…or how not to bungle a $5.7-billion, taxpayer-funded program:
Larry Eisenberg was put in charge of a project to make the schools more energy efficient. What he did was set out to be a visionary by making the schools not only self sufficient, but actually sell energy back to the grid, with a plan that wasn’t even close to being practical.
*Plans for large-scale wind power collided with the reality that prevailing winds at nearly all the campuses are too weak to generate much electricity. To date, a single wind turbine has been installed, as a demonstration project. It spins too slowly in average winds to power a 60-watt light bulb.
For Valley College, Eisenberg’s team produced maps showing fields of solar panels covering nearly half the campus. Trees would be chopped down. Lawns would be covered with photovoltaic panels.
In May 2009, Musick proposed a giant elevated platform of energy devices. Reflective panels and other machinery would spread across 25 acres of open space and rise as high as 100 feet.
Tony Fairclough, an engineer who is the district’s technical director for renewable power, told Eisenberg there was “nothing substantive” to back up Musick’s claim that his solar panels could produce energy with “record efficiency” — 50 megawatts in all, many times what the campus would ever need.
About the same time, Chevron Energy Solutions, an arm of the oil company, was drawing up plans at Eisenberg’s behest to turn campus playing fields into a parking lot covered with photovoltaic panels.
Inspectors for the agency, which was created after school collapses in the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, were concerned that heavy steel solar panels to be built over a parking lot on Western Avenue could crash onto bystanders during a temblor.
Eisenberg suggested mounting the panels on wheels — not because that would be safer but to escape the state’s jurisdiction over fixed school structures built on foundations.
*
The part I love the most:
One thing was for sure: No matter how it was financed, the bill for all those solar panels and wind turbines would be huge. Eisenberg’s cost estimates for taking the nine campuses off the grid ranged as high as $975 million — this for a college system that in 2010 spent less than $8 million on power bills [experts estimate the cost closer to $1.9billion].
In order to get it financed, the plan required getting federal tax credits. But the school didn’t qualify for them, so he arranged for private investment banks to buy the equipment, then use the tax credits to offset the cost, so that they could rent them to the school at a lower price.
*Eisenberg wanted to spend $98 million on hydrogen fuel-cell equipment that had never been put into commercial operation.
Eisenberg’s enthusiasm for wind energy also outran the facts. Among the projects he touted was the Windjet, a windmill that could be built in various sizes, including one as big as a Ferris wheel.
Its creator, a Manhattan Beach inventor named Brad Sorenson, called the Windjet the “highest efficiency wind power system in history.” It existed only in miniature prototype, run in part with a bicycle chain. Sorensen hauled the contraption around in the trunk of his car.
Eisenberg wanted to put one on each of the nine campuses.
A district energy advisor, Andrew Hoffman, dismissed the Windjet as a fantasy, telling Eisenberg that Sorensen "claims he can extract more power from the wind than is theoretically possible.
“When dealing with issues on the human scale, the laws of Newtonian physics are non-negotiable,” Hoffman wrote.*
Meanwhile, each of those blunders and failures required paying contractors for work started but never finished. He overestimated the power he could produce, underestimated the cost of all the projects, and setting back the green energy initiative 20 years. He’s made it that much harder for future projects, not just by pissing away funding, but by highlighting how complicated the process can be.
Kudos to you Mr Eisenberg for helping out the oil companies struggling in these hard times and making sure future green projects never see the light of day.
