A kind of frontier spirit animates this new energy world: a thirst to venture into the unknown; faith that untapped natural bounty, this time truly limitless, waits just over the horizon; even a moral calling, a new kind of manifest destiny that nearly inverts the nineteenth-century aspiration to dominate nature. This time around, technology will not be the harsh master of nature, but its ally.
Nowhere is that frontier spirit closer to the surface than on the actual last American frontier, deep in the interior of Alaska in a little community of sixty-one people called Chena Hot Springs. Discovered in 1905 by a rheumatic prospector, Chena is an eccentric, ramshackle place, hammered together from pipes, wood, and wire salvaged from Valdez and Prudhoe Bay; a resident moose frequently loiters amid the massage huts and piney cabins. It is literally the end of the road, about sixty miles northeast of Fairbanks and thirty-three miles off the grid. Beyond here, bush planes (or sled dogs, but we’ll come to that) are the only alternatives. Situated on the “auroral oval”—the latitude (65°N) at which the earth’s upper atmosphere produces the most spectacular northern lights—it is a winter destination for Japanese tourists who soak in the waters as the aurora dances overhead, and a summer haven for brides who wed under the midnight sun in a Gothic palace carved entirely of ice. It is also at the cutting edge of geothermal energy, winner of the 2007 “top 100 R&D” projects in the nation (named by R&D magazine and the U.S. Department of Energy), and run by a man as outlandish and inspiring as the resort itself.
photo courtesy of Sarah Shatz
That ice palace, improbably, is what set proprietor Bernie Karl on his path as a pioneer and proselytizer for clean energy. With his big belly and beard, billed cap and suspenders, Bernie (he is “Bernie” to everyone) is an impresario from another age, bursting with can-do spirit, possessed of a visionary ambition that borders on the nutty, and astoundingly resourceful, patching together world- class projects from recycled junk and ingenuity. One of his heroes is Walt Disney, who inspired Bernie’s decision in 2003 to hire thirteen-time world champion ice carver Steve Brice and his wife, four-time champ Heather Brown, to carve the six-room Aurora Ice Hotel out of fifteen thousand tons of ice and snow. Bernie’s team embedded refrigeration tubing in an insulated exoskeleton, and circulated glycol cooled by Caterpillar-built diesel generators at a cost of $700 a day.
It didn’t work. Within a few months of its January 2004 opening, as the hotel “was melting along with [Bernie’s] $20,000 investment,” Forbes magazine dubbed it “the dumbest business idea of the year… [H]e somehow miscalculated the effect of 24 hour summer sun and 90 degree heat.”1 Bernie gamely joked with the reporter, “I had a frozen asset, and I turned it into a liquid asset.” And then— he built it again. “Because,” he explains, “we’d learned how not to do it.” (Constructive failure, it turns out, is a crucial way station for many clean-tech inventors on the way to success.)
Bernie’s wife, Connie, whom he met in 1976 when both were working on the trans-Alaska pipeline (she was a bus driver, he a mechanic), told him he had one more shot. So he hired an architect and structural engineer, who eventually shaved the building’s weight to one thousand tons, eliminated the use of snow (which is structurally fluid), and redesigned the cooling system to replace the tubing with a big, cold air space between two walls.
Several years earlier, Bernie had hired Gwen Holdmann to figure out how to make power from the hot springs that were Chena’s claim to fame. A young space physicist and mechanical engineer from Wisconsin, Gwen had started her own renewable- energy consulting firm. It was the first time, Bernie recalls, that any potential employee had presented him with a three-page description of the job she planned to do; he was so taken with her that he asked her to be his vice president for new development. Gwen was not so sure. “Bernie’s a big talker, and I didn’t know whether he was for real.” But she agreed to begin mapping and analyzing the geothermal resource, secured a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, and assembled a team of advisers, including Southern Methodist University geophysicist David Blackwell and Dick Benoit of Sustainable Solutions in Reno, Nevada. Together they began drilling holes—some of them thousands of feet deep— to figure out the underlying geology, how deep the water was circulating, and the size and maximum temperature of the reservoir. “Halliburton would have come in and drilled us a deep well for $10,000,” says Gwen. “But Bernie didn’t have any money, then or now. We couldn’t even afford the instruments to get accurate temperature and pressure readings, so I spent $700 and built my own.”
Then the hotel melted, and Bernie sprang the news that he had given $50,000 to a nuclear physicist named Don Erickson, who claimed to have invented a three-pressure geothermal absorption chiller (most systems operate at only one pressure), and who had promised to build the first one ever at Chena in two months’ time. With the second crystal palace gleaming under the intensifying spring sun, Bernie’s calls to Erickson grew frantic. “This thing is going to melt. I’m sending you one-way plane tickets. You have to fly it in tomorrow.”
photo courtesy of Sarah Shatz
By all rights, that second system should also have failed; numerous experts assured Bernie he was just throwing more money away. Though absorption chillers have been around since the 1800s, conventional physics had set the minimum temperature differential (or delta T) required to make them work at 160°F. With the hot springs water at 165°F and a neighboring creek running at 40°F, Chena had a delta T of just 125°F. Bernie was not phased by the experts’ gloom: “A lot of educated people,” he says, “learn just enough to know what won’t work.” (He is not, as a rule, overawed by experts. When Connie needed a $10,000 gallbladder operation, Bernie, who has no medical insurance, brought a medical textbook into the surgeon’s office, opened it to a picture of a diseased gallbladder, and said, “You’d better bring me something that looks like this or I’m not paying you.” Only when the surgeon handed over Connie’s gallbladder did Bernie peel off the hundred-dollar bills.)
So despite the doomsayers, Bernie turned Erickson and Holdmann loose, and sure enough they figured out how to push the existing technologies beyond the edge. (That trick—taking existing stuff and making it go beyond what experts say is possible—is another recurring theme.)
The absorption chiller works, like conventional air-conditioners, by tapping the cooling effect of evaporation; Gwen likens it to the chill you feel at the beach when ocean water evaporates from your skin, drawing out body heat. Instead of using electricity to compress the refrigerant, however, Chena’s absorption chiller is the first three-pressure chiller in the world to use geothermal energy.
This is how it works: Hot water from the springs heats a solution of ammonia and water. The ammonia, which boils at just 4°C (40°F), turns into a pressurized vapor, separates from the water, and goes into a condenser, where cold water from Monument Creek turns it back to liquid, still pressurized from the energy it got from the ground. It is when that high-pressure liquid is allowed to expand that it sucks up heat, in this case from a brine that cools the air circulating between the inner and outer walls of the ice “museum,” as the structure is now called. The ammonia, meanwhile, is reabsorbed by the water and begins the cycle again.
Though only the size of a big home furnace, the chiller makes enough cold to produce fifteen tons of refrigeration a day (one ton of refrigeration can freeze two thousand pounds of water at 0°C (32°F) in twenty-four hours). That is enough to preserve the vast museum through the longest, hottest summer days: to keep its life-sized ice knights forever jousting on their crystalline steeds, the ice martini glasses brimming with real martinis, the ice chandeliers dangling dozens of individually faceted crystals, and the ice beds solid under their soft caribou hides—all lit with fiber optics to mimic the colors of the aurora borealis. The whole thing is cheesy and yet undeniably beautiful, with bits of subarctic algae, star- shaped crystals, and air bubbles preserved within the luminescent ice. Standing outside as tourists line up to get in, Bernie grins. “The stupidest business idea? Forbes can kiss my ass.”
That success energized Bernie and Gwen for their next grand scheme: making all the resort’s electricity out of the lowest- temperature geothermal resource ever used for power production. (In Iceland, one of the world’s major geothermal energy centers, the water is 200°C (400°F). “The stuff they discharge,” says Gwen, “is hotter than our water.”) They had begun talks with a company about building a customized and expensive plant when they got a call from United Technologies Corporation (UTC) of Connecticut, a $48 billion Fortune 500 company whose holdings include Otis elevator, Sikorsky aircraft, Pratt & Whitney jet engines, and Carrier refrigeration. UTC had heard about Bernie, the caller said, from the Department of Energy, which had been supporting Gwen’s exploration work. Would he be interested in working with UTC to modify one of its new PureCycle 200 power plants, developed to make electricity from waste heat at temperatures between 260°C and 540°C (500°F and 1,000°F), to run on geothermal energy?
UTC had recently spun off its fuel cells and generators into a new division, UTC Power, and the PureCycle 200 had come out of brainstorming sessions aimed at reconfiguring into new products existing technologies in the company’s portfolio. Carrier has 69 percent of the world’s market share in air-conditioners: how about running those air-conditioning units backward? In reverse, the centrifugal compressor would become a turbine: instead of using electricity to turn the compressor, it could turn the compressor with steam to make electricity. The UTC engineers found an old jet engine lying around the company’s research center, hooked up a Carrier unit, pumped in some steam, and in the first test produced 60 kilowatts. A bit more research and development, and they were testing it on methane flares at landfills. But they needed a more consistent heat source, which led them to geothermal—one of the rare renewable sources that is available virtually 100 percent of the time—and to Bernie. What really swung Bernie UTC’s way was the company’s long-term goal: to mass-produce low-temperature geothermal power plants, cutting the cost from $3,000 to $1,300 per kilowatt installed. Even more than the tightwad Bernie, who wanted to save the $365,000 he was spending on diesel fuel each year, the missionary Bernie wanted to spread good works throughout the land.
When the ribbon was cut on the first UTC Chena Power Plant in the summer of 2006, it was a gala affair. Alaska’s political luminaries followed the Fort Wainwright marching band past the goat pen and organic vegetable garden up to the plant to celebrate. “We’ve had a real problem in the past getting partnerships going” for alternative-energy projects, said Senator Ted Stevens. “We’ve not had such a leader as Bernie.” Governor Frank Murkowski also had praise, reported Petroleum News, “for the self-described imposter with no formal education who had upstaged the assembled politicians and scientists. ‘Most people didn’t believe you could take hot water and make a generator out of it,’ said the Governor. ‘You’ve proved them wrong.’”2 Jean Copin of the United Technologies Research Center compared Bernie’s adventurous spirit to that of their founder, Elisha Otis, who at the 1853 Crystal Palace Exposition in New York went up ten stories in an elevator and told his assistants to chop the cable to demonstrate the effectiveness of his safety brake. (Bernie himself tells that elevator story often, to explain his deep regard for UTC. “That’s the kind of company they are—the real McCoy.”)
photo courtesy of Sarah Shatz
The Chena Power Plant is even simpler than the chiller. Water from the hot springs is pumped through a heat exchanger, vaporizing a “working fluid” with a very low boiling point; that gas moves through a nozzle at a pressure of 220 pounds per square inch and at twice the speed of sound, spinning a turbine at 15,000 revolutions per minute. The turbine, in turn, spins a generator. The working fluid then goes to a condenser, where it is cooled by Alaska creek water siphoned from a well thirty-one feet uphill. Except for one month when the units were down after a welding spark nearby set off a major fire, the pair of 225-kilowatt “organic rankine cycle” (ORC) plants have worked at full capacity, producing 3 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2007, displacing 224,000 gallons of diesel, and saving Bernie hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What is revolutionary about the plant is not the technology, which was familiar, but that a giant company “with the smartest guys in the world,” in Bernie’s estimation, “were willing to deal with this country mouse” to work out the economics on a small scale. The trick was to invent as little new as possible: of the 171 parts in the power plant’s turbine/generator assembly, 158 came off Carrier’s existing production line in Charlotte, North Carolina; only 13 new parts had to be manufactured. A Carrier mechanic, says Gwen, would not be able to tell the Chena turbine and generator from the compressor and motor he is used to repairing. By using “the Henry Ford approach,” said Halley Dickey, UTC Power’s sales manager for geothermal business development, “we cut the cost of power production here from 30 cents to 7 cents a kilowatt-hour, which means a million-dollar plant will pay for itself in a year. What Bernie’s built is a money machine.”
Connected by satellite and shared monitoring systems, the Chena-UTC team continue to improve the product. UTC team members raised the turbine a few feet because they found that gravity helped reduce foaming as the working fluid dropped back down to the heat exchanger; they also scored the water pipes and added a thick steel cuff on the compressor to increase heat diffusion. And they switched to a cheaper working fluid—R134a refrigerant, which, as Bernie says, you “can buy at Sam’s Club”—which allowed the use of cheaper components. (Eventually, they may want to find yet another substitute; use of that refrigerant—common in automotive air-conditioning systems—has itself been challenged as a potent source of greenhouse gases.) The Chena team members added a muffler to deal with the supersonic whine and a dual cooling system: by switching to an air-cooled compressor in the winter, when the ambient temperature hovers around –43°C (–45°F), they reduced the energy needed to run the system in order to get more net power. They also added 3 megawatts’ worth of batteries, which Bernie bought from a San Diego dot-com that went bust, for startup and load balancing.
The enthusiasm at both ends was so great that instead of the usual ten years it takes to bring a new product to market, the Chena-UTC team finished in two. When the fire burned out all the wiring and controls, UTC engineers took vacation time to come to Alaska to rebuild the control boxes, and project manager Bruce Biederman spent his Saturdays on the phone with Gwen, helping her get them going again. And long after Robert Hobbs, director of operations for UTC’s Research Center, considered the technology worked out enough to pass it on to product development, the engineers in his division were so fond of the new machine that they wanted to keep working on it. UTC is now working to scale up to a 1-megawatt plant. Bernie has offered to install one at Chena and finish the research and development there.
There are major differences of style. “A big corporation moves slowly, does everything by committee,” says Gwen. “We just do stuff. If we screw it up, we fix it.” “They’re old, stoic, and conservative,” says Bernie, “which drives me crazy but is also their strength.” UTC’s size and history have proved to be enormous assets: “With our engineering and manufacturing expertise, our deep pockets, the fact that we didn’t have to start from scratch but could expand an existing production line and our credibility in the market,” says UTC vice president Judith Bayer, “we can bring new technology quickly to market.” UTC is now building 225-kilowatt power plants for commercial sale, while continuing work on a 1-megawatt unit. The company plans to produce hundreds of the new units each year, which together will generate 100 to 150 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply 100,000 homes—or a city about the size of Toledo, Ohio. More than half of the first year’s production has been sold to Raser Technologies, a Provo-based company that holds geothermal leases on 14,000 acres in southwest Utah and will use 135 plants to produce 30 megawatts of power, enough for 30,000 homes. That’s baseload power: always available, and completely carbon-free.
UTC’s motivation to address carbon emissions began with recognition of its own outsized impact on the world. The company estimates that its products—airplane engines, elevators, air-conditioners, helicopters—generate 2 percent of all carbon emissions worldwide. As an aerospace company, it also knows that any gain in efficiency is worth many times its weight in gold. Since 1997 the company has doubled in size while cutting energy use in absolute terms by nearly 19 percent. Between 1997 and 2006 that cut in energy use meant a reduction in carbon emissions of about 400,000 metric tons, the equivalent of taking 80,000 cars off the road.
UTC hopes to be rewarded for its early greenhouse gas reduction initiatives when a mandatory cap-and-trade program becomes law. Although its power division has just 487 employees (compared to 61,000 at Otis and 41,000 at Carrier), it receives 20 percent of the UTC Research Center budget, an indication of where the company thinks its future profits lie. For its 2006 strategic planning meeting, the company even invited Bernie Karl.
photo courtesy of Sarah Shatz
The venture capitalists scrambling to get in on solar and biofuels start-ups have largely ignored geothermal power, being more comfortable, perhaps, with silicon chips and biotech than with drill rigs and old-fashioned industrial technology. It is big companies, like UTC and the Israeli giant Ormat Technologies, that are poised to reap the potential, which by 2025, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, could meet between 4 and 20 percent of current U.S. electricity needs. In the fall of 2007, Iceland’s Glitnir Bank announced that it would invest $1 billion in U.S. geothermal projects over the next five years and predicted that annual sales of electricity from geothermal sources will grow from $1.8 billion to $11 billion by 2025. The resource requires careful management: to avoid cooling Chena’s production wells, Gwen had to develop ongoing monitoring systems to track the water reinjected into the ground.
Heat energy is continually regenerated in the earth’s crust, through both the subduction of tectonic plates and radiogenic decay. It is particularly close to the surface along the “ring of fire” where tectonic plates meet, including the entire Pacific coast, where it produces hot rock all the way to the Rockies. A granite pluton— a body of rock formed by the cooling of molten lava—like the one underlying Chena promises a particularly good resource. Granite fractures easily, creating conduits for water that has circulated deep into the crust, and it is often rich in uranium and thorium, which generate heat as they decay. Where underground water comes in contact with deep hot rocks, it can reach 370°C (700°F). At “flash plants,” like California’s Geysers, water shoots up the wells to the surface, where, released from high pressure, it “flashes” into steam and spins the turbine generator. Following a period of decline in pressure, water is now reinjected into the wells using reclaimed wastewater piped in from cities. After forty years of use, running day and night, Geysers still generates enough electricity for a million people.
Alaska has more geothermal resources than any other state, although none had been developed before Chena. It also has the nation’s highest energy costs, ranging from 30 cents to $1 per kilowatt-hour. Though the winds in Alaska are terrific, melting permafrost can compromise the stability of windmills; solar energy is also complicated, given that power needs are greatest in the winter, when the sun scarcely rises. Gwen finds those challenges invigorating:“ Alaska is the most energy-intensive state in the most energy-intensive country. So if we can get Alaska to shift, others won’t be able to claim it’s impossible. And because energy is so expensive, what might be marginal in another part of the country makes sense here. So we can do the R&D to lower the costs. The rest of the country is catching up to us in energy prices anyway.” Alaska also has powerful Republican senators, Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski, with a large voice in energy policy; both support mandatory federal limits on the emissions that cause global warming.
Bernie has his sights set farther afield, to America’s oil-producing regions, which he says could be “the Saudi Arabia of geothermal.” In tens of thousands of oil wells, water at temperatures between 120°C and 150°C (250°F and 300°F) comes up with the oil. Considered a nuisance, it is separated and dumped, at a cost of about $4 per barrel of oil. In Texas, in the year 2002 alone, more than 12 billon barrels of hot water were produced, representing a potential geothermal resource of 10,000 megawatts of energy. “That’s the equivalent of ten nuclear power plants,” says Bernie, “but they’re still planning on building nukes and coal.” On more than one occasion, he has stood before a roomful of oil and utility executives and told them, “You ought to be ashamed.” His partner at UTC, Bruce Biederman, has begun setting up demonstration projects at those Texas wells, putting little Chena power plants on flatbeds and trucking them right to the sites. “There are 500,000 oil wells drilled in the U.S.,” says UTC’s Judith Bayer, “which means the front-end investment and risk of assaying and drilling [the most expensive steps involved in developing geothermal power] is already done; the permits are already secured. The hot water, in other words, is free fuel.”
In October 2007 Bernie got a chance to demonstrate the potential closer to home. The Department of Energy awarded $724,000 to Chena Power to begin using the wastewater produced by Prudhoe Bay oil wells to replace a portion of the 162 megawatts of electricity now generated by the oil field’s natural gas–fired turbines. The grant will be matched by funds from Chena Power, UTC, and BP.
Southern Methodist University professor David Blackwell, who continues to work with Gwen on assessing the Chena resource, advocates going further still. A 2007 MIT report he coauthored, “The Future of Geothermal Energy,” proposes using advanced oil- drilling techniques to drill down five thousand feet or more, fracture hot dry rocks in the earth’s crust, and inject water to “mine heat” that exists along the underground thermal incline everywhere under the earth’s crust—if the drills go down far enough. Such heat mines could be drilled near urban centers, Blackwell and his colleagues argue, providing several times the energy those cities need.
photo courtesy of Sarah Shatz
For Bernie, waste is a kind of sin and recycling almost a religion; before he was a resort owner, he owned and operated K&K Recycling for twenty-four years. The Chena resort and power plant have beams recycled from an Exxon rig in Russia and fifty-year-old pumps from a Nike missile station. Bernie is looking into buying a 6,500-foot drill rig once owned by Bill Gates on which he hopes to save a couple of million dollars. “The only natural wealth we have is what we can grow or we can mine,” he says. “I mined gold for nine years, but then began mining what other people had already mined.”
That ethic began early. Bernie grew up in Peoria, Illinois, one of sixteen kids, including five brothers afflicted with muscular dystrophy. He started his first business at the age of eight, in 1960, with a lawnmower he bought on credit for $108 from Sweetman’s Hardware Store. He paid for it by mowing the Sweetman lawn at the top of a big hill twenty-two times. Then he bought ten more. Two years later he had ten kids working for him mowing lawns, was on his bike delivering the Chicago Tribune early every morning and the Peoria Journal Star each night, and pulled a wagon around town daily collecting the previous day’s papers, storing them in his parents’ garage, then loading them into his uncle’s coal truck to sell for 25 cents per hundred pounds. When he sold a Stark Brothers fruit tree to his third-grade teacher, Mrs.Webbler, it was the start of yet another business. Equipping his wagon with batteries, an inverter, and an electric hedge clipper, he offered full-service landscaping to his neighbors. From his Dad, who worked for Caterpillar for forty-three years but spent every free moment expanding their house, Bernie learned plumbing, electrical work, bricklaying, and carpentry. But it was from his brothers in wheelchairs, he says, that he got his drive. “It is because of them that I do not dwell on bad things; I work on good things. One of my brothers can’t swat a mosquito. But he took a Kubota mower, put a trailer on it like the Popemobile, and runs it with his mouth, mowing acres of grass.”
Bernie saw those same intrepid qualities in Gwen. When she showed up at Chena, she had only recently moved out of a squatter’s cabin on an abandoned gold claim in the woods, where she had lived alone for a year. She had come to Alaska the day she graduated from college; “like a compass,” she says, “I’d always had a pull to the north.” Her fifth-grade science fair project had been on the solar wind, which creates the aurora borealis; as a graduate student in space physics at the University of Alaska, she returned to that obsession, mapping the aurora with a 30,000-volt laser that could track the movement of atoms in the upper atmosphere. She also began collecting and training sled dogs. At age twenty-one, with twenty dogs and no money, she had stumbled upon the 120 square- foot abandoned cabin, a half mile from the nearest road, which had a sod roof and root cellar but no water or electricity. To get water in the winter, she had to snowshoe to the creek and chop a hole in the ice; to stay warm, she had to down trees and split untold cords of firewood. Food and propane for gas lamps had to be hauled in on a sled, with Gwen usually doing the pulling. “Most of us spend our lives not thinking about where you get all that stuff. I felt like I learned the true value of water, the true value of warmth and light. How much work does this heat require? I knew exactly: if I want to be warm tonight I have to chop wood for an hour.”
Frustrated by the abstract nature of her graduate research and by university politics, Gwen left school and began her consulting firm, Your Own Power. After a year of squatting, she purchased land from the state and built her own cabin, where she lives with her husband, Ken, who finished seventh in the 2007 Iditarod. (Though she worried the building department would restrict her dogs, her construction permit prohibited just four things: a nuclear power plant, a hazardous waste dump, a prison, and a strip club.) Most of the power for their house and Jeep comes from solar panels and used vegetable oil.
In March 2001 Gwen finished the Iditarod, mushing her dogs 1,161 miles from Anchorage to Nome on the coast of the Bering Sea, spending twelve days and nights crossing mountains, frozen rivers, and tundra, maneuvering treacherous precipices in blizzards and howling winds. In 2003 she won the third-biggest dog race in the world, the 430-mile Wyoming Stage Stop. In February 1998 and again in 2004 she finished the most grueling race of all, the Yukon Quest, 1,000 miles along the historic Gold Rush route from Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory to Fairbanks, riding and running alongside her dogs and muscling the sled out of trouble through unremitting darkness, temperatures of forty below zero, gale-force winds, open water, bad ice, and—most terrifying—a head-on collision with a moose. Moose are terrified of dogs (their only predator, apart from humans, is the wolf) and have been known to charge and stomp them to death when alarmed. Nearly as terrifying was a night during the Quest when she stopped to “snack the dogs” and lie on her back in the snow to watch the aurora, which was particularly beautiful that night. Her dogs, suddenly restive and whining, roused her from her reverie to alert her to a pack of wolves in the woods just eight yards away. For the next fifteen miles, she could see the wolves darting in and out of the trees, shadowing her team. Now Bernie, who chides himself for being so fat that he puts out “twice as much carbon dioxide as most people,” has decided he is going to run the Iditarod—“with one hundred chihuahuas.”
Bernie’s other schemes are nearly as farfetched. “People tell me I’m thinking outside of the box. But hell, I’ve never been in the box. And I’m never going to get in it.”
By the end of 2008 he intends to use no hydrocarbons at all at Chena Hot Springs Resort. The next step on the way to that goal is construction of a 400-kilowatt biomass power plant, on which he’s again partnering with UTC. Although his mother still raises corn, Bernie is deeply scornful of corn ethanol. “You can’t burn food— it’s just stupid. And with all the subsidies, I figure its real cost is about $11.50 a gallon. How unconscionable that Congress would dump so much money into it. I asked Senator Stevens why they did, and he said, ‘It’s 28 votes, the strongest lobby in the nation.’”
What Bernie proposes to burn in his plant are the fast-growing willows that cover much of the Alaskan interior. “Sweden’s at the same latitude, and they use willows. You can get 8,000 BTUs per pound, with no irrigation. Two hundred acres would power a whole village. Hell, a moose grows from sixty to two hundred pounds in a year eating nothing but willows. They’ve got 30 percent protein in the top eighteen inches, and good hay has only 18 percent protein. And tannic acid on the bottom so the moose only eats the top and doesn’t kill it.” (As Bernie gets increasingly wound up by his own vision, Connie, who is standing nearby, interrupts gently: “I’d verify all that.”)
Next on the list is what Gwen calls “Bernie’s hydrogen kick.” Gwen’s analysis of the Chena hot springs suggests that it might ultimately support as much as 5 megawatts of generation. Since the resort uses less than half a megawatt, Bernie is using the leftover electricity to make hydrogen, with which he hopes soon to power all the resort’s vehicles. Gwen acknowledges that they could provide a model for the use of Alaska’s vast supply of “stranded renewables.” The Aleutians, for instance, are a string of volcanic islands in the Pacific’s ring of fire that project westward toward Russia. They are a world-class geothermal resource far from major human settlements and power lines, but adjacent to the major international shipping lanes known as the Alaska Marine Highway. Geothermal power plants there could be used to make hydrogen to power merchant vessels.
Plan number three is to commercialize the absorption chiller, which by pushing the lower limit of the delta T has opened up the potential for low-grade waste heat resources around the country. Most Alaska villages still use noisy diesel generators to supply all their electricity needs. Although they use the jacket water that cools their diesel generators for space heating in the winter, they dump that hot water out in the summertime. Instead, says Gwen, they could use the waste heat to run a chiller, make ice for the local fishery, and get a higher-quality, higher-value product.
photo courtesy of Sarah Shatz
In Chena’s hydroponic greenhouses—already a seven-thousand square- foot oasis of productivity, with garlands of tomato vines heavy with fruit and heads of lettuce that could win a county fair— Bernie provides a testing ground for numerous agricultural projects run by the University of Alaska. Ultimately, he says, he wants to prove that forty acres can feed six hundred thousand people. He will soon replace the commercial growing medium with ground glass, from the bar’s empties. Asked “How do you know it’s going to work?” he shrugs.“How do I know it won’t?”
Bernie’s most important contribution may be as a kind of old- fashioned, plainspoken country preacher. “There’s a cost for living on this earth,” he says. “We either pay now or our grandkids pay later, and I believe we should pay as we go. We’ve screwed up our atmosphere because everyone’s had a free ride. I believe in users’ fees. If you want to trash the atmosphere, you got to pay the price. I also think you should be rewarded for doing things right.”
Bernie has “almost single-handedly energized the sleepy geothermal industry,” says Craig Walker of UTC. He has insisted that none of Chena’s innovations are proprietary—that they should be widely shared. And though the stream of visitors to his remote outpost rarely seems to slow, he never seems to tire of it. Dan Driscoll of the Power Enhancement Group of Reno, Nevada, comes by to see the power plant for possible use at gold-mining operations in China and South Africa, and Bernie walks him through. An hour later, two members of the Alaska House of Representatives drop by, and he does it all over again, this time with an Alaska Magazine writer in tow, while a bride and her bridesmaids crunch through the gravel nearby. Popular Mechanics is on the phone, and an hour later, Discovery TV. At 10:30 at night, when yet another writer shows up, Bernie’s out there again, ready to talk till dawn.
The Bush administration budgets for fiscal years 2007 and 2008 requested no research funding for geothermal energy, saying that it was a “mature technology” with no more need for federal money.3 That judgment frustrated proponents of geothermal power. As UTC’s Judith Bayer says, “It’s no more mature than wind, gas, or oil, which still get plenty of federal R&D funding.” Even the flawed subsidies that have been used by Europe to spur renewable energy have had an effect, she notes, getting the European Union out ahead in developing technology while the United States has lagged behind. And with the European cap-and-trade system now in full swing, the gap will only grow.
The administration’s timing, Bayer says, was particularly perplexing. UTC had just produced the new Chena power plant with help from Department of Energy funds. MIT had issued its report on heat mining, suggesting that enhanced geothermal technology could fill a significant portion of the country’s energy needs. And the U.S. Geological Survey had announced that, thirty years after its last assessment of the nation’s geothermal resources, it would issue a new report in 2008. In its 1978 survey the agency had identified potential geothermal resources that could produce 23,000 megawatts and estimated that “undiscovered resources” could generate another 127,000 megawatts. The report was based on technology and assumptions now long out-of-date, but even then, its authors believed they might have underestimated the resources.
Soon after the proposed Department of Energy budget became public, Bernie saw Senator Lisa Murkowski. He recounts the following exchange:
“Who’s the idiot I should talk to who decided not to include geothermal in the mix?” he asked.
“Well, that would be the president,” Murkowski replied. “But you know what? He would enjoy you, and I’m going to call the White House to arrange a meeting.”
George W. Bush has a geothermal heat pump at his Texas ranch, so Bernie expects a sympathetic audience.
Bernie has one last plan cooking at Chena Hot Springs. Not far down the road from him, UCLA professor Alfred Wong runs HIPAS, the High Power Auroral Simulation facility. The facility contains several powerful instruments, including an extremely high-powered laser from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which HIPAS uses to measure phenomena in the arctic ionosphere (upper atmosphere). Wong has ionized dust particles in the ionosphere, creating a thirty-mile aurora that he can make change colors and dance across the sky. Bernie has decided he wants to make an aurora on demand for his Japanese tourists, using, of course, geothermal power. (“Is he on that again?” Connie asks, strolling by.)
Wong is also experimenting with using the earth’s magnetic fields to eject carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so it no longer warms the planet—an idea discussed in Chapter 10. And Wong wants to make weather with his “ion driver,” an array of magnets charged by the sun. Has he really made it rain? Bernie smiles: “In his mind he has.” For a dreamer like Bernie, that means he’s most of the way there.
Notes
1 Forbes, July 5, 2004.
2 Petroleum News, August 27, 2006.
3 Despite the administration’s argument, Congress earmarked $5 million for geothermal projects in fiscal year 2007 and was expected to allocate about $33 million for fiscal year 2008.
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