Parents: you might want to check what kind of polluter-paid propaganda your kids are being exposed to in school, as part of their science curriculum. The Chamber of Commerce has now joined Exxon itself in supplying “Energy” education textbooks for middle school children.

The Chamber is distributing a teaching guide to classrooms across the country as part of its “Shedding Light on Energy” program with educational publisher Scholastic Inc, that is worded to arouse fear of government regulation of pollution from fossil fuels.

“What do you think could happen if one of our energy sources was suddenly unavailable (e.g., power plant maintenance, government curb on production, etc.)?” the guide asks.

Starting from the familiar fossil industry premise that all energy IS fossil energy, the Chamber scares kids that the lights are going out due to a government “curb on production” of “energy sources.”

Of course the lights won’t go out if coal plants are shut down or mountaintop removal is stopped by the EPA, or if there are pollution controls on gas refineries.

Switching from dirty energy sources to clean ones take years; during which time, utilities issue requests for proposals (RFPs) from other cleaner energy suppliers, from wind farms to (less polluting) gas power plants.

Worst case scenario, coal power plants can be converted quite quickly to run on natural gas, as has been the trend, as more and more states move to reduce carbon emissions with Renewable Energy Standards that limit carbon. Utilities are aware of plans that affect their future production, and plan for changes in electricity supply.

The US Chamber of Commerce gets the majority of all its funding from the fossil industry, both domestic and foreign, opposes climate and clean energy regulations, and funds climate deniers both as new candidates for the the House and Senate, as well as those already there. It is losing members who are not part of the fossil lobby, due to its dangerous position on climate changing fossil fuel dependence.

Now the Chamber is trying to create future generations of “useful idiot” voters to vote against their best interests.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

In by far the most exhaustive and detailed study to date, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that solar homes sold 20% faster, for 17% more than the equivalent non-solar homes, across several subdivisions built by different California builders.

When Shea Homes put solar PV and solar thermal systems on half the homes in a development, all 257 of them sold within a year, two years faster than expected. And while these new houses were priced at $380,000 to $500,000, they sold for as much as $600,000.

This was well before the housing crash, so it represents the buoyant market of that time, in 2003. Still, it found that compared with non-solar homes, the houses that had solar on them sold for more. While the average price increase related was 55% for the solar homes, the non solar homes appreciated only 33% (pg 49.) This represents a 20% higher sales price for solar homes.

The Clarum Homes’ solar homes in the study also sold faster than their “control” homes. The solar homes sold in 23 months, the non-solar, in 28 months. This is a 17% faster home sale for a solar home.

The solar homes appreciated 20% more, and sold 17% faster than the non-solar homes.

After extensive interviews with the home buyers in the development, the (413 page pdf) NREL study made some other interesting findings.

If solar was already on the house, and factored into the price already, buyers were more likely to pick a house with solar. But if it was just one more decision to be made at the point of purchase, the decision got shelved.

This was found to happen because the salespeople were more likely to neglect to bring up the option altogether, for fear of losing a sale to indecisiveness. After all, they can’t even sell the house till the buyer has decided on either the Neon orange Corian or the Tuscan granite for the counter tops. They can sell the house without solar, but not without the counter tops.

Why builders should make solar standard:

By contrast, instead of leaving the decision to the salesperson, simply building the house with the solar system as standard was found to be behind the successful widespread adoption of the solar powered homes. Some of the homes were built with solar on them already, so there was no decision needed. The sales comparison between them and the non-solar homes formed the basis of the discovery of the 20% higher prices, and 17% faster sales.

Solar as the standard was also more profitable for builders themselves, the study found. In one California development, all 306 homes included solar hot water systems and 120 also included PV systems. That builder found that it was more profitable to build in the solar systems as the standard feature rather than wait for homeowners to request an upgrade and to add the solar in those instances later.

Even modest reductions appreciated:

Also, interestingly, the homes are not nearly as solar powered as they could be, with relatively modest reductions in their electricity bill. But the buyers were very satisfied with their energy bill reductions. Homes had small 2.4 KW PV systems (as well as solar hot water systems) that reduced their energy bills by only 54% compared with comparison homes. Of course, it depends on how many plasma TVs are inside, but the average home like this needs about a 6 KW system to supply all of its electricity.

And were these just crunchy granola-chomping lefty hippies buying the solar homes? Absolutely not. The study found no differences between the solar home buyers and the average buyers for these sorts of homes. But the buyers were thrilled with their savings.

As the NREL study concludes, these results suggest:

“…a conceptually fresh alternative paradigm for the building and marketing of new Zero Energy Homes. When this paradigm is used, builders, new home buyers, and utility companies will benefit. When appropriately applied to business practice and public policy, this new paradigm will help builders create the sustainable communities so necessary for our well-being and that of future generations”.

Image: NREL
Susan Kraemer @Twitter

China, which shot to world leadership in turbine production after passing renewable energy legislation (together with local construction mandates) in 2005, has begun building its first off-shore wind farm in Bohai Bay, a few hours from Beijing. The engineering design and construction of what will be the world’s largest offshore wind farm at 1,000 MW, according to Ordons energy news, is being undertaken by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC),

It is not that unusual for offshore oil to develop offshore wind technology. The two share some of the same technical and engineering issues. Stat-Oil in Norway is also investing in offshore wind development, because many of the engineering solutions found to develop offshore oil, are also applicable to the development of offshore wind, like building platforms in deep sea.

Once complete, in 2020, the Bohai Bay wind farm, just three hours from Beijing, will be the largest off-shore wind farm in the world, at 1,000 MW. The current world’s largest offshore wind farm in Europe just started sending power to the grid in September from a 300 MW array of turbines in the North Sea.

To build the massive infrastructure needed, nearby Tianjin has received an investment of $2.2 billion from the Chinese government. The potential is for a staggering 750 Gigawatts of offshore wind power off the coast of China, more than twice the potential 330 GW off the Atlantic coast of the US, which itself would power the East Coast twice over.

Image: Offshore oil equipment in Bohai Bay
Susan Kraemer @Twitter

Once China decides to tackle an issue, it excels. For example, having decided to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from its energy mix, it did so, and in the process, propelled Chinese companies to three of the top five wind turbine manufacturers in the world. From a 78% dependence on coal as recently as 2007, the giant nation is now on its way to 67% dependence by 2015.

This is an extraordinary speed of change considering that the enormous country is actually the manufacturing center of the world, which involves the heavy industry that is at the base of most supply lines for the rest of the world. But it remains behind the US in coal-dependence, which already has reduced its dependence on coal to 46%.

But there is one area where China lags the US. The nation’s building stock has worse energy-efficiency. Their buildings leak energy, mostly through the windows.

And compared with European window glass efficiency, China lags even further behind. Because many US states lack energy efficient building codes, there are fewer incentives for manufacturers here to compete with real energy efficiency. Thus, in the US, the only serious producer of energy efficient windows (Serious Materials) grew in the state with the toughest energy codes, California.

In China, the problem is even worse than spotty codes. Building codes generally are ignored, for lack of building inspectors on the ground. According to a study by Geoffrey Lewis during a Fulbright Scholarship in China, most of the coal powered heat is going out of the window.

But if China decided to figure out how to revamp its incentives to improve manufacturing of more energy-efficient windows, and to make that the standard, there is evidence that it could also reduce its reliance on coal much further. Like Scandinavia, which leads the world in window building efficiency, China has very, very cold winters.

German Passivehaus standards enforce windows that can stand up to that climate with triple pane glass and the engineering around the frames needed to prevent “heat bridges” crossing them. Like Germany, China is a nation of engineers, and companies like Jinan Sunny Machinery Company appear to now be starting to spring up to build windows at the level of energy efficiency needed to reduce energy use.

This should not be hard. And it certainly is cost effective. As this graph shows, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy-efficient is one of the cheapest ways to reduce greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

Competing claims about China’s energy is widely disparate in the US media, depending on whether you get your facts from the right wing rags like the WSJ, or from the actual data the industries involved publish, so I think it is instructive to compare them, to put the plans for wind next to the plans for coal in context.

Currently China gets 70% of its power from coal, much higher than the US. Year-to-date, coal-fired plants contributed 45.6%  of the power generated in the United States (EIA: October).

By 2015, China’s 1.4 billion people will get 933 Gigawatts of their power from coal, by building an additional 300 Gigawatts of coal-fired power units and putting 290 GW of coal-fired units into operation. The right seizes on this: “We can’t do anything about climate because China is building a coal plant a week!”

Yet coal will actually go down as a percentage of China’s power from 70% to 67% by 2015. How can adding more coal plants reduce the percentage of coal on the grid?

Because the ramp-up in all the renewable power in China is much faster. It is gathering steam to the point where it impacts the percentage of coal on the grid.

By 2020, wind power in China will have increased by between 500% and 1,000%.

Total wind installed was 26 Gigawatts at the end of 2009. The most conservative estimate of how much China plans to ramp that up to, is to get at least 150 Gigawatts of wind on the grid by 2020: a five-fold or 500% increase. (China Wind Power Outlook 2010 report) A moderate estimate, assuming business as usual, by the Global Wind Energy Council, based on current incentives and laws in place, projects that China will have 230 Gigawatts of wind on the grid by 2020 (GWEC).

So, while coal dominates China’s grid now, by 2020, it won’t.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter