These slides have served as change agents in greentech
circles. By popular demand, we’ve added a few slides to the
collection.
BY ERIC WESOFF (SEPTEMBER 22, 2011)—If you attend enough cleantech events or are pitched by enough
startups, you start to see the same few PowerPoint slides over and over
again. Here is a collection of the best or at least the most notorious
and historically significant slides in our industry. This collection has
been one of our most popular pieces and I'm taking the opportunity to
updat some of the charts and add some additional commentary.
After publishing this list to an overwhelming response, we heard from
the original architects of some of these iconic greentech slides and we
made sure to give them their overdue credit.
From the
BP Statistical Review of World Energy -- here's a painful reminder of what we pay at the pump. It's a chart of Crude Oil Prices From 1861 to 2010.
Make sure to contrast that with the
Price Trends in Solar Modules
in this slide with data from IPCC and Paula Mints of Navigant. We've
gone from $60 per watt to $1.50 per watt. What will it be in 2020?
Lawrence Livemore's classic Energy Flowchart: A good
slide provides a wealth of information in an intuitive, understandable
way -- and this slide certainly does that. This one slide shows energy
inputs and outputs and really drives home the tiny foothold that
renewables have in the American energy mix.
By the way, Americans are using less total energy and more renewable
energy, according to LLNL. The U.S. used less coal, petroleum, and
natural gas in 2009 than in 2008, and increased its use of wind, solar,
hydro and geothermal, according to the LLNL energy flow charts. This
probably has as much to do with reduced economic activity as it does a
shift in energy sources.
EPRI's Prism Chart. EPRI, the Electric Power Research
Institute, is almost entirely funded by incumbent power companies, so
their information has to be viewed through that lens. Nevertheless, the
"Prism" slide has found its way into many greentech presentations, mine
included. It conveys the challenge involved in reducing CO2 emissions
from the electric sector down to 1990 levels. According to EPRI, this
task will require significant amounts of CCS (Carbon Capture and
Sequestration), as well as another 64 gigawatts of nuclear power by
2030.
Carbon Wedges. Princeton's Carbon Mitigation
Initiative and the NRDC can both play the EPRI CO2 reduction game, as
well. The NRDC, though, does it without the nuclear wedge.
The Keeling Curve. Regardless of the flaws of
An Inconvenient Truth,
the movie, or those of Al Gore, the man, the movie and the man present
this CO2 data in a variety of compelling ways. The graph shows the
variation in concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last fifty
years based on Charles Keeling's measurements at the Mauna Loa
Observatory in Hawaii. Even if you don't subscribe to the theory of
anthropogenic global warming, this chart is pretty stark evidence that
something is happening and it's happening fast.
This slide from the CEC illustrates the "Rosenfeld Effect."
California's per-capita electricity consumption stayed flat while
consumption in the rest of the U.S. went up. Why? Largely because of
the California Energy Commission leadership of Art Rosenfeld. During
his tenure, California instituted utility efficiency programs, appliance
standards and building standards that saved the state billions of
dollars, millions of kilowatt-hours, and avoided the building of a large
number of power plants. It's not all about high technology.
The wind power flying spaghetti monster. If you've
ever attended an event pertaining to energy storage, it's not unheard of
for every presenter to flash this one. It's originally from a 2007
CAISO (California Independent System Operator) report on Integration of
Renewable Resources and shows the scary variable nature of wind power.
It speaks volumes on the intermittent nature of wind and the challenges
of integrating renewable energy onto the grid without energy storage or
fossil-fuel backup.
This type of variability and ramp up / ramp down strikes fear in the heart of every ISO (Independent System Operator).
Read what Jim Detmers, formerly of CAISO had to say here.
The solar variability slide is just as scary in terms
of the ramp-up and ramp-down rate, with cloud cover causing voltage
sags. This slide makes the rounds and comes originally from Jay Apt and
Aimee Curtright's Working Paper,
"The Spectrum of Power from Utility-Scale Wind Farms and Solar Photovoltaic Arrays."
BY ERIC WESOFF (SEPTEMBER 22, 2011)
The McKinsey Efficiency Study "finds that the U.S.
could reduce annual GHG emissions by as much as 3.0 gigatons in the
mid-range case to 4.5 gigatons in the high range case by 2030. These
reductions from reference case projections would bring U.S. emissions
down 7 to 28 percent below 2005 levels, and could be made at a marginal
cost less than $50 per ton, while maintaining comparable levels of
consumer utility."
The thrust of the McKinsey study is that there are pollution reduction
choices that can be achieved at “negative cost.” This flies in the face
of economic theory, which would have us believe that companies and
consumers would not willingly pass up profits by making changes in
lighting, fuel efficiency, industrial process improvements, etc. Turns
out consumers aren't always entirely rational.
NREL's solar cell efficiencies slide. The slide that
launched several hundred solar startups is also partially responsible
for the great concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) scare of 2008. It does
show the lag between hero experiment efficiencies and real-world PV
performance and must be included in every solar presentation -- by law.
There are a lot of complicated ways to graphically illustrate the
consumer side of the smart grid. This concise slide is not one of them.
EPRI claims authorship of this one.
The cubic mile of oil. The world uses about 30 billion
barrels of oil per year. That is 1.2 trillion gallons, which works out
to just about 1 cubic mile of oil.
And another way of illustrating the same concept:
Image courtesy of IEEE Spectrum
This slide from the leading renewable energy utility PG&E of Northern California
(by way of Nissan) shows that fast charging a plug-in electric vehicle
places a load on the grid equivalent to the average peak summer load of a
single home. Except that these loads move around from place to place
and charge up whenever they feel like it, in the middle of the day or
the middle of the night. It means that widespread EV usage can't happen
without a smart grid vehicle infrastructure.
Germany has the same solar insolation as the U.S. state of Alaska. Yet
Germany is the global leader in solar installations. Why is that?
Three words: policy, policy, policy. Mr. Colin Murchie Director,
Federal Government Affairs at SolarCity and performer at Washington
Improv Theater, originally produced this slide for SEIA.
Khosla Ventures' green portfolio. This slide was
immensely improved when the VC firm got a new graphic designer and got
rid of the light bulb design. In any case, it shows what you can do if
you have a grand vision, sizable
cojones and several billion dollars of your own and other people's money. And time for board meetings --
lots
of board meetings. The slide lists 40+ green startups, intelligently
parsed, and we would bet there are a few more not being shown. One of
these might be the black swan. Vinod only has to be right one time out
of ten or twenty to reinforce his genius status.
Bonus shameless self-promotion slide: Downloaded
tens of thousands of times, this slide from Greentech Media's smart
grid analysts smartly lays out the layers and players in the smart grid
ecosystem:
And a final word on PowerPoint from Mr. Tufte:
Michael Kanellos contributed to this article. Actually, he thought up the title and then went on vacation.
