Author: Captain Obvious

I truly wonder why IQs seem to have dropped among the really smart people when things like those shown in the press release below can happen.

I am a fan of fuel cells for what they can do, but I am always struck by the lack of discipline in considering where the source of hydrogen is going to come from and what the full stoichiometric balance will look like.

The raw fuel supply for these hydrogen fueling stations is natural gas.  Let’s call that essentially methane, or CH₄.  If you split off the hydrogen, where did the carbon go?  Did it fall to the ground as a lump of pure carbon?  No, it normally forms Carbon Dioxide so where did that go?  How come no one ever talks about that?

Then, let’s get back to the reason we all talk about hydrogen in the first place.  We want to use it in fuel cells.  Well, if we have hydrogen fuel, we can run our existing cars on that and produce only water vapor out the tail pipe with only a small carburation change once we figure out how to add the tanks of it to our cars.

Can you see the farce here?  Why aren’t the smart people on the planet calling this the farce that it is??

Energy Commission will fund new hydrogen fueling stations in California

May 2 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Mark Glover The Sacramento Bee

http://www.sacbee.com/2014/05/02/6373512/energy-commission-will-fund-new.html

The Sacramento-based California Energy Commission says it will invest $46.6 million to accelerate the development of publicly accessible hydrogen fueling stations

I went to see my Dentist a few days ago.  It is a twice a year thing and, despite the discomfort, it is always a pleasure.  The hygienist has become a good friend.  She and our dentist have watched our son grow from a toddler to a young man.  We value the relationship even though you could say the services are a commodity.  There is a sense of caring that goes beyond the fact that we are paying for a service.  When anything has ever happened to my teeth I feel they both care deeply that I get things back to normal.  He never seems rushed (even though I know other patients are waiting to see him) and he never seems prone to “spend my money” unless it is the right thing to do.

As a consequence, we recommend his practice to anyone and everyone we come in contact with who is seeking to find a dentist.  He often thanks us for those recommendations and has recently told us to stop doing that … he has no more room to take them!

This is the essence of what people today are talking about to replace customer satisfaction as a metric for relational success.  It is called net promoter score and you can imagine that my dentist has a very high one.

I also learned something a while back from my Dentist.  The title phrase for this article was posted conspicuously on that light he shines into my mouth.  I had to look at it a lot.  We all know it is true, but how many of you floss at least once a day?   There was one time in my youth when I didn’t pay as much attention to flossing as I should … and the results were very bad.  I lost two teeth as a result.

Yes, flossing can make your gums bleed, and it can be a bit painful to floss the first time if you haven’t been flossing regularly.  But, it if you fail to floss those painful situations, they will get worse and when they do, it threatens your teeth.  My hygienist tells me it can also threaten your general health.

So, now let me get to my point.  How does your organization handle painful customer situations?  Does it welcome them and want to floss them?  Or, is your culture afraid of bad news?  Does it shoot the messenger?  Or, does it view customer glitches and complaints as opportunities to improve and possibly even transform your business?  I hope it is the latter, because it needs to be.

Oh, and by the way, you might want to measure your net promoter score.  It is probably negative!

My personal belief is that the secret to marketing and sales success is to focus on customer pain and fear.  That is where I can be of most help.  Do you hear the pain and anguish your customers are experiencing that go beyond your energy supply responsibilities?  Are they wincing under increased environmental pressures?  Are they coping with cost cutting pressures in their business?  Are they competing with other members of their own company for market share?  That’s right … is your local manufacturing plant competing with other plants in the family of production resource for business?

There is a cute story I think might help here.  A father drives up to a local bank about a decade ago because his young daughter wants to deposit some money in her savings account. She walks in, waits in line, and then presents her $0.65 to the teller for deposit.  The teller curtly tells her the bank does not accept deposits that small.  Tearfully, she goes back out to the car and repeats the story to her dad who then promptly walks in and asks for a certified check for his entire bank balance of several hundred thousand dollars so he can move it to another bank who will honor his daughter’s wishes.

My fear is that utilities are missing huge opportunities here under the guise of efficient operations and the natural cost cutting agendas that are so appropriate at this time.  Everyone is under pressure.

It is rather common for customers to come to their energy providers and look for some help when they are under cost cutting pressures.  After all, when the world price of aluminum is low and electricity is one of the largest cost components, it is only natural for them to seek relief.

But, many of you will respond with the obvious statement: “They already get our best price because they are a high load factor customer!”  Go ahead, keep that excuse going and watch them go out of business.  Or, you can redefine your relationship to them recognizing they are in a commodity business and that your price is critical to their survival.  The right answer is to write a derivative contract to them that, on average, indexes the price of power to the world price of aluminum.

I can see you wincing.  You don’t want to work that hard.  Or, worse yet, your answer to me is: “You don’t have a program for that.”   Oh please.  What other excuses do you want to throw at me?  The fact is that you are just not willing to take on the customer’s problem and solve it.  Plus, the rep who brought this situation to your attention was probably told that this customer was bluffing and to stop asking for more concessions.

How do you solve this problem?  You go to an energy trader who writes a derivatives agreement that pays you a constant price for your electricity and then gives the customer a variable price to reflect the market for aluminum.  It is called a “contract for differences” agreement and happens all the time in the natural gas business.  And, yes, the customer will pay an insurance premium over just facing the market variations without it.  After all, someone is giving them a hedge and they should rightfully have to pay for that.

Maybe this one hits a bit closer to home:

A recent Utility Dive survey of what worries electric utilities identified distributed generation as the top marketing and customer service issue.  The industry knows that this is being driven by financial facilitation – customers are not buying the DG, they are being sold the benefits in some form or fashion and the “deal maker” is packaging up the system in that deal.  Yes, this is being fostered in part by incentives that may be questionable in the full light of day.  Yes, these agents are unregulated and the incumbent may be regulated.  But, no, this is not a healthy sign of flossing your teeth regularly.

Do you know what the customer is being told about their electricity savings?  If you do, do you believe that the customer is going to get the benefits promised?  I would suggest the answer is “no” given the recent actual performance of solar and wind systems as documented by others.  We are all aware that things do not work as well as we hope and that Murphy’s Law is at work all the time.

Can’t you see that by being a bystander and just letting customers get duped that you also suffer in the process?  What if they sign deals that threaten their wellbeing?

Finally, let me offer a true story about the carpet industry in upstate New York.  It was under constant attack by everyone for its waste water discharges.  The rules were getting tougher by the year.  A city in North Georgia decided it could attract these customers by building waste water treatment facilities that could accommodate carpet finishing plant effluent.  They offered to build them and simply charge the carpet companies a fair price to take away their sins so to speak.  It is now the carpet capital of the world.  All because it decided to solve the customer’s problem.

So, are you just going to wince and let your teeth rot out?  Or, are you going to floss your customer situations and watch what a healthy set of gums brings you?  Your choice.  Only floss the teeth you want to keep.

What a fun French phrase!  You no doubt know this originated when Yogi Berra witnessed Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hit back to back home runs.  The psychologist Edward B. Titchener in his book 1928 A Textbook of Psychology, explained déjà vu is caused by a person having a brief glimpse of an object or situation, before the brain has completed “constructing” a full conscious perception of the experience. Such a “partial perception” then results in a false sense of familiarity.   Scientific approaches reject the explanation of déjà vu as “precognition” or “prophecy.”  I have to admit I am suffering from this right now, despite the science that says it is not prophetic.

I have been told that the energy industry is like a big rock.  If you stand still in one spot around this rock, ideas will work their way around that rock and appear timely and correct again … you just have to wait long enough.  That certainly seems to be the case with distributed generation.  I can remember lots of things that were in vogue 20  and 30 years ago and now watch with amusement that today’s new crop of utility managers feel they are new and novel.

How soon we forget.

The electric utility industry started out as distributed generation and electricity was frightfully expensive.  It was only affordable to the rich and famous.  Before that, industrial firms located along rivers and used hydropower to provide mechanical work.  Farmers used windmills to pump water and to process grain.  Once electricity was invented, DC motors were employed to take this mechanical work and produce energy that could be moved more effectively through wires to the points needed.  Edison’s first power plant was a Diesel, engine-driven DC generator.  That was the beginning of the central station power plant and the only use was for street lighting.

The economy of central station power plants and the inexpensive delivery of that energy over the public highways of electricity distribution systems made the local generation by even rich people uneconomic.  That is, until fuel prices cycled through their low points and made it economically interesting for almost anyone to get into the business.  That has happened numerous times in the past.

Low natural gas prices in the 1950s spawned a series of projects, mostly using reciprocating engines since gas turbines were not commercially available in this format quite yet.  They were almost all abandoned within about 10 years once natural gas prices moved back up on to the fundamentals of fuel price parity.  Customers grew tired of tending to these maintenance and operational distractions.

Tax credits and a fear over our dependence on foreign oil spurred a bunch of projects in the early 1980s.  It is funny to remember that natural gas was banned as a fuel for utility power plants back then.  Check it out.  It was called the Fuel Use Act.  It was passed in 1978 and then repealed in 1987 due to low fuel prices.  Cogeneration was encouraged with PURPA in 1978 as well and persists today, but almost no one takes a really close look at today’s operational performance to see if it passes the minimum thresholds set by that legislation.  Today’s natural gas prices are so low no one cares.  It strikes me as somewhat humorous that today’s electric utilities are so quick to try to adjust their standby and backup tariffs when the first defense to illegitimate projects is the thermal standards themselves as the law exists.  Customers have no rights to fair standby or backup tariffs unless and until they meet these standards.

If you are old enough, you may also remember when the speed limit was reduced to 55 mph at the same time in the late 1980s.  With all the talk about energy efficiency and café standards, why in the world was that allowed to expire?  Oh, right, I forgot how inconvenient it was to travel at that speed.

Just recently, the speed limit on our loop around Atlanta (Route 285) was raised from 55 mph to 65 mph.  I think the reason was that no one was driving 55 mph on it anyway, so they might as well raise it.  It does make you feel better when you can do 65 mph because otherwise you are only averaging 5 mph during rush hour.

My biggest fear of déjà vu is that fracking now has us believing we are in for a long future of low gas prices.  It seems like no one believes natural gas prices could rise in the future.  I have been shocked to see electric utilities run to natural gas and abandon coal.  Where is the sense of portfolio risk management?   I get the environmental impacts, but I am troubled by the prospect that the abandoned coal plants will not be operable in the future.  The employees being let go cannot be replaced in any reasonable period of time.  The skills will be gone.  Coal is a very difficult fuel to burn.

It is amazing to me that we have forgotten the history of natural gas being at price parity with oil over the long haul.  Sure, we seem to have way too much natural gas here in the US at the moment.  Why isn’t anyone worried about that?  Does anyone realize what would happen if natural gas returned to its historical fundamental of price parity with oil?

So, let me give you a dose of reality.  Let’s assume today’s price for oil at around $100 a barrel is a good planning value.  There are about 6 million Btus in a barrel of oil.  Let’s make the math easy and say that oil is around $16 per  million Btu or about $1.60 per therm.  A therm is defined as 100,000 Btus.  Natural gas right now is less than one third of that.  Yes, oil is three times as expensive as natural gas.  What my friends do you think will happen when the supply/demand balance swings back to parity?  What would happen if just one environmental accident threatened the fracking industry in the US and shut it down, even just for a year or two?

Yep, you have it right.  Americans would be almost bankrupt in their home heating bills. Electric utility electricity prices would double almost overnight. It would be just about as bad as the market crash in the 1930s on our economy.  People would be choosing between heating and eating.

How can we sit so calmly today with the specter of this on the horizon?  I have asked this question to many leaders in the industry and they say “Joel, everyone in the fracking industry knows the success of it depends upon the industry policing out any chance of an environmental risk.”

Well, frankly, I don’t find that comforting any more than thinking about the vulnerability we have to terrorists in other areas.  All it would take then is for one malcontent to do something terrible here.

Let me therefore raise my concern.  My wife calls me Dr. Doom because I can always see the dark side of how things can go wrong.  I call it Cassandra’s curse.  Let me not dwell on this but just ask that you internalize what I am saying and take it to heart.  Stop arguing the counterpoint.

What if I am right?  How would you feel at some time in the future having not done what you should start to do now, and facing the ruin to the American way of life as we know it now?  Don’t you think you should be working to balance out the supply side risks by explicitly admitting this is a risk to everyone in the market?  How can you sleep at night without cautioning your customers that this is a national risk?  I hear so many other less significant risks being discussed all the time like energy efficiency and demand response.  This single unmitigatable risk could cripple the United States, and at a time we can least afford another financial setback.  Where is your sense of conscience?

I am not arguing against distributed generation.  I am only using it to point out how we tend to go around the rock.  We are going to work our way around this rock.  But, this time, when you say “It’s like déjà vu all over again” it won’t be funny as in Yogi Berra’s day.  It won’t be funny at all.

The recent scare by the IPC on global warming got me thinking.  It is about time we got really serious about this topic and, instead of worrying so much about carbon dioxide, let’s go after the big climate change agent: methane.  Most living organisms emit it when they ingest fiber so there are all kinds of proven culprits here including us.

Before we focus on our species, let’s take a quick look at two other known bad actors about which we can do something pretty easily: cows and termites.  I am so glad that really smart people have spent countless hours funded by you and me to take a closer look at this.  Here is one of their more recent published works: Cow Farts Have ‘Larger Greenhouse Gas Impact’ Than Previously Thought; Methane Pushes Climate Change.

See the study presented at the national science academy:  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/11/20/1314392110.abstract

Now, you may be surprised to also know that our politicians thought enough about this critical issue to fund a study on alternative grasses that could be fed to cows to reduce their emissions.  Some naïve politicians suggested corks, but I have been surprised that someone hasn’t come up with a cow afterburner that simply sits on the hindquarters of the cow and sensing the emission by actions of the sphincter immediately fires up a catalytic converter to reduce the methane to the less harmful carbon dioxide.

I will not even begin to attempt to understand the wood burning fireplace folks who say that is carbon neutral.  Yes, I get that it wood is a renewable source of fuel, but I have to admit that somehow, despite my Masters in Chemical Engineering from one of this country’s top engineering schools, I still do not fully understand that burning wood in seconds is better than letting it sit around on the ground and eventually return as God intended: dust to dust.  Somehow the idea of converting this natural process which takes decades to instantaneous production of carbon dioxide is going to reduce global warming?  I think the math is flawed, but who am I do say.

So, let’s return to safer ground and get back to another critical critter: termites.  Critical thinkers will immediately include termites in the list of species we should eradicate.  After all, they have an extremely high fiber diet. Seems ironic that we have a huge industry in the US whose sole purpose is to get rid of these and they still persist.  Maybe we should no longer build our houses out of wood.  That’s it, let’s cut off their food supply!

Oh, and we are in the list as well.  After all, we not only respire (and therefore we should limit the population on the planet) but we are discouraged from eating fiber.  Maybe we should all be required to take Beano®.  This certainly lobbies against Mexican food in my mind.  Tragic.

I have to admit, I am having increasing difficulties explaining things that are intrinsically complex to every day folks.  The phrase that comes to mind is “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”  For example, everyday Americans simply have no patience for the truth when it is harder to understand than a nice simple lie.

It is easy to fail to see the truth when you do not speak the language of truth.  Math is like that.  This is why the State Legislature of Virginia once attempted to round Pi to 3.  As you progress through college and through graduate school as an applied mathematician, you are introduced to higher levels of abstraction that can tackle bigger problems but they also require conversance in the workings of that formulation.

It gets much worse when you tackle intrinsically complex subjects like heat transfer, reaction kinetics, and thermodynamics where concepts like entropy are introduced.  Isenthalpic processes are one thing but isentropic can just seem weird until you truly understand it.  There was a joke question back when I was in graduate school that went viral even before we had anything to transmit is that quickly.

The question was, is Hell exothermic?  You can check this out for yourself.  It is a true story.  A thermodynamics professor had written a take home exam for his graduate students. It had one question: “Is hell exothermic or endothermic?  Support your answer with a proof.”  Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:

“First, we postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass. If they do, then a mole of souls can also have a mass. So, at what rate are souls moving into hell and at what rate are souls leaving? I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for souls entering hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in hell to increase exponentially.  Now, we look at the rate of change in volume in hell. Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in hell to stay the same, the ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs to stay constant.

So, if hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter hell, then the temperature and pressure in hell will increase until all hell breaks loose.  Of course, if hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in hell, than the temperature and pressure will drop until hell freezes over.”

It was not revealed what grade the student got.  I think he deserves an A.  Frankly, I am prone to give a lot of people today an F … and you can quickly guess what that stands for.

April Fool!

We are all familiar with this quote from Mark Twain.  I open this article with it because it seems to capture the underlying feeling in the utility industry at this time.  While Jim Rogers, the past chairman of Duke Energy, has now come out and declared the traditional electric utility model dead, I am guessing that most in the electric utility industry are repeating Mark Twain’s words under their breath.

Jim Rogers is noted for pithy quotes.  One of my favorites is “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu!”  Since I have written extensively about customer engagement and key account strategies, I could not agree more.  Yet, at this time, utilities seem to be pulling away from that role and resorting to their age old tactic of trying to change the rules of the game to be more in their favor.

I am not surprised.  Today’s flat electric load growth and upward pressure on rates makes it very tempting to look for financial tweaks that move the operating financials in the right direction.  But these also tend to embitter customers who see them as combative and a sign of resistance to needed energy supply change.  Yes, these customers simply do not understand the issues and seem especially uninterested in looking at the realities of our energy future.  But, when you put these questions to a public vote, they tend to vote for the gradual pressure in upward rates to get these choices into the market!

And yes, all the engineers who know the details can easily criticize the reality of fuel cells.  After all, these were five years off back in 1985 when I was manager of machinery development at Mechanical Technology Incorporated (MTI) and were the first in the country to actually put them in cars. Now they are about five years off if you listen to some of today’s car companies.  MTI spun off that division which is now Plug Power.  We engineers love to point out why things don’t work.  But there are a few of us who can look past the reasons why things don’t work and see opportunities for new ideas that can be made to work.  Don’t tell me “no” … tell me “how.”  There is almost always a way to make an idea work.

I am reminded of the comparison between the way our space program and Russia’s space program solved the problem of designing a way to write in space.  Our scientists tried to come up with a ball point pen that would work in zero gravity.  The Russians simply chose to use a pencil.

In the beginning … the grid was Direct Current

I am going to bring us all back to one of these engineers who figured out “how.”  And, ironically it was out of a customer service glitch.  Thomas Edison shifted the emphasis at his research center to “get even” with his local utility because they were demanding payment of his overdue energy bills.  On one level Edison thought he did by inventing the electric light.  The gas industry (remember, lighting back then was done with natural gas) thought they were going to die.  So, they did what any free market company does … they thought they might as well invest in Edison’s company.  After all, at the time, the idea of using natural gas to make electricity wasn’t feasible.

Edison believed local electricity production and use should be direct current.  All of us in the utility industry know the legendary battles between his ideas and those of Tesla and Westinghouse.  Well, history teaches us that Edison lost the battle and we now have alternating current.

But, I want you to see how we may now have the perfect storm of ideas to bring Edison’s dream to reality.  Think about this for a bit with me.  Watch the difference between trying to accommodate the trends in energy technology today and how they get easier if we include a DC grid in with our current alternating current paradigm.

Solar and wind have grown significantly.  They may have received subsidies that are no longer “cost effective” but they have captured the attention and enthusiasm of the average American.  As this din of energy technology enthusiasm grows louder and louder and this just makes many incumbent energy providers cringe.  They were OK with solar and wind when they were small, but now want to change the rules given they are not so small.  Who pays for the transmission upgrades necessary to accommodate these new sources? Who pays for the balancing energy it is going to take to leave these resources in a must run status?  All of this puts upward pressure on electric rates.  Who pays?

Jim Rogers has recently said the traditional electric utility model is dead and that the future is a blank sheet of paper.  Well, I would like to suggest that there are three things the incumbents can do: watch things happen, wonder what happened or make things happen.  Perhaps it is time to make some things happen.

Think about all these new energy efficient technologies we now have. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) … DC.  Solar and wind … DC.  Electric vehicles … DC.   Variable speed drives … best and cheapest done with DC.  Electricity storage needs … best done with DC.  Distributed generation interconnection … best and cheapest when done with DC.  Microgrids and power reliability … best done with DC. The list goes on.

I am not suggesting we are going to do away with our transmission and distribution systems.  I am only suggesting that the “last mile of wire” might include … wait for it … think about it … DC.  And, I would suggest that the incumbent electric utilities start to think about how they can include DC in the last mile of wire to homes and businesses.

My boat has AC and DC circuits and an inverted to power the AC when the generator is off.  Power reliability is not a concern.  Why wouldn’t homes of the future have the same?  Wouldn’t this also make demand response at the home level incredibly easy to implement?

Transitioning to a Brighter Future

Obviously this is a very big idea.  There are lots of reasons it will not catch on right away.  There are a host of obstacles that preclude it from being a quick fix.  But, it clearly has legs.  Therefore, it deserves a demonstration project.

Yes, the devil is in the details.  Yes, this requires engineering.  But, some customers will pay for it.  Start there.  They will pay the freight.

Why not offer one to a big box retailer … say Walmart?  Why not try a model residential community that is all DC.  High end homeowners are looking for a way to be part of something truly new and exciting.  These are the same people who buy the EVs.

Who is going to be first here?  Who wants to go down in the history books?

I end with one more historic quote: “Things may come to those who wait … but only those things left by those who hustle!” … Abraham Lincoln