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Saturday Morning News

Some Californians Solve Energy Problems by Living `Off the Grid'

Aired January 27, 2001 - 9:16 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: There are plenty of other people who live off the grid, getting along fine without relying on major utilities. And joining us to talk about home-grown energy is Daniel Kammen, associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He's also director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory there.

Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Kammen.

DANIEL KAMMEN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA- BERKELEY: It's a pleasure.

PHILLIPS: Well, let's talk about living off the grid for a moment. One alternative, as we know, is wind power. I even remember living in southern California and heading to Palm Springs, all the windmills. But it didn't work out so well. It was a bit of a bomb. However, you say that this could work.

KAMMEN: Well, it's not that it didn't work out, it's that the windmills you saw in some of the passes were mainly put in to do research and development, to test them out, to get them ready to work on the grid. And they were put in places with high winds, lots of gusts, to test out what they could do under different conditions.

Windmills that are operating for power are often in areas where there's much more steady wind, and that's what's being installed today.

PHILLIPS: So where is wind power successful?

KAMMEN: Well, wind is all over, and so California has great, great wind resources in the central valley, along a lot of the foothills to the mountains. The Midwest is a great wind resource. It's steady. Spain, Germany, the Netherlands have all installed large wind farms recently. They're generating lots and lots of grid- connected power. And homes off the grid are doing it too.

PHILLIPS: OK, solar. I remember about 10 years ago my parents bought -- you know, they invested in the big solar panels. They put it on the roof. However, it didn't do so well, and I remember it was very expensive. Has that changed since then?

KAMMEN: Yes. PHILLIPS: OK, and let's talk about that, and where solar has been very successful.

KAMMEN: Well, solar has dropped in price dramatically. Actually, solar and wind have both seen the prices coming down at dramatic rates. Solar has dropped by about a factor of two, from about 35 cents a kilowatt hour to around 18 cents a kilowatt hour, in just the last few years.

And wind has dropped from about 10 cents a kilowatt hour to 4. And those are kind of magic numbers, getting below 10 for solar, which will happen soon, and getting below 5 for wind, which has happened now.

So they're widely applicable, and the economics look great.

PHILLIPS: You live in northern California. Obviously you see what's going on with the rolling blackouts, et cetera. What would be your advice to your community, starting with your community right now? Would you have a specific recommendation about alternative energy?

KAMMEN: Yes, absolutely. There's a couple things to do. The first, though, is that there needs to be state and federal level leadership, because these new technologies, it's like asking Bambi to compete with Godzilla. They've got to get a foothold in the market. And so that's got to happen through some financial incentives to make it a little fairer for them to compete with companies like PG&E that have billions of dollars in assets.

So what a community can do is to essentially go into business of installing these technologies. And lots of areas in California have wonderful solar resources. You can put solar panels on homes, on strip malls, on buildings, on all kinds of areas. And windmills can also be installed in the same way, often in areas where there's farming areas, where there's hillsides.

And so cities can go into the business of putting those in place. And the neat thing about it is, you can solve the short-term energy problem, getting resources on right now, green power to be used today, and in the long term, we can help to buy back control over the utilities, which is what everyone's talking about overall, by having more generating capacity, more green power, in the hands of people other than these out-of-state energy suppliers.

PHILLIPS: What about biomass energy or hydroelectric power? Are these sources that we should even talk about right now?

KAMMEN: I hope so, for different reasons. Biomass energy is when you burn wood or other agricultural wastes and use that for power, and that works great in areas with a lot of farming, like California, where you can take the agricultural residues, wastes, tree bark, all kinds of stuff, chip it up, make it into a gasified fuel, and burn that.

And that could actually eventually be an even bigger supply than could wind, because there's so much biomass out there. And hydro is one that's got this controversial history. Hydro is great, it's green in the sense there's no greenhouse gas emissions, there's no other pollutants. But you don't want to dam big rivers, like we've seen a history of in the U.S. You want to do smaller ones.

PHILLIPS: Quickly before we let you go, do you have a Web site or something that people could log onto and find out more about what they could do to go for an alternative source of power?

KAMMEN: I do. We provide a lot of information on a Web site at University of California-Berkeley, and it's called RAEL, the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory. And we look at U.S. energy issues and international ones. And so the Web site for that is the standard http://socrates.berkeley.edu/(tilde)RAEL. So it's the RAEL, sorry about that.

PHILLIPS: No, that's -- people can run a search and find it, Socrates and Berkeley, that really runs hand in hand.

All right, Daniel Kammen, thanks so much for joining us and talking about your ideas.

KAMMEN: Sure enough.

PHILLIPS: OK.

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