Today I attended the first ever White House Summit on environmental education.  There were speakers ranging from Richard Louv to NASCAR. 

The Presidential Environmental Youth Awardees were inspiring.  And it was wonderful to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan express his enthusiasm for environmental education and the new Green Ribbon Schools program (inaugural winners to be announced on 4/23/12!).

However, it was pretty clear from the onset that there was indeed an elephant in the room…

Just a few weeks ago the White House recommended to Congress (through its annual budget request) the effective elimination of three environmental education programs that were funded by Congress at about $35 million last year (or about 1/4 the cost of a F-22 Raptor fighter jet).

What does the elimination of these programs mean?  What is at risk?  First, let’s consider just a few examples pulled from thousands of local grants to schools, nature centers, parks, zoos, science centers, natural history museums, aquariums and other community-based organizations over the years:

• Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Missouri received an EPA grant to engage their youth in environmental education and outdoor experiences.
• The Galeton School District in Pennsylvania received EPA funds for under-served students to monitor water quality to determine the environmental impact of natural gas extraction from Marcellus Shale.  
• Environmental Learning for Kids (ELK) in Denver, Colorado, received an EPA grant to provide career, leadership and life skills for you under-served youth through its Leadership Corps program.
• The Seacoast Science Center in New Hampshire received a NOAA grant to create new partnerships across New England for teaching informal, outdoor ocean science to under-served families in five New England communities.
• The Science Museum of Virginia received NOAA funds to provide earth science and climate change education for visitors through its Science on a Sphere platform.
• Trout Unlimited in the Chesapeake region received a NOAA B-WET grant for their Potomac Waters Youth Education Initiative to educate students about the importance of headwater streams to brook trout and the entire watershed.
• The University of Wisconsin received a NSF grant to create a regional Great Lakes network to increase the adoption of effective climate change education programs by working with teachers, businesses and the public.
   

This is just the tip of the iceberg!  These funds support programs like National Public Lands Day and the development of innovative curricula.  The National Environmental Education Foundation has leveraged millions of dollar in public/private partnerships through a modest federal investment.

At the summit, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that EPA would maintain $5 million in funding for FY 2013, which is about half of what Congress provided last year.  This is a good step, but we still have not seen a detailed plan for how these funds would translate to grants and other support from EPA. 

Administrator Jackson also reinstated an inter-agency task force created by the 1990 National Environmental Education Act to improve coordination among federal agencies and stakeholders.

Unlike the steps announced by EPA, no one mentioned the major cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Program or the National Science Foundation environmental education programs.

At the end of the day I left with some new ideas and was pleased with the reinstated task force,  but I did not hear a commitment to the financial investment our nation needs to prepare the next generation to address climate change and enter the new green jobs sector.

Did you attend the summit?  Watch it online?  Please share your thoughts with me by leaving a comment below.  And stay tuned for future action alerts to support environmental education.

A public-private partnership with the city of St. Petersburg, Progress Energy Florida, USF-St. Petersburg, and the Florida High-Tech Corridor Council has sponsored a demonstration-scale project of the Sustainable Electric Energy Delivery System (SEEDS) on the USF campus. Another SEEDS project, developed by the same partnership, exists in nearby Albert Whitted Park.

Each SEEDS project consists of an array of photovoltaic panels, an advanced energy storage system, and monitoring controls. During the day, the panels capture sunlight and convert it to electricity, which charges two vanadium redox battery systems, or VRBs, each with a capacity of 5 kilowatts x 4 hours. This means that, when fully charged, each VRB can discharge 5 kilowatts of energy every hour for up to 4 hours.

credit: University of South Florida

Peter Lilienthal, Senior Economist of International Programs at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, seems enthusiastic about VRB technology. He noted that one appealing characteristic of the VRB is its ability to be charged and discharged repeatedly without losing its power. “The Achilles heel of most batteries,” he said, “is that there are only so many kilowatt-hours you can cycle through. Every time you use the batteries, you’re wearing them out. With vanadium, however, you can use it as hard as you want. When you do, you’re not reducing the life of the battery.”

Also of note is vanadium’s relatively benign nature when compared to elements such as lead and cadmium, elemental metals that are used in other battery systems and are known to have toxic effects on both humans and wildlife. Because the vanadium electrolyte solution has an indefinite lifespan, there is less concern over disposal or contamination than with other battery systems. (Note: Theoretically, the vanadium solution never has to be replaced–only the membrane separating the two tanks would, every 10 to 12 years. All new technology has the potential for nasty surprises down the road, but the fact that this solution may be reused indefinitely, and can simultaneously charge and discharge, sets it apart from other systems. –Ed.)

Mr. Arif Islam, Assistant Director of the Power Center for Utility Explorations at USF – St. Pete, said that this is the first time that such a technology has been demonstrated. “The two sites are extended laboratories for students and researchers at PCUE,” he said, noting the educational value of the project.

The SEEDS are also connected to the community power grid. If the photovoltaic panels do not fully charge the vanadium storage system—such as may occur on an overcast day—the system receives off-peak electricity from the grid, which can then be released during times of peak energy consumption. Energy from the photovoltaic panels will feed directly into the grid if the storage system is fully charged.

Currently, the SEEDS solar panels can generate about 5.5 megawatt-hours of energy per year, which offsets approximately 3.5 metric tons of CO2. This amount is eclipsed by the campus’s annual electricity consumption of nearly 17 gigawatt-hours, or 17,000 megawatt-hours, which cost the university 1.5 million dollars in the last fiscal year and resulted in the release of 10,500 metric tons of CO­­2.

Dr. Christopher D’Elia, professor of Environmental Science and Policy and associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs at USF-St.Pete, hopes that the SEEDS project, once taken to a larger scale, will yield appreciable economic savings in addition to the environmental benefits. “We’re looking for solutions, and our budgets are extremely tight, and anything we can do to reduce power costs would be very, very helpful,” he said. At the moment, however, the project is in a small-scale, demonstration phase and should not yet be viewed as a solution to the campus’s energy needs.

Mr. Islam would like to see the SEEDS technology eventually reproduced on a larger scale and become an integral part of a smart grid system. As opposed to today’s energy grids, which usually consist of single-source energy producers and multiple-source consumers, a smart grid is decentralized, consisting of diverse energy producers (such as utility-scale wind farms and residential solar systems) that feed electricity into a grid system capable of storing power and delivering it during times of peak usage.

“We would like to scale [the SEEDS] up in megawatts to make it an adaptable technology for our industry partner and to make it more beneficial to the community,” Mr. Islam said, referring to Progress Energy, which supplies electricity to the city of St. Petersburg and USF itself.

For now, however, researchers at USF-St. Pete are pleased with the small step their campus is making to reduce its carbon footprint, and its value to students and other researchers.

See More:

SEEDS Poster — USF [PDF]

Vanadium Redox Battery— The University of New South Wales

Storage Boosts the Power of Renewable Energy— Renewable Energy World