Modeshift

Consumer Energy's Lake Winds Energy Park under construction near Ludington, Michigan. Photo/Keith Schneider

The farm fields and rolling hills near Ludington, Michigan, sport new decoration now: big wind turbines that take advantage of the gales of nearby Lake Michigan. Consumers Energy, Michigan’s statewide utility, is constructing the $235 million, 56-turbine, 100-megawatt Lake Winds Energy Park with Danish-designed Vestas equipment, some of which arrives in Mason County by rail. The winter white towers and turbine blades soar above orchards, forest, and cropland, powerful sentinels of Michigan’s capacity to reckon with the new economic and environmental conditions of the 21st century.

On Sunday, a wondrous August afternoon of towering banks of cumulus clouds and brilliant blue Michigan sky, I drove by the wind park. It’s impressive, not only because of the scale of the enterprise, but also what it represents. Consumers Energy found a way to deal with grassroots opposition and build a clean energy installation that responds to climate change, promotes advanced manufacturing, and gets people in Michigan a little more comfortable with generating electricity with an energy source other than coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy.

One impending, and potentially disastrous impediment, though, is the reluctance by Republicans in Congress to renew federal clean energy tax credits, so crucial to financing new alternative energy projects. Vestas, for instance, said again this week that it is prepared to layoff 1,600 workers, most of them in Colorado, if the tax credits are not renewed by year-end.

Still, Michigan’s clean energy industry is persistent. In November Michigan voters will decide on whether or not to more than double the amount of electricity that must be produced from renewable energy — 25 percent by 2025, up from the current goal of 10 percent by 2015, which was enacted in 2008. Jacob Wheeler, a colleague at Circle of Blue, today posted a fine assessment of this proposal and how it fits in the roiled energy policy and politics of the Great Lakes region.

Over at the Michigan Land Use Institute, managing editor Jim Dulzo reports on how careful planning and a sound strategy helped a wind developer,  Richard Vander Veen, build a big wind energy park in Gratiot County north of Lansing, the state capital.

So, despite all manner of market challenges and political resistance, there’s progress here in Michigan on clean energy.

– Keith Schneider

Over at Circle of Blue, we’ve spent much of the year reporting on the transition occurring in the Great Lakes as a result of changes in climate and energy markets. The newest article, on shifting water levels and the Great Lakes port and transport sectors, posted here today.

On average, two big ships call every day at the docks of this Lake Erie city. The route to one of the busiest ports in the Great Lakes follows a 34-kilometer (21-mile) ship channel, which starts well out in Lake Erie, runs past the Maumee River delta, and ends 11 kilometers (seven miles) upstream. To ensure the ships do not scrape the bottom of the shallow port at the mouth of the silty Maumee, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers annually dredges 700,000 cubic meters (900,000 cubic yards) of mud and sand from the channel, or 1 million metric tons a year.

For decades, the mathematics of waterborne transport here were simple. For every 10 to 11 metric tons of cargo that moved into and out of the Toledo port, about one metric ton of sediment left the channel. (Last year, 10.4 million metric tons of cargo were handled at the port.)

This all equates to more frequent dredging to keep transportation flowing on the Great Lakes. Tens of millions of dollars in Great Lakes port planning and construction depend on a better understanding of weather and water conditions over the next several decades. Tens of billions of dollars in waterborne trade do, as well.

Port Planning in Era of Climate Change
“We’re not in the business of speculating about climate change or its causes,” said Glen Nekvasil, vice president of the Lake Carriers Association, the trade group of U.S. flagged vessels, which is based in Cleveland, Ohio. “We’re just seeing a lot of variability in water levels, and it affects our operations.”

On Tuesday morning next week, August 21, Circle of Blue hosts a conference call with the media and citizens to discuss the findings of the new Great Lakes report. Join us by signing up here:

Essentially, our reporting found that the Great Lakes and Great Lakes states are in the midst of a remarkable and confounding ecological and economic transition related to climate change and the fossil energy sector. Real and swift changes are occurring on waterways carrying less coal, pipelines transporting more corrosive fuels, refineries expanding and modernizing, coal plants shutting down, and natural gas wells supplying more gas-fired power plants. The shift in fuel sources has helped to reduce air emissions, but also increased water pollution events. It’s also helped Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan become top generators of new jobs over the past year.

Meanwhile, the effects of climate change and erratic weather appear to be eroding infrastructure at big ports, and influencing waterborne transport as Great Lakes water levels drop. Sediment levels are increasing. Ships carry lighter loads. Docks and other infrastructure are decaying. A wealth of new science also is revealing disturbing trends about the effects of warming air and water on the intensity of storms, ice cover, erosion, stormwater overflows, sea lamprey reproduction, and other events.

Join our interactive conference call with Circle of Blue’s director, J. Carl Ganter, myself, and three prominent Great Lakes authorities, to ask questions, learn more, and sort out seminal trends that are shaping the Great Lakes.

– Keith Schneider

Over the weekend Tom Friedman of the New York Times wrote a good piece, Get it Right on Gas, about the short-term promise and potentially long-term economic and environmental peril prompted by the U.S. energy boom. Friedman’s article made quite a few of the same points I made in March in a ModeShift piece, New American Energy Boom: A Reprieve and a Reckoning.

The Reprieve:

Friedman: “The enormous stores of natural gas that have been locked away in shale deposits across America that we’ve now been able to tap into, thanks to breakthroughs in seismic imaging, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” are enabling us to replace much dirtier coal with cleaner gas as the largest source of electricity generation in America. And natural gas may soon be powering cars, trucks and ships as well. This is helping to lower our carbon emissions faster than expected and make us more energy secure. And, if prices stay low, it may enable America to bring back manufacturing that migrated overseas.”

Schneider: “The boom in oil and gas production represents a generation-long economic reprieve for the United States. Almost every  analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Geological Survey, and by the major oil and gas companies projects that the production trajectory for domestic oil and gas production will steadily increase for 20 years, maybe longer. More than $100 billion annually in capital investments is pouring each year into energy-producing states for exploration and drilling equipment, new pipeline construction, refinery expansions, and for pumps and trucks and transport depots to move fuel to market. Dense pockets of new job growth in oil and gas production, processing, and services have formed in a dozen energy-rich states, helping to lead the U.S. out of the recession.”

The Reckoning:

Friedman: “Natural gas is still a fossil fuel. The good news: It emits only half as much greenhouse gas as coal when combusted and, therefore, contributes only half as much to global warming. The better news: The recent glut has made it inexpensive to deploy. But there is a hidden, long-term, cost: A sustained gas glut could undermine new investments in wind, solar, nuclear and energy efficiency systems — which have zero emissions — and thus keep us addicted to fossil fuels for decades.”

Schneider: “The risks of perpetuating America’s fossil fuel economy are equally momentous, producing a new era of national reckoning. Ample natural gas supplies and low prices are dampening demand for wind, solar, geothermal, and other non-polluting sources of energy.  One result is that clean energy manufacturing plants are closing in the Midwest, Rocky Mountain states, and California. Two solar producers in Michigan, for instance, have shut their doors in the last year.

Public investment in non-fossil fuel innovation is uncertain. It’s not at all clear yet whether Congress will renew the tax credits that expire later this year and that have spurred wind and solar use and manufacturing.

If the U.S. spends another generation in an oil and gas coma, choosing not to pursue alternatives with the fierce commitment to success that propelled the Apollo program to land a man on the moon, it will end up even more economically stretched and politically unstable than it is today.”

See more of my reporting on the U.S. energy boom here.

– Keith Schneider

Wade Michael Page, the face of hate.

When the police mug shot of Wade Page circulated on the Internet over the weekend, I was struck, again, by the unmistakable face of domestic white terrorism. Page, who led a skinhead rock band and was a drunk who washed out of the military and a truck driving job, killed six people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

I know that face. It’s the face of anguish, and hurt, and violence. I’d seen it almost two decades ago when I reported on the white supremacy, skinhead, and militia movements for the New York Times. I’ve seen it, also, in the young white men in rural America, men with high school diplomas, perhaps a semester or two of community college, who today struggle to stay relevant and financially afloat in an economy that pays them, if they work at all, with what we now refer to in America as a “globally competitive wage.”

That face is young and framed in a buzz cut. Its eyes are hardened and jealous. The moustache and goatee, carefully trimmed, ring a hard mouth familiar with the words of hate. The face of modern white American terrorism is as unmistakable as the slick-backed shiny hair of the Klansman, the thumb-length black moustache, or the long al-Qaeda beard.

I saw that face in the Michigan Militia, in skinhead murders in Allentown, Pa., in the Oklahoma City bombers, and in the Wisconsin Sikh massacre. I see that face, too, in the grinding lives of too many young white American men too willing to blame “the other.” It’s the face of American menace.

Here is a sampling of those Times articles:

Fearing a Conspiracy, Some Heed a Call to Arms

Hate Groups Use Tools Of the Electronic Trade

Algae blooms appeared on Lake Superior this summer, but appear to be significantly diminshed on Lake Erie. University of Toledo picture.

Not far from where I live in Benzie County, Michigan lies a network of shaded forest trails that end on the broad sand beaches of Lake Michigan’s Platte River Bay. In the distance, the steep flanks of the Sleeping Bear Dune dive to the Great Lake. Across the Manitou Passage the green expanses of North and South Manitou Islands are like the broad backs of giant turtles floating in the water. On clear and sunny days the water is porcelain blue.

I’ve taken out-of-town friends to Platte Bay, among them Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior during the 1960s who helped establish Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, who’ve said that stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline is one of the most magnificent places they’ve ever seen.

I don’t show off the bay in August. Three summers ago a mat of green algae about three inches thick clung to the beach. I remember it vividly because I regularly run those trails in the summer and finish with a swim and a relaxing beach walk back to the trailhead. The algae, drying and turning brown, was as thick and nasty as week-old pudding.

Half a century ago, before the country and the Great Lakes states legislated the end of open dumping of sewage and industrial effluent into the five big lakes, algal blooms were common. They result from mixing the ingredients of neglect and waste — particularly phosphorous and other nutrients — into calm and warming waters.

The 1972 federal Clean Water Act, which this year marks the 40th year since its enactment after a veto by President Richard Nixon,  steadily improved how cities and industries managed wastewater. The blooms largely disappeared for more than three decades.

Now they are back, and in many places worse than ever. Blue green algae mar the waters of Lake Superior near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The western shoreline of Lake Michigan, from Kewaunee, Wisconsin, to Sturgeon Bay is an almost unbroken green runway of algae, in some places about a foot thick. Last summer, Lake Erie experienced the worst blue-green algae bloom in decades. And while, so far, Platte Bay is mostly clear of algae this summer, little ghostly green tendrils float in the water, like jellyfish. They brush against your arms as if to say, “Remember us. We’re still around.”

From an ecological perspective, the cure is straightforward: prevent phosphorous from getting into the Great Lakes. There’s no dispute about this point. Heavy storms on Lake Superior this summer washed enough extra nutrients into the water to produce the big Apostle Island bloom. But in Ohio, the 2012 drought dramatically reduced the number and intensity of heavy spring rains that wash farm field fertilizers into agricultural watersheds that drain into Lake Erie.

Gail Hesse, the executive director of the Ohio Lake Erie Commission and co-chair of a phosphorous task force, told me this week that experts are predicting a much smaller algal bloom on the lake this year. “I was at a task force meeting yesterday,” Hesse said. “We were joking, ‘the bad news is there’s a drought. The good news is there’s a drought.”

The political and economic solutions are more difficult. The extra nutrients, according to scientists at the Ohio Lake Erie Commission and other groups studying the blooms, come from three sources — 1) overflowing and aged municipal sewage treatment plants, 2) industrial agriculture practices that pour fertilizer on farm fields and concentrate livestock in massive, manure-producing confined feeding operations, and 3) sprawling metropolitan land use patterns that are so parking lot- and highway-hardened that rain washes everything on the ground into the nearest waterway.

It’s becoming such a mess out there again that it’s flat out unsafe to go swimming in any of the Great Lakes after it rains. Beach closings are now regular events on the Great Lakes. The algal blooms are evidence of well understood hazards that new pollution control equipment, safer farm practices, and the greening of metropolitan America should fix — again.

– Keith Schneider