how to recover and move on? Expect lots of debate (and finger-pointing) in 2010.

Smarter Energy

Energy efficiency became sexy in 2009; look for it to be taken seriously in some parts of the Caribbean in 2010. Its newfound status is partly propelled by the breathless reporting from the developed world about so-called ‘smart’ electricity metering (part of a larger approach to achieving the ‘smart grid’). More important is the growing realization that energy efficiency is truly the low-hanging fruit; the easiest and least costly way to deliver energy services. And, for Caribbean countries that are dependent on imported energy (ie: all except Trinidad & Tobago) the benefits are even greater.

Welectricity, an award-winning new service to be launched in first quarter 2010, is based on this realisation. With its innovative, behavior-based approach to the energy efficiency problem, Welectricity will help households to achieve positive energy efficiency outcomes. Watch this space (and get more information at www.welectricity.com).

Twitter

The surprise of the year. I started using twitter in January (my first tweet: “Finishing off a commentary for my website www.greenislandinc.com”). In less than 12 months, it had become my number one source of information on developments in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

When I started using the micro-blogging service, it was because I vaguely realized that I ‘had to’. According to what I had read, it was supposed to allow me to extend my marketing and advertising reach beyond my traditional sphere of connections, budget, and so on.

I’m not quite sure how the marketing and advertising bit has worked out yet. John Wanamaker, a US department store merchant, once famously said that “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” That’s sort of how I feel about the time I’ve invested in twitter. But I do know that what I have gotten is a great and growing source of relevant and timely information and opinion that I didn’t previously have - all in one place. Priceless.

For more insight on the twitter phenomenon, read the June 2009 Time cover story (the opening sentence is spot on). Then follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/hazbert

GET SMART

Where were you when the corn ethanol revolution happened? Actually, that revolution didn’t turn out so well. Revolutions are supposed to be by the people, for the people kinds of things. But this one was by the US government, for the special interests. Not surprisingly, it ended up harming the people – in this case by contributing to a worldwide food crisis that exacerbated hunger in the developing world, social unrest and global recession.

Observing today’s hype about smart meters, I can’t help thinking about corn ethanol. Why? Because the benefits of corn ethanol, such as they were, didn't amount to sustainable, widespread energy or economic benefits. The numbers didn't add up – and I don’t yet see them adding up for smart meters.

Advocates of smart meters primarily tout them as devices that will benefit consumers. They emphasize the savings the meters will encourage by allowing consumers to ‘see’ what energy they are using; the idea being that more informed consumers will make better choices about their energy use.

This argument is only true up to a point. The deeper substance is often missed, which is that information by itself has not been shown to be a sufficient motivator for energy conservation (or for that matter, other outcomes that require behavioral change, such as weight loss or quitting smoking). In which case, the potential impact of this fundamental selling point is debatable. (I’ve written in some detail about the behavioral stuff here).

Another proposed benefit is that, where utilities have variable rates (electricity prices that vary during the day based on supply, demand, generation type and/or time of day), their customers can save money by adjusting their heavy electricity usage to occur during times of lower prices. This of course may not always be practical for the consumer, and in any case doesn’t apply to most of the Caribbean.

For now, it seems that the biggest beneficiaries of smart meters are likely to be the utilities themselves – the main benefit being that the electricity company can read the installed smart meters remotely from a central place, thereby eliminating the cost of sending out meter readers.

Billions of dollars are being spent by utilities and governments worldwide on smart metering programmes. Just this month, the British government unveiled an ambitious plan to install smart meters in all of the country’s 26 million homes by 2020, at a price tag of £8.5 billion. Their estimate is that the plan will allow the power industry and consumers to save £14.5 billion. Caribbean utilities are following suit with their own, much-smaller-scale smart metering programmes (but no word on what they’re spending yet).

But what about the energy and carbon balance of all this?

A smart meter is a complex thing. After it is designed it must be manufactured, using energy, materials and components (glass, plastic, metals, integrated circuits and so on). Then it must be packaged in a box (which itself must be manufactured), then shipped in a truck, train, ship or plane. Then it is taken to the customer’s home (more driving) and installed. At that point, after being responsible for a long chain of energy use and carbon emissions, the meter is meant to help reduce the customer’s energy use and carbon emissions.

In some cases, the smart meters will be designed to be linked up to in-home displays and also to other monitoring devices and systems connected to (or built into) electrical outlets or appliances. All this is so that a consumer can get a complete, detailed array of information about his or her energy use, at any given minute. In other words: more information – but also more devices, which means more materials, manufacturing, packaging, shipping, energy used and carbon emitted.

All of this raises a few questions.

What impact will all of these devices have when they finally get into the home and are plugged in or equipped with batteries (yet another device)? Will the energy savings and carbon reductions encouraged by the meter over its lifetime be sufficient to offset its own direct and indirect energy and carbon footprint?

Remember the paperless office? The widespread use of computers and digital imaging technology was supposed to eliminate paper documents by allowing us to digitize written communications. We would, the argument went, use far less paper because, thanks to technology, we wouldn’t need to. Well, that didn’t happen. On the contrary, according to The Myth of the Paperless Office, a book by Sellen and Harper published by MIT, the use of email in an organization causes an average 40% increase in paper consumption.

Smart meters will probably work out for the utilities that deploy them. But on the consumer side, this looks to be another example of trying to attack a problem of behaviour (how we consume energy) by throwing yet another device at it. And we already know how other examples of applying technology to behavioral problems have been working out.