In new data provided by the Edelman Trust Barometer survey of 31,000 global respondents, 68 percent of respondents trust the “renewables” business to do the right thing, as compared with 58 percent for natural gas, 53 percent for utilities and 49 percent for oil (see image below).

That’s a license to lead, folks. Despite significant perceptual headwinds, renewables emerge with a 10 point lead over its nearest energy competitor. As a marketer, I’m reminded of why I originally found this sector so energizing and inspiring during the cleantech boom of 2007-2008.

Note the high trust in places like China and India. Not surprising, considering the clear messages sent by those governments about cleantech deployment, and the ability of those nations to leapfrog traditional energy systems to meet electricity demand for growing middle classes. Both countries boast cleantech leaders like Hanwha Solar, Suzlon and Tata.

Note the low numbers for Japan (66 percent) and Germany (63 percent). These are consistent with both countries’ lower trust in business and energy.

The German numbers shocked me the first time I saw them. But for this country, renewables have graduated to the “big energy” establishment, which I expect engenders less trust than the sheen of new technologies in emerging markets.

For Japan, trust in the entire energy industry is lower than other countries post-Fukushima, but renewables are trusted most within the Japanese energy sector.

Broadening focus to the entire energy industry, this data corroborates another trend: so-called “purpose-driven” energy innovators enjoy a trust premium over other energy professionals. This not just a cleantech thing, it’s an advanced energy thing. This is for two reasons:

When asked to rank attributes that shape trust in a company, respondents ranked “purpose” – protecting the environment, partnering with NGOs – as most important, and being an “innovator of new products” close behind (see image below and note the orange and purple attributes that respondents rank as more important for the energy industry as compared with general business).

Clearly, energy companies can earn more credibility by better communicating real global citizenship and helpful innovation.

On the flipside, communicating about the success of business “operations” (dark blue) was valued only as table stakes for being an energy company, not as a major trust-builder. I would argue this is true if we’re talking about large companies, but I think the opposite is true for advanced energy start-ups where the onus is much higher to prove operational success.

The data also shows how technology is trusted more than energy. In my opinion, the marriage of technology and energy is a net gain for energy company trust building. See the image below, which depicts how much higher technology is trusted than energy (78 percent vs. 67 percent). I interpret this as further proof that innovation gives the energy industry license to lead.

This is reflected in the strong Silver Spring IPO on Wednesday. Silver Spring is an innovative energy IT company, not just an energy company. Energy IT is a highly credible sector populated by other promising companies like OPOWER and FirstFuel, and a primary focus for venture capitalist still focused on cleantech. The public trust data corroborates the investor enthusiasm.

Would you like more data on trust in the energy industry? Don’t hesitate to contact me at joey.marquart@edelman.com.

Joey Marquart is the global cleantech sector lead for Edelman, the PR firm. He is based in Silicon Valley and oversees communications programs for solar, bio, EV, materials and smart grid companies.

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And for just about as long, people have dreamed of mining them. But dreaming and doing are far apart, and the Japanese research project is only a tiny step towards the economical and safe exploitation of methane hydrates. Before that reality, a number of very significant advances have to be made:

1). Environmental containment: Methane hydrates are ice crystals with a few molecules of methane trapped inside. But the crystals aren’t blocks of ice like what is in your freezer. They are lattice-like frames that crumble very easily. Thus any disturbance to a methane hydrate bed can lead to a cascade of collapsing crystals, followed by one big belch of methane gas from the seabed.

This is bad for two reasons. The gas you want to mine can get out of your grasp, and the bubble of valuable hydrocarbons now enters the atmosphere, where it collects heat at nearly twenty times the rate of carbon dioxide. Some even speculate that methane burps from the seabed caused ancient global warming incidents.

How do you stick a drill-pipe into a sediment that has a consistency of cobwebs, without disturbing it? There’s probably an answer out there waiting to be discovered — but nobody knows how to do it today. And there’s no sign that the Japanese drilling experiment is successfully doing so.

2). Economics: Most methane hydrate deposits exist underneath dozens or hundreds of feet of mud and gravel. Where the mud stops and the methane starts is a very blurry line. Thus the fluid that’s brought to the surface will include an enormous amount of extraneous material. That’s a problem that can be solved relatively easily, but not cheaply.

Separating the methane from everything else will be an enormously expensive task that far exceeds the separation requirements of current “tight” natural gas resources (such as coal-seam methane and shale gas). There’s no simple way around that cost, which means the extraction costs of seabed methane will always be higher than any other gas deposits. At current natural gas prices of $3.64 per MMBTU, there’s no reason for anyone to invest in methane hydrate projects.

3). Infrastructure: There is no industrial infrastructure currently built to mine, process and deliver methane from seabed deposits. Unlike traditional underground formations that are highly concentrated, seabed methane beds are spread out over extremely large areas.

To eventually extract that methane will probably require specialized floating infrastructure that can follow the resource. While certainly not a deal-killer, the creation of an entirely new infrastructure to gather the hydrates and turn them into usable fuel is a good reason to not spend a few tens of billions of dollars on all-new, untested equipment.

While some of the breathless reports about the Japanese “discovery” (there’s really nothing special about the Japanese project, several other Japanese and Canadian experiments have successfully brought up methane from hydrate beds) claim that a brand new fossil fuel resource has been stumbled upon, the facts are a little less fantastical.

Yes, there is an enormous amount of methane laying on the world’s seabeds. And yes, there are probably some ways to get it to the surface. But the chances are that most of it will continue to sit there for centuries to come.

This article originally appeared on the blog of Pike Research. Pike Research, a part of Navigant Consulting’s global Energy Practice, is a market research and consulting team that provides in-depth analysis of global clean technology markets. Pike Research is also a partner of GigaOM Pro, GigaOM’s premium research service.

Image courtesy of shunkoh, Flickr Creative commons.

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Obama proclaimed:

If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.

Obama attempted to take these types of actions a few years ago when he worked with the Environmental Protection Agency on a controversial plan to attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Now that Obama is in his second term, and doesn’t have to worry about being voted into another term, he seems to be getting more aggressive on his original campaign goals on clean energy and fighting climate change.

In addition to Obama’s discussion of fighting climate change with market means, the president issued several other promising declarations on energy:

• Make natural gas cleaner: “My Administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits. But I also want to work with this Congress to encourage the research and technology that helps natural gas burn even cleaner and protects our air and water.”
• Create an Energy Security Trust for R&D for non-oil transportation: “I propose we use some of our oil and gas revenues to fund an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good. If a non-partisan coalition of CEOs and retired generals and admirals can get behind this idea, then so can we.”
• Energy efficiency: “I’m also issuing a new goal for America: let’s cut in half the energy wasted by our homes and businesses over the next twenty years. The states with the best ideas to create jobs and lower energy bills by constructing more efficient buildings will receive federal support to help make it happen.”
• Fight power grid cyber attacks: “Earlier today, I signed a new executive order that will strengthen our cyber defenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs, and our privacy. Now, Congress must act as well, by passing legislation to give our government a greater capacity to secure our networks and deter attacks.”

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Alas the cleantech sector has yet to see its own Moore’s Law, though the closest might be that solar cells and panels have dropped dramatically over the past 18 months. But even if Sandalow couldn’t promise a Moore’s Law for energy, he laid out some of the most important trends that the DOE is paying very close attention to in the energy sector in 2013.

1). Grid resiliency and modernization: Both the Superbowl blackouts and hurricane Katrina have highlighted how important it is to make the grid much more resilient to blackouts as well as cyber events. The threat of cyber attacks “is real,” and it’ll be the private sector who mostly will lead the response against these situations, said Sandalow. Having a much more robust grid will also be needed as utilities add more clean power, like wind and solar, onto the grid.

2). Low cost natural gas: Cheap U.S. natural gas, which has emerged through horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, is the “hottest topic in the energy area,” said Sandalow. The DOE is accepting comments right now for whether or not the U.S. should export liquid natural gas. We have 16 applications for companies that want to export it, said Sandalow.

3). The dropping cost of solar: The DOE has its SunShot program, which looks to lower the cost of solar panels, but there’s a lot more work left to do. Germany has a 50 percent lower cost to install solar panels because it removed a lot of the red tape, said Sandalow. He explained, “I want to know when solar will become viral in the way that cell phones did, and what will it take, energy storage?”

4). Electric vehicles: The DOE has done a lot of work with electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, and we plan to do a lot more, said Sandalow.

5). High performance computing and big data: The trend of big data analytics and the most powerful computers in the world will no doubt help crack the problems with energy innovation. They are already being used heavily in the energy and climate change monitoring sectors.

6). Clean energy financing: There’s a lot more work to be done to finance clean power projects, though some milestones passed recently like the tax credits for wind projects. For startups clean power financing is actually a pretty hot area for investment.

7). China: Sandalow says he’s been to China 13 times while he’s been in office. The relationship between the U.S. and China over energy has at times been challenging, says Sandalow, but the trend of Chinese investments being made into cleantech companies in the U.S. is really interesting, and “I expect to see more of it.”

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That’s about the most disingenuous and manipulative piece of advertising I’ve seen in years (about as bad as its Coal Can Do That site). While power grid and utility execs are still looking into what caused the blackout at the Superdome, there are much more likely causes of the blackout than a reduction of coal use including faulty grid architecture (feeder line from an external substation), issues with Superdome power architecture, or even the highly speculative discussions of grid hacking that were ample on Twitter during the blackouts. (Note, Peabody isn’t actually saying the blackout was caused but a reduction of coal use, but just weirdly slaps the two together).

The use of coal for electricity in the U.S. has been reducing and will continue to reduce. Natural gas for electricity is the new hotness — it’s cheap, provides power 24/7, and is cleaner than coal — and wind power was actually the largest source of new generation in the U.S. in 2012. That wind stat was a record, by the way. Of course, having a massive coal business, Peabody doesn’t like this shift in energy generation, so it creates advertising campaigns that look to promote coal.

It’s a sad approach, really. I would say this to Peabody: you can’t turn around a fundamental shift in energy technology by these types of PR methods. The only thing that will shore up the loss of the coal business is investment in new energy technologies.

Yes, you claim to be doing so with “clean coal” technologies, but clean coal tech at this point is far less commercially viable than natural gas, wind, solar and energy efficiency technologies. If you look at the winners and losers throughout the history of the business world, the same type of technology shifts have led to changes like brick and mortar booksellers and video rental companies going out of business in the face of their online counterparts (Borders, Barnes and Nobles, Blockbuster), or telecom companies going under by not embracing wireless technology and the Internet.

No one would argue that coal provides one of the cheapest and most reliable forms of energy. But the environmental ramifications — both greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and dangerous work conditions — of coal are also well known. Coal is a non-renewable source and many of the coal plants in the U.S. are using very old technology. Natural gas is cleaner and also, like coal, can be used around the clock (wind and solar only provide power at certain times of day). And now with its low cost, it’s not surprising that utilities are turning to it now in droves. (Though, yes natural gas is non-renewable also).

As clean power — truly emissions free — becomes more mainstream, it’ll take over more of that new generation, too. Peabody, please join the modern technology age.

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“There was a challenge around getting clean power,” says Nelson. Utah has less than 3 percent renewable energy and generates 82 percent of its power from coal, according to data from 2009 from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The question of how eBay would find clean power for its Utah data center — which is part of eBay’s global consolidation of its data centers into just three mega data centers in Utah, Arizona and Nevada — opened up another possibility: would it make more sense for the online marketplace to power its Utah data center by generating its own power and use the grid as backup?

The fuel cell finds a home

For the much larger Topaz data center, which is modular and built to scale to 30 megawatts, eBay has issued a 10 megawatt public RFI in the past couple months, seeking proposals to generate renewable energy for the data center. But for the adjacent smaller add on Quicksilver data center, eBay decided to have 6 megawatts of Bloom Energy’s solid oxide fuel cells installed on site, making the installation the country’s largest non-utility fuel cell installation. Bloom’s fuel cells generate power by combining natural gas and oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water. EBay is operating a microgrid on site that will allow it to divert excess power from the fuel cells not used by the Quicksilver data center directly to the larger Topaz data center.

Nelson liked the design of fuel cells themselves because there are thousands of redundancy points built in. Each fuel cell produces 25 watts, is combined into a stack producing 40 kilowatts, and is part of a brick producing 200 kilowatts. If one or a group of fuel cells fails, the entire fuel cell brick doesn’t go down.

“Fuel cells are primary power for the computers and then the grid is used as backup. We have a higher available data center with this design than we would have with a traditional generator and UPS design. That was a big ah-ha moment for me,” said Nelson.

Aside from the redundancy of the fuel cells, Nelson was much more excited about the capital expense savings eBay’s getting from shifting his backup power source.

“We’re not putting UPS (uninterruptible power supply) or generators at Quicksilver. They’re completely removed,” says Nelson, referring to the Quicksilver data center, the smaller of the two data center projects in South Jordan, Utah. “This required us to completely change how we approach data center design. We’re using the fuel cells as the backup and the primary source.”

Nelson added that while the up front costs of fuel cells creates a scenario where the fuel cell power is more expensive than grid power, there were a number of cost avoidance returns from the fuel cells that made the economics work. Namely the elimination of UPS and generators along with the simplification of the building design that included changing the height of the building as well as the structural support needed. He noted that eBay examined the risk of an outage on the gas grid, and found it more reliable than the electrical grid. EBay also looked at large scale battery storage, which Nelson said wasn’t cost effective.

Generators and UPS exist at data centers in the event of a power outage and are used about 1 percent of the year. Generators themselves have been criticized. For example, the environmental impacts of Microsoft’s diesel generators in Santa Clara, California and Quincy, Washington were recently highlighted in a controversial New York Times article on data centers.

In terms of the broad pressure on leading webscale IT companies to move away from non-renewable sources of energy like coal power and diesel generators, fuel cells can be renewable if they use biogas. Biogas is reclaimed methane (CH4) from landfills or water treatment plants, rather than mined natural gas. It’s this reason why Microsoft has discussed the possibility of locating future data centers near water treatment plants, which wind up having to flare excess methane because it’s a 20 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

There is currently no biogas produced in Utah, according to Nelson, and eBay is offsetting its natural gas use in Utah by paying a premium to enable biogas production elsewhere. Nelson said the offset will be “meter in/meter out,” meaning for whatever amount of natural gas eBay uses at its Utah data center it will enable that amount of biogas production elsewhere. EBay didn’t disclose the premium it’ll pay.

When the grid becomes backup power

Generating one’s own power is typically more expensive than grid power, which utilities generate at scale and from inexpensive coal, natural gas and nuclear energy. But there’s a growing amount of discussion from data center operators that being in control of one’s own power generation could lead to better uptime.

The June power outage in Virginia caused service problems for Amazon Web Services, impacting Instagram, Pinterest and Netflix. In places like India where the grid is inherently unreliable, companies have been generating their own power for years. Five of India’s biggest electricity consumers generate 96 percent of their own power, which is why major Indian conglomerates like Reliance Industries and Tata Motors were largely unimpacted by the massive blackout over the summer.

While getting off the grid was not eBay’s primary motivation for the fuel cell installation, Nelson did say, “If there are limitations within the grid, we’d like to not be bound to them. And we got the benefit of having the grid as backup.” Using the grid as backup creates a relatively safe redundancy, and if it enables the elimination of UPS and generators, data center operators can rethink the up front capital costs of installing costly on site power generation.

Bloom Energy

EBay is getting its fuel cells from Bloom Energy, which targets corporate customers interested in generating their own power on site. To address the hefty up front capital costs of buying fuel cells, the fuel cell pioneer now offers energy-as-a-service in which Bloom carries the upfront purchase cost of the fuel cells in exchange for a kilowatt hour power purchase agreement. We’re seeing this financing strategy in solar as well, as IPO hopeful SolarCity is actively pursuing a strategy in which it waives the costs of rooftop solar panels in exchange for a long term power purchase agreement. There’s even talk on Wall Street that bankers want to bundle the contracts and securitize them as debt products, to be known as solar backed securities though the market for fuel cells is likely too small for this type of securitization.

EBay actually opted to pay the upfront capital costs of the fuel cells combined with a 20-year guarantee from Bloom of minimal power generation, including maintenance obligations. The eBay deal is a major win for Bloom, which has dived headlong into the data center market this year, hiring Peter Gross to head up its data center group. Gross led data center design for EYP Mission Critical Facilities, which HP bought in 2007.

According to my colleague Katie Fehrenbacher’s August interview with Bloom Energy CFO Bill Kurtz, Bloom remains “halfway” to breaking even, and is in the process of raising another $150 million at a valuation of $2.7 billion. If successful, the raise would bring the lifetime capital raised for the eleven-year old company to $800 million. And it would also make Bloom number four on the top 10 U.S. venture-backed companies in terms of total equity raised, just ahead of Metro PCS and Facebook, but two slots behind Solyndra, which clocked close to a billion dollars in funding.

For the time being, Bloom will have to sell more data centers VPs on the idea that the extra expense of fuel cells has secondary benefits not evident in the initial cost of power. Like a decreased need for UPS and generators, and maybe even a data center less vulnerable to grid outages. And if the possibility of using reclaimed biogas ensures that the fuel source is renewable, all the better. For now all eyes will be on eBay, as well as Apple which is deploying a smaller fuel cell facility in North Carolina, to see how the fuel cells perform and whether they could be part of a rethinking of how to provide backup power for the modern data center.

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If you remember back four years ago — when clean power, cleantech and the potential for carbon policy in the U.S. was hitting a peak — Pickens announced to the world that he planned to kick off the world’s largest wind farm in Texas. It was part of his Pickens Plan to make the U.S. energy independent, and he even bought 500 turbines from GE to build the farm. But then the recession hit hard in late 2008, the Texas wind farm struggled to get the proper transmission lines permitted, and natural gas started on its downward spiral in price, making clean power less attractive to investors.

In the spring of 2010, Picken’s decided to move the planned wind farm up north to Minnesota. The project was originally going to see 334 turbines land in Goodhue, Minnesota, creating a 78 MW wind farm, according to local Minnesota media back then. However, in recent years the wind farm plan had clearly gotten much smaller in scale, and is now reportedly a 50-turbine wind farm, estimated to cost $180 million.

Despite that Pickens has finally sold off his stake in the project, the owner of the wind farm, now called New Era Wind Farm, says he’s still try to get it built. The project is reportedly controversial in the area because of “concerns about potential noise and unpleasant shadows from spinning blades,” as well as “threats to protected eagles and bats that might hit the blades.”

Pickens still seems bullish on natural gas, particularly natural gas for transportation. Last year he was working on a bill that would help provide incentives for natural gas for transportation. Here’s a video interview I did with Pickens back in early 2011, and he told me back then that the wind part of his Pickens Plans was “on the shelf,” because of the low price of natural gas:

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But additional challenges loom in parallel. Water is very likely to be one of them, which is especially pertinent in my region. For true believers in the universality of substitution, let me suggest two things. First, come to terms with the finite compactness of the periodic table. Second, try substituting delicious H₂O with H₂O₂. It has an extra oxygen atom, and we all know that oxygen is a vital requisite for life, so our new product will be super-easy to market. Never-mind the hydrogen peroxide taste, and the death that will surely visit anyone foolish enough to adopt this substitution. Sometimes we’re just stuck without substitutes.

Substitution silliness aside, water and energy are intimately related in what has been termed the Energy-Water Nexus (see for example the article by Michael Webber from this conference compilation; sorry about the paywall). We’ll explore aspects of this connection here (and in Part II to be published tomorrow), touching on pumping water, use of water for the production and extraction of energy, and desalination. As glaciers and snowpack melt and drought becomes more common in the face of climate change, our water practices will need to be modified, hitting energy right in the nexus.

Household Water

Let’s start at the familiar level. A typical San Diego residence uses 14 hundred cubic feet (1 hcf = 748 U.S. gallons = 2831 L) of water each month—working out to 138 gal/day (520 L/day) per person, assuming an average of 2.5 people per residence. Based on backpacking experience, this is more than one hundred times as much water as is necessary to satisfy basic needs.

Note: only 60 percent of Do the Math readers are from the U.S. The volumetric units in this post will likely elicit a groan or two overseas. Some additional conversions: 1 gallon is 3.785 L; one cubic meter is 264 gallons; and 1 hcf is 2.83 m³.

My own household (two people) averages 20 hcf per year. This past year is slightly anomalous in that we planted a large section of our yard with drought-tolerant California natives, and have supplied 4.25 hcf of water (5.5 inches or 14 cm of rain equivalent) to help establish them in their first year — yes, I record sprinkler use. Even so, our water use over the last year comes to 23 hcf — working out to 47 gal/day (or 38 gal/day ignoring temporary irrigation).

Okay, so I’m shocked² by these sets of numbers. First, I am shocked that we use as many as 38 gallons per day within our house. On what?! We are sparing with showers, each requiring only five gallons and on a roughly two-day cadence. Our low-volume toilets (one of which has a dual flush capability) average something like 1.5 gal per flush, and we don’t flush after every use (of certain types, if you know what I mean). Dishes? Sparing, efficient. Laundry? The same. Vegetable garden? Rainwater catchment (600 gal storage). So it’s hard to get it to add up—yet it must, and I accept that.

The second power of shock (thus the square) is the nearly 10× greater usage (344 gal/day) by typical area households. Yet it’s not an unfamiliar mismatch — also appearing in our use of electricity, natural gas, etc. But where is all this water going?

Presumably, much of it goes into creating green lawns in a semi-arid desert: San Diego typically gets about 10.3 inches, or 26 cm, of rain per year. If I guess that a typical house in San Diego has about 2000 ft² (185 m²) of lawn, then tripling the natural rainfall amount will require 34 hcf of water, or about an extra 3 hcf per month. Hmmm. Not as big a chunk of the monthly 14 hcf as I thought it would be.

Maybe I underestimate how much irrigation people are doing. Overwatering, overspray, evaporation, and leaky sprinkler systems may be a big part of the story, but I am still left a bit puzzled. I guess frequent long showers (also energy-intensive), washing clothes maniacally often, flushing every use, hosing off the driveway, washing cars, etc. may all add up.

One final comment on domestic water. Each month, I pay a $19.33 base rate for water service (not including wastewater service, which is a comparable charge). Then it’s $3.61 per hcf of water used. So my monthly water bill comes to about $26. Meanwhile, the average residence pays $70 for their 14 hcf allocation. I’m paying about 2.7 times as much per gallon as the average resident: my reward for conserving, apparently.

A further amusement is that my water service issued a “20 gallon challenge,” which asks residents to shed 20 gallons per day per person. Setting aside the temporary native-plant irrigation, our 38 gal/day household usage would mean that rising to the challenge would result in our complete abstention of utility water usage. In fact, it would require each of us to cough up (not literally) a gallon of water each month to donate to the utility. Good thing we have rain catchment.

National and Statewide Usage

The USGS provides national water use estimates every five years. For 2005, the total 410 billion gallons per day works out to about 1330 gal/day per person. This drops in half if excluding water used for cooling power plants. For California, 81 percent of the withdrawals were for power plants and irrigation, leaving 240 gallons per day per individual in the state.

Energy for Water

A 2006 report pegs the total amount of water-related energy use in California at 52 billion kilowatt-hours annually. This computes to about 6 GW of continuous power expenditure, or 160 W per person. Not a trivial amount. Of the 52 TWh, 32 are performed by the end user for heating, cooling, moving, filtering, or pressurizing the water. The other 20 TWh goes into pumping water across the state, including over mountain ranges. That’s about 8% of California’s electricity demand!

As a lark, if we dumped all 52 TWh of energy into the annual California water supply (40 million acre-feet: just listen to the Europeans howl), how much would the water warm up? Answer: about 1°C. Not all that much. But it illustrates the degree (ha!) to which water heated by 40°C for a shower or by 80°C for cooking pasta is high-value water, relative to the rest.

Combining the energy and volume numbers in another way, each gallon of water in California comes with an average energy price tag of 0.004 kWh, or 0.0015 kWh for the pumped-delivery charge alone. This means that a 1 hcf unit costs just a bit over 1 kWh to deliver.

Water for Energy

But there is another direction to consider as well. Power plants generally use water as a conveyance for waste heat, and withdraw far more water than any other entity in the U.S. (including agriculture). According to the EPA, every kWh of energy delivered demands the participation of 25 gallons (95 L) of water. Most of this is either returned to the source (warmer by 17°C, I calculate) or preserved in a closed system.

But 2 gallons are lost for each kWh of energy delivered (regionally variable: much higher in arid regions). Luckily, the resulting kWh is sufficient to deliver another 750 gal to the door, so there’s no spiraling trap preventing us from consuming water in this way.

Obviously, hydroelectricity is another place where water and energy collide. In drought conditions, municipalities may increasingly face decisions about whether to use the contents of their reservoir for water or electricity. Interestingly, according to Webber, each kWh of hydroelectric energy produced results in the loss of 18 gallons of water due to increased evaporation off of manmade reservoirs — over-and-above what would have happened in the natural run of the river. So hydroelectricity is more consumptive than the thermo-electric plants by a fair margin.

Production and processing of our fossil energy commodities also require the use of water. Gasoline consumes a few times its volume in water for production. But from an energy standpoint, at 36.6 kWh/gal, every kWh of energy available in the gasoline takes a small fraction of a gallon of water to produce. Thus electric cars turn out to be more water-intensive than gasoline cars, for instance, if each kWh of electricity production gulps a few gallons of water.

For tar sands, the ratio is about 5:1 water:oil-product, plus more for refining. A similar number accompanies oil shale extraction, but in the U.S. the oil shale is primarily situated in arid regions where water availability is limited.

Hydraulic Fracturing (“fracking”) for natural gas appears to require 10 L/GJ of water consumption. For the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline, this works out to just about one liter—so not as intensive as tar sands or oil shale, or even gasoline. Mostly this is because gas is happy to flow on its own with little help from water: the water only has to create the cracks (fracks?). However, water does enter the equation in other ways for fracking. Contamination of ground water is a principal concern, and some residents have complained of being able to ignite the effluent from their kitchen sink faucets!

But the real water hog for energy purposes is biofuels. Each gallon of fuel produced may consume something on the order of 1,000 gallons of water (regionally variable). That’s about 25 gallons per kWh, to put it in the same units as we discussed for power plants. Naturally, the impact depends on the degree to which irrigation is employed vs. natural rainfall. I would assume that the amount of water used in the refining/processing is similar to that for gasoline and therefore does not contribute much additional burden.

Stay tuned for the second part of this two-part series, and later this week we’ll publish The energy-water nexus Part II!

This post originally appeared on Tom Murphy’s blog, Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and Ph.D. student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics.

Image courtesy of JoshuaDavisPhotography, laRuth, Photoctor, dr_relling, RichardBarley, RennettStowe.

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Seeing someone from the American Gas Association on a panel at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum was surprising. The worlds of fossil fuels and renewable energy typically don’t mix — at least not at a clean power conference.

“The takeaway here is that the AGA is doing an outreach effort,” said Nancy Floyd, managing director of Nth Power and the moderator of the panel that included the AGA rep, after the panel discussion. “You can’t ignore what’s happening with natural gas.”

In recent years, the natural gas industry has successfully positioned itself as the more environmentally friendly form of fossil fuel, mostly because using natural gas to generate electricity produces less greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal. Coupled that with Obama’s energy policy to embrace oil and gas development – energy independence and job creation are two powerful election-year slogans – and there has been a surge of natural gas exploration that includes the controversial use of fracking to extract it.

Renewable energy proponents generally aren’t too pleased with this new love affair with natural gas because they worry that this abundance of natural gas and its cheap price will make renewable energy less attractive. Cheap fossil fuels means there won’t be price pressures to help promote the development of alternative energy sources, from biofuels to solar tehnology.

Natural gas developers and distributors are expecting a significant growth in their market for years to come. Even though prices are low for natural gas now, they should go up along with an increase in production, said Paula Gant, vice president of policy with the American Gas Association, on the panel. The association represents utilities, distributors, pipeline owners and marketers.

Where might the growth come from? In addition to using natural gas at conventional power plants, the fuel can power cars and generate electricity through fuel cells. The Obama administration is funding research and development on compressed natural gas passenger cars. Fuel cell developers such as Bloom Energy are seeing a strong interest from businesses, such as Microsoft and Apple, that want reliable, onsite backup power generation for their data centers (some companies want to use biogas but will need natural gas pipelines to get it).

Apple’s massive solar farm in North Carolina

“In our view, we don’t think abundant and affordable natural gas precludes the development of renewable energy in this country,” Gant said.

She listed natural gas, renewable energy and energy efficiency as three “domestic resources” that will create jobs, deliver cleaner forms of energy and address climate change. Gant also pointed out that natural gas power plants complement solar and wind farms and help utilities manage the health of the electric grid. Solar and wind energy production is intermittent, but the grid can run along smoothly only when there is a balance of supply and demand (or else there will be blackouts). Utilities can crank up production at natural gas power plants when solar or wind energy production slows down.

Gant said natural gas and renewable energy companies should work together on issues such as renovating and building new natural gas pipelines. The natural gas industry expects a tough fight against environmental groups over pipeline construction, and it wants an ally to woo state and local policy makers.

Paul Detering, CEO of Tioga Energy, which develops solar power projects located at businesses and government agencies, said working with the natural gas industry is a practical approach, particularly since energy storage technology has yet to become cost effective enough to help deal with the intermittent issue of and solar energy generation.

“We can’t take the approach of ‘if I win then you lose’,” Detering said after speaking on the same panel as Gant. “In the next 20 years, there won’t be enough renewable energy to become the main base-load power. I think natural gas is a lot better than other brown fuels.”

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This move, to have clean energy directly power a data center, has always been in the plans. Google’s former green energy czar Bill Weihl (now at Facebook) told me years ago that the ultimate end game was for Google to procure clean energy to use for its data centers. But the search engine giant needed to find the right area, the right utility partner and a new(ish) data center project.

That sweet spot was a data center built in Mayes County, Oklahoma in 2011. Earlier this year Google started working with utility Grand River Dam Authority (GRDA) to buy 48 MW of wind energy from the Canadian Hills Wind Project in Oklahoma. Google says it paid a premium (higher than the basic cheap power it could get elsewhere) to purchase the wind power from the project. As Greenpeace points out, half of Oklahoma’s power grid is run on coal.

Google says the GRDA approached it about buying power from the wind project in early 2012 to sell to Google. The wind project is GRDA’s first clean power project. We need more utilities like this that are willing to work with big customers that want to buy clean power. Most power customers, other than some of the leading Internet companies, aren’t aggressively looking for clean power and willing to pay a premium for it.

Most of the massive Internet companies are building their data centers in locations where power is cheap and reliable. And usually that means fossil fuel power — coal or natural gas — and sometimes means hydro power. The exception is areas like Iceland, which have geothermal and hydro in spades, so can provide cheap, reliable clean power. The Chief Technology Officer of Verne Global, Tate Cantrell, will be speaking at our Structure Europe event next month.

This is one of the first times I’ve heard of a data center operator buying a substantial amount of clean power from a utility project for a premium. So kudos to Google for that.

Greenpeace released a statement about Google’s clean power data center news:

Google’s announcement today shows what the most forward-­‐thinking, successful companies can accomplish when they are serious about powering their operations with clean energy.

Hopefully this is just the first of such announcements from Google.

Google fundamentally believes that it should work with utilities to buy clean power. In contrast other Internet companies like Apple are opting to build their own clean power. Apple is building a massive solar panel farm (through developer SunPower), and a large biogas-powered fuel cell farm (from Bloom Energy), next to its data center in Maiden, North Carolina. Auction site eBay is also building a huge fuel cell farm at one of its data centers.

The leading Internet companies are just starting to dabble in experimenting with clean power. The vast majority are still opting for low cost, reliable power, which usually means going where the grid is powered by fossil fuels. Power and data centers is still controversial — check out the New York Times recent story on that, as well as my opinion on that story. Also read my feature story on the controversial world of clean power and data centers.

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