Update! 20 PowerPoint Slides That Shook the Earth

I would argue that this iconic picture of the Earth from space did more to galvanize the environmental movement (and by extension the greentech movement) than any of the other 10 slides:
http://rlv.zcache.com/earth_the_big_blue_marble_poster-p228866919014017622trma_400.jpg

Excellent piece. I would add the slide that shows how all the great tech companies (from HP to Apple to Google) were created in the midst of a recession. It’s not an energy slide, but I’ve seen it in every energy company presentation from 2007 through today.

The NREL’s solar cell efficiencies slide has done some extreme damage to many investors.  For example, the slide shows that United Solar allegedly had a 12%-efficient cell in year 2000.  Fast forward to 2010: United Solar’s most efficient module is just 6.7% efficient.  And, of course, let’s not forget how AstroPower ended!

The smart grid slide comes courtesy of EPRI - glad to see we made the top ten list!

Love it! Reminds me of the Photonics Spectra “Peregrinations” ($10 to 1st to define it)

I would have liked to have seen the GPI, or Genuine Progress Indicator Graph illustrating the GPI against the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) from the 50’s to 2002. As the GDP has increased (percieved “progress”) the peoples “happiness” for their overall wellbeing and prosperity has remained relatively the same (30% satisfied). My reasoning for this, lay in the question, “the means to what end.”
thanks

These are all good, but I nominate Sequoia Capital’s “RIP Good Times” as the single most damaging slide deck in recent memory. It’s like these guys thought they had a God-given right to make lots of easy money and then woke up one day to discover that the fundamental economics underlying their business stunk and they weren’t nearly smart enough to have a clue what to do about it other than panic.  As the contagion spread around the world around the world it spooked a lot of Limited Partners and a lot of VCs .

It hurt everybody, but especially Cleantech, as these companies already had long, expensive and risky start-up cycles to deal with, that were being exacerbated by the global financial crisis.

Wonderful Eric! It would have been nice to cite authoritative sources for the slide origins for the benefit of historians and a high res image so they can be further repropagated.
Although it does speak to the ubiquity of these slides that they shuffle around taken for granted.

One more image that I’ve seen in far too many presos (especially PV companies): http://www.fanpop.com/spots/photography/images/421609/title/man-holding-sun

That ACORE slide is actually one I produced for SEIA in 2005,  (just taking the then-available images at http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/countries/europe.htm and recoloring them in Photoshop to match the NREL index.)  Email me and I can send you the original.

I am a big fan of the Greentech Media’s smart grid ecosystem slide and have used it on occasion. Best one pager I’ve seen.

Not a fan of the solar or PEV slides.  On the solar, the relevant fluctuation is not a single solar panel, but a substation region with lots of solar collection, for which the fluctuations averaged over hundreds of commercial/residential rooftops will be minimal.

On the PEV slide, you could just as easily say:

Home Clothes Driers Create a Significant Increase in Load
Customers will prefer a 240V drier to shorten drying time
Drying clothes is a large load for PG&E customers, comparable to the average peak summer load of a single home

It means that widespread clothes drier usage can’t happen without a smart grid drier infrastructure.

Given that there’s already infrastructure for home clothes drying and other use at *peak* power, and most people will use home car chargers at night when the rest of their household load is minimal, I’d argue that we already have all the infrastructure we need.  I defy you to show me a municipality where 80% of homes (with cars parked near electrical outlets) can’t already run 240V/15A from 11 PM to 7 AM with no changes to the existing infrastructure.  And in fact, this would far better use installed electrical capacity—including overnight wind peaks and zero-GHG nuclear which would otherwise have nothing better to do than pumping water up a hill.

I nominate the EPRI “prism” slide - have seen it countless times…

I take a bit of an issue with the Rosenfeld slide as there are good arguments, as noted above by the link to the Cynthia Mitchell article, that a good percentage of that “flat per capita growth” can be attributed to the fleeing of manufacturing from California rather than the investments in energy efficiency and codes and standards.

A great set of slides indeed, but I must take exception to the assertion that: “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.” First of all, the definition of “fast” is key to interpretation. If 50 years is “fast” then yes, “something is happening and it’s happening fast.” But in the grand scheme of things (millennia—not years, decades or even centuries!), I don’t think you can draw any meaningful conclusions from this so-called trend. (50 years does not constitute a trend except for that 50-year period.) There are countless “trends” that if presented in relatively “short” (rhymes with “fast” as used above) time slices like this would suggest some pretty scary scenarios if taken out of context. For example, how do you think the air quality in Oregon looked after the last Mt. St. Helens eruption? I’m all for conservation, efficiency, environmental protection… all that stuff—100%. But let’s try to keep it in a proper perspective by not overstating the significance of 50 years out of 50 million. Show me that plot in a 1,000-year period, and if it still stands out, maybe then it qualifies as Earth-shaking.

Thanks.  Note that CO2 is “see oh two” and not “see zero two”.  The “O” stands for Oxygen and it’s not a zero.  C02 and CO2 do look different.  See EPRI Prism and Carbon Wedge above.

The wind power flying spaghetti monster.

Let’s see this one with connected wind farms distributed over a 100-200 mile range.  And over a larger area as one might get when using wind energy from the Great Planes along with the Texas Panhandle.

Output from one single wind farm is not the real world, it’s as misleading as graphing the demand curve from one single house over days and using that to make a statement about the variability of demand….

Am I reading the Livermore slide right?  Is “Rejected Energy” the politically correct way to say wasted energy?  If this is true, utilities waste 88% of the energy in the fuel they burn to produce energy.  That’s staggering! 

Why is anyone promoting a smart grid when the grid is so inherently stupid?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to make electricity at the point of use by burning natural gas from a pipleine?  Even a cheap natural gas powered generator running at 35% efficiency whould be a better use of resources than a central utility plant. And a fuel cell running at 90% efficiency in the home would be a total game changer.

The Germans are getting a piss poor return on their solar enegy investments. Total amount spent = $50 billion. Total contribution to German power production = 1%.

Dumb, dumb, dumber ...

One more very enlightening slide is Photon fuel efficiency.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/08/martin-roscheisen-ceo-nanosolar-electric-cars.php
Quote of the Day: Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Nanosolar, “Biofuels don’t cut it”
by Michael Graham Richard, Ottawa, Canada on 08.20.08
Science & Technology

Photon International chart image

“This is one of my favorite charts: A comparison of the distance a car can drive based on either of the following forms of energy, each produced on 100m x 100m of land (2.5 acres). How come that biofuel does not really cut it? Electric cars are about four times more energy efficient than fuel based cars, no matter whether they are based on biofuel or other fuel. This is because any fuel engine mostly creates heat and thus wastes the majority of the available energy units. Combine this with plants not being very efficient solar energy harvesters relative to semiconductor based solar electricity, and the result is this huge difference.”

The “Wind Power Flying Spaghetti Monster” is a bit scary, but what if the same data was combined for several locations connected on the grid? 

Take a look at Figure 5 on this link - http://energyselfreliantstates.org/content/solving-winds-variability-more-dispersed-wind

Look at the yellow line.  That’s how the monster gets tamed.

Then the curve gets further smoothed by dispatchable loads such as EVs, HVAC, appliances, ....

A lasting classic is the trend for energy efficiency in refrigerators.  It shows that refrigerators have gotten bigger, cheaper and more efficient all at the same time.  Here it is from NRDC:  http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dgoldstein/2 Quakers book talk 2007.jpg

Did California become that efficient in power usage per capita or was it a combination of efficiency AND chasing away heavy industry (jobs)?

The “flying spaghetti monster” plot is BS, not so much because of aggregration (though that helps), but because it implies that because output is different on different days, there is no way to know what output will be like on any given day.  That’s just silly.  In fact you can (of course) forecast wind output, and forecast it pretty well.  A slide on forecast error would be much more to the point—the spaghetti graph “looks scary” but is content-free.  In fact, in the context presented, it is uncomfortably close to being disinformation.

The infamous “Springerville” graph is in the same category.  Arguably a bit less disingenuous because it does, sort of, show the output of a PV system.  But it doesn’t tell you anything about what is actually happening - how fast output is actually changing cannot be discerned given the x-axis scale, and there is no linkage between this and the consequences of it - for instance, is voltage fluctuating, if so, how much, how often, what are the implications for power quality?  So again, there is very little useful information in this graphic.  It also does not show the massive geographic diversity that occurs with PV, even over very short distances.  There is little excuse for the use and misuse of the Springerville graph, given that the data showing dramatic geographical smoothing has been out there for a decade at least (see Weimken, et al 2001).  More recently, I and others have presented a lot of data showing geographic diversity inside the footprint of modestly sized PV plants—10-20 MW—that is within distances of 1 km.

In short—may be iconic—but GTM has an obligation to its readers to at least point out that the data and/or context it is presented in is flawed.  The story is interesting actually, so you should get some page hits guys.