Landfill Gas

Several weeks ago a group of energy professionals from India were touring central Californian renewable energy projects and I suddenly found myself as the SMUD representative on a tour of the the Kiefer Landfill. I was tasked to provide information on how small generators interconnect with utilities. In exchange, I received a tour of the landfill...and garnered some fantastic information about how landfills extract methane and burn it to provide electricity.


I discovered that the California Air Resources Board will not tolerate the release of methane into the atmosphere. If we don't use it, it will be flared, because to not do so risks explosion. If it isn't captured for a secondary use like power generation, waste gas is always flared and lost:




Kiefer flares the gas if its not burned in ICE engines. I now have a much larger appreciation about my role as a protection engineer responsible for the transmission line from the landfill to SMUD. If the line is out of service, the gas is flared and the power generation is lost.

The reason I'm blogging about all this is because SMUD calls this 'renewable' energy. We market landfill generation as 'green' which is a complete crock of shit. A crock of shit because we universally fail to recognize the vast volumes of cheap Chinese shit that end up in the landfill to begin with, and the massive fossil fuel inputs necessary to keep this over-consumption waste stream moving. This is merely energy efficiency, not renewable energy.

Only dumps on the scale of Merika and her excess consumption are able to generate enough methane to fuel power plants...which is why India is just now sending over engineering delegates...because they are now developing their own massive landfills and see the potential electricity generation.

PV Payback

I spent time this morning re-calculating my projected PV payback. I am looking at sixteen years, or until midway through the year 2023.

I had originally estimated sixteen years, before I knew my actual production numbers which were much higher than I expected. But...it's still sixteen years! However, I now include the following assumptions which I didn't consider earlier:

1) PV production will fall 5% in 5 years, and 10% in ten years.
2) A new inverter will be needed in 10 years, at a future value ($1,740) of a present value of $1,068 at 5%.
3) 5% inflation for both energy from my utility and the new future inverter.

So I will have reached payback in about 16 years, and assuming a total PV system life of 25 years, my $7,389 outlay will have returned $17,973.

Because I paid for the system from savings up front, I did not finance this endeavor, so no interest payments. Even assuming that I plow the monthly energy savings right back into savings, I still incur a lost opportunity cost of not having invested my money over that time frame, But look at the markets today, sheesh! I sold high in 2007 to buy my system that today is more expensive from a mutual fund that is devalued. And 5% energy inflation...well, you know my bias towards higher future energy costs, personally I think they will be higher than 5% but I'll be conservative.

I'm coming out ahead in all accounts.

Living the Cheap Life

At SMUD, where I work, my bosses-bosses-boss, assistant general manager for energy supply, shows some telling trends.

SMUD, like most other utilities, cities, and municipalities, has embraced going green. With abandon. Carbon footprint calculators, selling carbon credits, pay a premium to get 50% or 100% of your energy from green sources -- that sorta thing. And SMUD has a mandate that in the future, a certain percentage of our resource mix has to come from renewable resources. Many others are adopting similar thinking...without checking, I'd bet that the City of Santa Barbara or Colorado Springs also have some sort of green energy goal.

I am not exact here, but I would say that our mandate is 25% by 2012. This is not federal law. Not even state law that I'm aware of, or a local ordinance. Just a goal.

But -- if you could see the trend, projected out to 2015, SMUDs renewable portfolio falls off a cliff. This is in part due to anticipated electric growth, but also the drying up of existing contracts. As everyone else is also riding this green turnip truck, the value of renewables is increasing and is, of course, becoming increasingly expensive.

I'm convinced that as SMUD will ask ratepayers in the future to pay more to meet this mandate...they will say "kiss my ass." On a SMUD employee forum board, one wrote, "I just want my electricity to be the cheapest it can during my lifetime."

A sentiment shared by most, I'm sure. So the mandate will be 'eased.' Just like the 1990 law that mandated 10% ZEV cars by 2003. Too expensive. Not enough infrastructure. I'd guess that now, five years after that deadline, we have reached 0.002%

That's what will be said about our 'easing' of the renewable portfolio goals. Just can't do it yet. The technology is out there, but... So cut the goals, further weakening the push for renewables, and wait until conventional sources are totally unreliable.