Roger Cooper

The Rodney Dangerfield of fuels

June 29, 2009

In the energy and climate change debate, environmentalists are for the most part united in their feelings about coal (very bad), gasoline (avoid “gas guzzlers”),  nuclear energy (scary), hydropower (small is better than big),  wind (good unless you worry about birds), solar thermal (nifty) and rooftop solar PV (even niftier). But what about natural gas, which is the source of more of our energy than coal, nuclear or all the renewable sources combined?

use_by_source_large “We’re the Rodney Dangerfield of fuels,” says Roger Cooper, executive vice president of policy and planning at the American Gas Association. Meaning that gas gets no respect, nor all that much attention. (The DOE logo, below, includes an oil derrick, wind turbine, hydro and the nuclear symbol, but nothing about gas.

I went to see Cooper and Christopher McGill of the AGA last week because of the news that the domestic supply of natural gas is increasing. A group called the Potential Gas Committee, which is based at the Colorado School of Mines, has just reported that the U.S. has about a 100 year supply of natural gas, assuming we continued to consume it at today’s rates. “That’s the largest future supply ever reported,” McGill said. Just a decade ago, the same group project that the U.S. had a 60 to 65 year supply. The increase is, essentially, a result of new (and controversial) drilling technologies that make it easier to recover the gas from saturated shale rocks that, it turns out, exist all over the country–the Applachachians, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma and in the Rocky Mountains. “You’re talking about a huge volume of saturated rock that has the potential to be exploited,” McGill said. This New York Times story explains the significance of the new estimates.

My question for the gas association was a simple one: What does the discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas, which is, after all, a fossil fuel, mean when it comes to climate change? A simple question, but the answer is anything but.
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Google, brainpower and Jevons paradox

June 16, 2009

Today I’ve been blogging for Greenbiz.com from the 20th annual Energy Efficiency Forum in Washington, D.C., a day-long event sponsored by Johnson Controls and the United States Energy Association. Here are some highlights:

Google: making consumers smarter about energy

Imagine if you walked into a grocery store, chose the food you want (no price tags), took it home and then, at the end of the month, got the bill in the mail. “That’s essentially what we are doing with electricity and natural gas right now,” says Dan Reicher, who heads energy and climate policy at Google, which is aiming to change that.

Instead giving energy consumers a monthly bill that arrives after the fact and is hard for even a geek to decipher, Google wants to give them a way to track their electricity use in real time, or close to, through a free, open-protocol piece of software called Google’s Power Meter. The Power Meter being rolled out in cooperation with eight utility companies, six in the U.S., one in Canada and one in India; they feed the software data through smart meters or other devices.

“Just the simple act of getting people information can really change the way they use energy,” Reicher says. The software tracks electricity use for now, but there’s no reason it can’t be adapted to meter natural gas or water in the future. The software can be installed on a Google home page (alongside stock prices or sports scores) or on a mobile device. “You get data, numbers, graphics, all kinds of interesting things,” Reicher said.

Making consumers smarter about energy will change habits, especially when combined with time-of-day pricing. If utilities can induce people to use less electricity during summer days when it is expensive and more during off peak hours, they won’t have to build as many new power plants to meet peak loads and everyone will save money.

Google employees have been testing the Power Meter for some time, with amusing results. One tenant in a San Francisco apartment saw unusual spikes in his usage and learned that he was paying for the washer and dryer for his entire building. Another found that her her swimming pool pump never turned off. A third replaced old refrigerators in the kitchen and garage and cut his utility bill by 45%.

The scope of Google’s work around energy and climate is quite remarkable. (Reicher, who’s been to FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green, is a typically smart Google exec, a former energy investor and a policymaker during the Clinton administration.) Google is investing in geothermal energy, doing its own research on solar thermal power, pushing hard for plug-in hybrids and “greening” its data centers. I’m hoping to dig deeper into Google’s energy initiatives in a future post.
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