CenterCut

Tidal Power Plant at Eastport, Maine, U.S. Coast Guard Station

2010-08-26T02:33:00.000-06:00

Eastport, Maine, August 26, 2010 - Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC) is installing the largest tidal power plant to date in U.S. waters. The Maine-based energy company is using the movement of tides to generate renewable power for the U.S. Coast Guard station in Eastport, Maine. The bay's five-knot tides provide a predictable, clean source of energy.

While tidal water moves more slowly than wind, it provides more force. Tide velocities peak four times a day, and one of ORPC’s innovations is developing the systems to harness that power as the turbine spins at different rates. The power plant will use advanced cross-flow turbines, a permanent magnet generator and a power electric system that transforms the generator’s energy output to grid-suitable electricity.

The barge-based plant uses the power from two turbines to charge large battery packs, which are ferried daily by skiff to the Coast Guard station in Eastport. The battery packs provide roughly 20 kilowatt-hours of power daily, about half of the energy needs of the 41-foot search and rescue boat docked there.

This plant is a small power plant, as it would take 25 such turbines to equal the rated capacity of one average wind turbine.

This “demonstration” project cost $4 million, including more than a million dollars of federal and state support. ORPC is using the data it is gathering to fine-tune a larger installation in Cobscook Bay, planned for 2011. That system, according to the company, should generate enough electricity to power 50 or 60 homes.

Feats of Clay

2010-08-08T06:58:00.008-06:00

What is sustainability? Is true sustainability achieved at the local level, in small increments, or at the top with massive multinational corporations? Is sustainability linked to decentralization? Are some measure of sustainability and decentralization prerequisites to both democracy and the emergence of a vibrant civil society?

A case in point may be Mansukhbhai Prajapati, a craftsman based in Gujarat. Prajapati, a high school dropout, has been called a 'true scientist'. His Mitti Cool, a clay refrigerator that works without electricity, has turned the world's attention to simple steps in sustainability.

Presenting the national award to Mansukhbhai in 2009, India’s President Pratibha Patil appreciated his work and asked him for a Mitti Cool. Scientists and journalists from across the world have visited his unit to see how he makes eco-friendly products at a low cost. The simple and unassuming Mansukhbhai has been modestly successful financially, but his ambition is to make more low-cost and eco-friendly products for the masses.

"A good majority of Indians cannot buy a fridge as it is expensive. Besides this, electricity bills and maintenance costs are also high. Mitti Cool is an eco-friendly product which has no maintenance costs. It also retains the original taste of vegetables, says Mansukhbhai who has sold 1500 units so far.

Prajapati’s refrigerator cools naturally without using any electricity. It is ideal for rural areas with an erratic power supply. They are priced from Rs 2,000 (USD 44). The refrigerator has a capacity of 50 liters and its upper portion stores about 20 liters of water, while the section below the water tank has separate space to store fruits, vegetables and milk. The water in the tank keeps the temperature lower in the cabinet so that vegetables and fruits stay fresh for almost five days, while milk can be preserved for three days.

Armed with the success of the Mitti Cool refrigerator, Mansukhlal started experimenting with non-stick tawas (fry pans) and water coolers. For example, the clay water cooler comes with a 0.9 micron candle inside the water storage pot to filter water. Clay is a magical ingredient, Mansukhlal believes, because it's environment-friendly, and also because these natural products don't need electricity to function.

The hottest selling item today from Mansukhlal's Mitti Cool range is the non-stick tawa, which is substantially cheaper than other non-stick utensils. It is again made out of clay and has a Teflon coating, which seeps into the pores of the clay so that it cannot flake off during cooking. Unlike other non-stick cookware available in the Indian market, this one is priced affordably at Rs 50 (USD 1).

And of course simple clay is the very essence of sustainable materials.

China Outpaces the US & EU Combined in Renewable Energy Investments

2010-07-25T04:53:00.004-06:00

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, China is leading both the US and EU combined in Alternative Energy investment. Caulk it down to governmental certainty in policy matters.

Starting in 2010 China installed a law that requires its utilities to buy renewable power or face stiff penalties. That certainty has caused investors to bet heavily on China.

In the second quarter of 2010 foreign investment in Chinese of wind turbines, solar panels and low-carbon technology increased 72% to $11.5 billion. Investment in China’s Alternative Energy sector totaled $33.9 billion, inclusive of securities transactions, venture capital, private equity and finance, accounted for 33% of total global investments in this sector.

In 2009 China installed 14 GW of wind power alone, far outpacing any other country. This expansion has been fueled primarily with stimulus spending. US stimulus funds, if actually spent, are targeted to add 16 GW of all forms of renewable energy to the US grid. However, energy legislation has stalled in congress, adding to regulatory uncertainties investors have in considering such projects.

The Chinese law is interesting in that it allows citizens to produce and sell power into the national grid. Finland passed similar legislation decades ago with the result that its paper mills now provide 30% of the electricity on its national grid, by tapping into their produced heat on-site to generate electricity.

The lesson here is that stimulus spending alone will not work. Regulatory certainty combined with incentives for private producers are required to pull through Alternative Energy power into the national grid. If a government will loan you money to produce alternative energy, but will not require its power grid to buy it, why would you invest?

Richard Wottrich

Football Field-Wide Wind Power Blades

2010-07-01T06:38:00.001-06:00

Norway & Sweden Order Giant GE Wind Power Turbines

Imagine a US football field. Now imagine it slowly spinning in the air over a fiord in Norway. That's about the size of the diameter of new GE wind turbines recently ordered. On Tuesday, GE announced that four 4-megawatt wind turbines will be installed in Rogaland County, on the southwest coast of Norway, in conjunction with the Norwegian energy companies Statoil and Lyse. Assuming that environmental impact studies and funding agreements are successful, GE predicts the turbines will be up and running in 2012.

GE's 4-megawatt wind turbine has a 110-meter rotor diameter. A NFL-regulation football field, including the end zones, is about 109.73 meters.

As with GE's 2.5-megawatt wind turbines, the giant 4-megawatt turbines have direct drive trains that require no gearboxes.

Richard Wottrich

Sustainability & Basic Human Needs

2010-06-20T13:31:00.002-06:00

(Outside of Pune, India - Photo:RLW)

The next time you flush your toilet…

India has roughly 1.1 billion people. Well over 700 million of them do not have toilets in the privacy of their own homes. Over 30% of India’s 700,000 villages do not have access to a public latrine. This isn’t a problem for the men. They just walk out of doors whenever they want. It is a problem for women, as they cannot make such a display in public.

So Indian village women walk together in small groups to fields they do not own well outside their villages very early in the morning. Then they hold it all day until the fading light hides their journey in the evening. Often these groups will walk a quarter of a mile or further for privacy, which takes time away from their work day and their children. They cannot go alone, as the owner of the land might harass them, which is embarrassing. Often men will follow them and hide in the bushes and watch, which is humiliating.

This is such an indignity for Indian woman that brides have started to demand an unusual dowry item for matrimony – a toilet. These women see this as a human rights issue.

While in India I walked through several of these rural villages. You can feel the centuries pressing down upon you. I specifically told my Indian business hosts that I wanted to visit a village market and a few small villages. They were perplexed and asked me why. But of course they were men…

Richard Wottrich

"Go Fly A Kite" Takes On New Meaning

2010-06-03T03:38:00.003-06:00

Example of an AWE blimp

Wind turbine kites have taken to the skies as a form of Alternative Energy. Inventor JoeBen Bevirt of Joby Energy is mounting a test for a series of large kites that are designed to "harvest" high winds found at high altitudes. Airborne Wind Turbines are part of a wider Alternative Energy Sector known as Airborne Wind Energy Systems (AWE).

The Bevirt airborne wind turbines will fly to around 2000 feet (600m), where they will float, generating power that can be transferred to the ground via a tether.

"Global wind is a tremendous source of energy - carrying nearly 870 terrawatts in global tropospheric winds," says Bevirt. "In comparison, the global demand is 17 terawatts. Harnessing a tiny fraction will transform the way we power our civilization."

As of 2010 no commecially viable kite farms are in operation, but the concepts involved have been contemplated since the 1970s, but was not technically possible. Advances in materials, computing resources and unmanned aerial vehicles have brought the concept closer to reality. As a result, several companies are exploring harvesting wind power at high altitudes.

Magenn Power's Air Rotor System called (MARS) uses a helium filled blimp design. Sky WindPower is building flying electric generators. Kite Gen is focused on creating power kites.

Joby Energy's technology is based upon a large multi-winged kite, similar to a World War I multiwing airplane. Each kite is computer-controlled and can guided remotely to a desired altitude. Flight is controlled by its onboard computer system and harvested electricity is sent down a tether to a substation where it is converted from DC to AC power.

There are risks and limitations to contemplated AWE systems. Kites and 'helicopter' designs must be grounded when there is insufficient wind. Kytoons and blimps could allow fixed positioning. However, bad weather such as lightning or thunderstorms, could temporarily suspend use of the machines, probably requiring them to be brought back down to the ground and covered. Some schemes require a long power cable and, if the turbine is high enough, an aircraft exclusion zone. When the generator is ground-based, the tether need not be conductive.

Sky Windpower estimates that this technology will be capable of producing electricity for $0.02 per KWh, while a system of raising a kite to a high altitude while turning a generator on the ground, and then changing its shape so that it can be drawn back down with less energy than it produced on the way up, has been estimated to be capable of producing electricity for $0.01 per KWh - both numbers being significantly lower than the current price of non-subsidized electricity.

Richard Wottrich

Tracking the Cosmos Via Crystal Clear Blue Ice

2010-06-01T07:35:00.001-06:00

ICE CUBE neutrino array suspended in the Antarctica Ice Cap

The Wall Street Journal reported today that a new scientific instrument, called the Ice Cube, is under construction at the South Pole. The $271 million observatory built into the Antarctica ice cap is pointed towards the earth and utilizes it as a screen to stop all particles excepting neutrinos. Ice Cube is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Neutrinos are almost without mass, have no electric charge and thus can pass through matter "like a hot knife through butter." This means that neutrinos are not affected by gravity or radiation. Hence in theory they can be traced backwards to image the universe in a way that visible light and other forms of radiation cannot achieve. The trick is to see them.

Holes are being melted in the ice cap to a depth of one mile or more. Strings of spherical glass sensors are being hung down the holes like Christmas tree lights - there to freeze in place. Over 5,000 sensors are being suspended in a quarter cubic mile of pure Antarctic ice. The water in this ice is so pure than these sensors can pick up the tell tale miniscule flash of blue light emitted when a neutrino hits a water molecule from several hundred yards away.

The exciting mystery is that no one really knows what these neutrino images of the cosmos will look like.

Richard Wottrich

From Teosinte to Maize to Corn to High-Fructose Corn Syrup in 9,000 Years

2010-05-29T16:21:00.000-06:00

For most of the past 100,000 years Homo sapiens relied on gathering fruits, nuts, seeds, tubers and other offerings from nature in order to survive. It was a relatively recent 10,000 years ago that humans began to domesticate and raise animals and plant their own food.

Sean B. Carroll of The New York Times reported in an article on May 25th that the origin of domesticated maize has been determined through advances in DNA research. Corn has of course become an important food globally for humans, livestock and energy. Corn is the third largest food crop in the world behind rice and wheat.

In the past botanists have not found any direct ancestor of modern corn. The biological origin has thus been a bit of a mystery. However through DNA matching it is an unassuming Mexican grass called teosinte that is the Rosetta stone of this puzzle.

Teosinte of the genus Zea is a group of five grasses that grow in Central America and Southern Mexico. Its skinny ears have just a dozen kernels wrapped inside of rock-hard casings, like the tail of an armadillo. It is hard to imagine this plant as the ancestor of corn and in fact in the past it has been classified as closer to rice than to corn.

The DNA evidence taken from teosinte plants throughout its geographical range provides evidence that maize originated in the tropical Central Balsas River Valley in Southern Mexico. It is interesting that the geographical origin of maize is almost a template of the ancient civilizations of Mexico – Olmec, Zapotea, Teotihuacan, Maya, Toltecs and Aztecs. Maize was the mother food of these grand cultures and teosinte is the mother of maize.

It is amazing to me that small groups of people 9,000 years ago were able to select and grow the desirable features of teosinte and evolve it into a high yielding and easily harvested food crop. I thank them for the great American tradition of eating sweet corn with butter and salt on a summer day

And of course today huge industrial farms across our continent grow just a few highly bred varieties of corn for the production of ethanol, feed for cattle and other animals, and for the great crack cocaine food product of the 21st century – High-fructose corn syrup.

Richard Wottrich

Sustainability Begins With a Stable Population

2010-05-26T14:27:00.001-06:00

When the United States was born in 1776 the world’s population was perhaps 700 million. At the end of our Civil War in 1865 our global population has grown to roughly 1.4 billion; doubling in less than 100 years. When I was born in 1946 the world’s population had exploded to 2.5 billion. By 1990 it had doubled again to 5.5 billion. It is expected that we will hit 7 billion humans on earth sometime in 2011. So we have grown by an order of magnitude (700 million to 7 billion) in just 235 years.

This might be fine if we were providing a reasonable standard of living for most humans on earth. But we are not. Over 1 billion people are starving to death at any point in time. Over 2 billion people do not have access to potable water or basic medicines. The fact is that almost 30% of humanity lives under conditions that any rational Western citizen would on its face deplore as unacceptable.

This is what makes the national debate about controlling illegal immigration and protecting our borders so puzzling. Any rational analysis would acknowledge that a sovereign nation must and should protect its borders. The United States has one of the most generous immigration policies in the world. We legally allow thousands of people into our country every year. And yet it is somehow deplorable to even mention the multitudes that enter illegally.

The government would have us believe that there are roughly 11 million illegal aliens in America. Even the most casual observer knows this is a laughable number. Other NGOs estimate that the figure may be as high as 20 million; roughly 6.5% of our estimated population of 309 million. Well here is a news flash for you. I would take very long odds that there are least 30 million people in this country illegally; 10% of our population. The sad fact is our government doesn’t know and doesn’t care to know.

Do the math. We just passed a health care reform bill that will dump 30 million people into the healthcare system. It is so big that nobody knows what the cost or long term implications will be. It very well may bankrupt Medicare and Medicaid. And right behind those 30 million people are another 30 million illegal aliens that congress will eventually get around to parsing into amnesty.

The United States is the third most populous nation on earth. For it not to control its borders and stop illegal immigration is folly, and a form of national suicide.

Richard Wottrich

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

2010-05-18T20:36:00.002-06:00

Chart of optimum ocean temperature differentials for OTEC

Chicago — For almost one hundred years the concept of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) has been understood. OTEC generates electricity by utilizing the temperature differential between sun-warmed surface water and the cold ocean depths.

The concept of a heat engine is well understood in thermodynamics engineering, and much of the energy used around the world passes through a heat engine. A heat engine is a thermodynamic device placed between a high temperature reservoir and a low temperature reservoir. As heat flows from one to the other, the engine converts some of the heat energy to work energy. This principle is used in steam turbines and internal combustion engines, while refrigerators reverse the direction of flow of both the heat and work energy. Rather than using heat energy from the burning of fuel, OTEC power draws on temperature differences caused by the sun's warming of the ocean surface.

Surface water is pumped through a heat exchanger, where it heats a liquid chemical with a low boiling point, such as ammonia, which then expands as it vaporizes. The vaporized gas drives turbine blades that generate electricity. The gas is then piped into a condenser back in the cold deep ocean water, which chills it, returning it to its liquid state so the cycle may be repeated.

Demonstration plants have been built over the years, but OTEC has never been put into commercial operation primarily because of its high cost.

The New York Times has reported this week on Pacific Otec and its efforts with OTEC. For OTEC to be efficient, the technology requires a temperature differential of at least 20 degrees Celsius (36 F), which is available over large expanses of tropical waters. “Every additional degree will help produce 15 percent more energy,” said Philippe Dubau, General Manager of Pacific Otec, a subsidiary of Pacific Petroleum, an oil product distributor in French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Vanuatu that has been moving into the renewable energy sector.

The attractive aspect to OTEC is that it would provide steady power over a 24-hour cycle in a never ending loop, as long as the temperature differential exists.

Pacific Otec, DCNS, the French government-owned naval architect and military shipbuilder, and Xenesys, a Japanese specialist in desalination and thermal energy conversion technology, are working on a feasibility study for a commercial OTEC plant in Tahiti. Financial backing for the project has been provided by the French and French Polynesian governments.

The project envisions building an offshore OTEC platform, with a 10 megawatt-hour generating capacity, which will be connected to the Tahiti power grid and could produce enough electricity to cover 10 percent of the islands’ needs, Mr. Dubau said. The offshore OTEC plant would be 25 meters (80 feet) high and submerged 25 meters below the surface to remain stable in heavy weather. One of the main attractive features of OTEC is the compact footprint it requires as compared to solar and wind power.

As reported by The New York Times, Mr. Dubau said. “This feasibility study is not about the technology; we know it works. We also know the design of the plant is correct. But what we need to do now is to design the optimal energy system, considering local environmental data; to design the integration of the process into the chosen platform type; and, of course, study the economic feasibility of the whole project.”

Richard Wottrich

Who Pays For Alternative Energy?

2010-05-12T07:36:00.001-06:00

Government-owned General Motors received huge taxpayer bailout funding, so it can roll out the Chevy Volt at a subsidized cost, to be financed with tax subsidized low interest rates from the old GMAC (now Ally Bank to confuse the public), so that the Volt buyer can receive up to $8,600 in federal tax subsidies when buying the Volt. QUIZ: What is the true cost of the Chevy Volt?

There seems to be a disconnect when politicians begin to wax eloquent on Alternative Energy and “saving” the American people money. Perhaps a look at the facts will help.

Government-owned GM will release its new gasoline-electric combination Volt automobile this year. Nissan will roll out its all-electric Leaf in December.

Pricing will be fairly modest for these cars – perhaps around $25,000 to $30,000. This is because you and I will be paying for the car with a $7,500 federal tax credit. Electric car buyers will also have to pay for a $2,200 charging station, but federal tax credits will pay for half of that cost as well. Various states such as California, Georgia and Tennessee will chip in as much as $5,000 in tax credits as additional incentive.

Thus is born another tax lobby to pressure congress to keep these subsidies up. This is regressive taxation, because all Americans pay for this while initially these cars are little more than toys for wealthy hobbyists.

The fact is that if you power your car with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, you will be releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere than if you owned a Hummer. And half of American electricity is produced from coal. The fact is if you want a more efficient automobile; just add one passenger and you increase its efficiency by 50%. Or drive less.

Meanwhile over in the wind power fantasy, the federal government has authorized the Cape Wind project off shore from Nantucket. Monday this project asked for authority to enter into a 15-year purchasing contract with the utility company National Grid at a price that will cause consumers in that grid to pay $1.59 more per month on an escalating price curve.

This works out to $443 million in extra energy costs, even though this project will contribute very little power to the grid. It does however help the state to meet an arbitrary alternative energy mandate enforced by the state’s Green Communities Act, so the consumer be damned.

And so it goes. Just as the ethanol industry has developed into a huge federal tax subsidy machine to generate profits for private companies, so too will electric vehicles and wind power. Facts are stubborn things.

Richard Wottrich

Center for Nanoscale Materials

2010-04-30T18:16:00.002-06:00

This sequence of images demonstrates how nanoparticles linked to antibodies induced cell death in cancerous cells when researchers applied a light source. From the top row: cancer cells after no light, damaged cells 30 minutes after light and cell death 90 minutes after light. Image credit: Nanobio Interface Group at the Center for Nanoscale Materials (E. Rozhkova and I. Ulasov)

Argonne National Laboratory - Richard Wottrich attended a workshop and tour at the Center for Nanoscale Materials today at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL USA. The sessions were limited to 20 participants from companies such as Nanophase Technologies Corporation, Cabot Microelectronics, NanoScale Corporation, Dendritic Nanotechnologies and Elevance Renewable Sciences.

Two presentations were made by the CNM’s Nanobio Interfaces Work Group:

Elena A. Rozhkova presented a review of their results and experiments in electron paramagnetic resonance and its application to treatments in cancer.

Elena V. Shevchenko presented a review of their results and experiments in 2- and 3-D nanoparticle assembly and its application to self-replicating crystalline tiling, lattices and applications thereof.

CNM is an extraordinary resource that presents opportunities for basic and advanced research, experimentation and commercialization of new nanotechnology concepts. Corporations interested in the dynamic interaction between CNM and appropriate funding sources should contact Richard Wottrich for further discussion.

Let Them Eat ... Wind

2010-04-29T11:29:00.001-06:00

America’s schizophrenic psychosis regarding energy will doom us to losing leadership in Alternative Energy unless we wake up. We all want cheap gasoline and low heating bills, but are not prepared to pay for sustainable energy sources. We would rather that some Third World country despoil their soil rather than drill in our own backyard. NIMBYism is alive and well.

The Obama administration just approved the nation’s first offshore windmill farm, the Cape Wind project. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved the 25-square-mile section of Nantucket Sound for a 130 wind mill farm that will provide enough power for 200,000 homes in Massachusetts.

But it took nearly 10 years of fighting to arrive at this point, as everyone from the Kennedy family to local Native American tribes and the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound have fought hand over fist to stop the project. Now that the project has the go ahead there are already groups vowing to file additional law suits. It may be another 5 to 10 years before this project is completed.

I have been in many European cities that have windmill farms. In particular Copenhagen comes to mind, where the sea panorama has a necklace of wind mill towers strung down the coast. Not only are these wind farms not intrusive, they actually add interest to an otherwise flat seascape. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

And that is the problem really. If wealthy home owners are able to defeat any energy project just because they personally do not like it, then what kind of a national energy policy does that bespeak for America?

Richard Wottrich

Professor Esther Duflo Wins John Bates Clark Medal

2010-04-24T07:34:00.002-06:00

Esther Duflo, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has won the John Bates Clark medal, given to promising economists under the age of 40. Duflo, a 37-year-old native of France, is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT and a director of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Duflo has pioneered methods of analyzing antipoverty programs worldwide to uncover and determine effective ways to combat poverty.

In conjunction with Harvard University's Kennedy School and Stephen Ryan at MIT, for example, a program was implemented in India where certain teachers were given cameras with time and date stamps. They were instructed to take pictures of their students each morning and afternoon. Teacher absences in these schools dropped overnight and student test scores increased as a result.

In another notable study, Duflo, together with Banerjee and J-PAL’s executive director, Rachel Glennerster, found that the rate at which families in northern India will immunize their children jumps from about 5 percent to nearly 40 percent when parents are offered a small bag of lentils as an incentive.

Duflo founded the Poverty Action Lab in 2003, along with MIT colleagues Abhijit Banergee and Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainnathan.

In recognition of Duflo's accomplishments and humanitarianism, Centercut is delighted to add Esther Duflo to its Centercut Clear Thinker list of notable people who think out of the box.

Richard Wottrich

Sustainability of Humans & World Hunger

2010-04-23T03:15:00.001-06:00

Sinhagad Fortress, near Pune, India (Photo:RLW - click on picture)

All this talk about sustainability and alternative energy is rather moot if we cannot even feed the people we have on earth. Over one billion people suffer from chronic hunger, lack of potable water and extreme poverty globally. And these people have children who suffer along with them - the very definition of a living hell on earth.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private charitable foundation in the world and it targets these basic problems head on. In 2009 its endowment was worth roughly $33.5 Billion. Warren Buffett has committed to contribute the bulk of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which should add another $30 billion.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, joined representatives of the governments of the United States, Canada, Spain, and South Korea at the U.S. Department of the Treasury today to launch a global trust fund to help the world’s poorest farmers grow more and earn more so they can lift themselves—and their countries—out of hunger and poverty.

Initial contributions to the fund total nearly $900 million, including a $30 million commitment from the foundation. Proposed by the G20 last year after the economic crisis and rising food prices pushed the number of hungry people to 1 billion, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program is a concrete step to translate $22 billion in food security pledges into action.

“Investing in small farmers is an incredibly effective way to combat hunger and extreme poverty—history has proved it many times,” said Gates, whose foundation has committed $1.5 billion to date to agricultural development. “The launch of this fund is an important step forward, but only a first step. Other countries meeting at the European, G8 and G20 summits in June, and at the U.N. Summit in September should join the four founding partners and make good on their pledges. If we all sustain focus until the job is done, hundreds of millions of people will lead better lives.”

This is worth tracking - worth helping - worthwhile...

Richard Wottrich

FloDesign's wind turbine

2010-04-19T03:40:00.004-06:00

(Click on image)

FloDesign Wind Turbine Co. has developed new wind power technology that will shape and shake the industry for years to come.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), - Design Flaws

2010-03-29T04:11:00.001-06:00

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva, is the world's largest collider, which measures more than 16 miles in circumference. It is expected to usher in a new era of particle physics research, enabling scientists to replicate conditions immediately after the Big Bang.

With a budget of 9 billion US dollars (approx. €6300M or £5600M as of Jan 2010), the LHC is the most expensive scientific experiment in human history.

However, it would appear that simple silver soldering design flaws have shelved the collider's full power capabilties until at least 2013. One such connection failed recently and blew a hole in the collider wall, shutting down operations. A detailed analysis last summer revealed several more bad connections, and CERN now says that it will take a year to correct the problem throughout the machine. As a result, the LHC will not run at its full collision energy of 14 tera-electronvolts (1012 eV) until around 2013.

Design flaws article: Naturenews.com

Richard Wottrich

China Walks the Walk, America Talks

2010-03-25T03:42:00.003-06:00

(Wind farm off the coast of Shanghai)

It appears that the political rhetoric in the United States about Alternative Energy investment is not matched by it actions. A report from the Pew Charitable Trusts reveals that China overtook the United States in 2009 in investments in wind, solar and other sources of Alternative Energy.

U.S. clean energy investments were $18.6 billion in 2009, roughly half the Chinese total of $34.6 billion. Five years ago, China's investments in clean energy totaled $2.5 billion.

The United States was 11th in clean energy investment as a percentage of GDP, behind Canada and Mexico.

The Pew report pointed to a factor constraining U.S. competitiveness: a lack of national mandates for renewable energy production or a surcharge on greenhouse gas emissions that would make fossil fuels more expensive.

As reported in the Los Angeles Times, "It's certainly the case that the countries and areas with higher investment in clean energy will be able to produce more jobs," said Chris Lafakis, an economist at Moody's Economy.com, which is working with Pew in tracking the green economy and jobs. Lafakis said investment was the No. 1 factor in green job growth.

Germany in particular has done an excellent job in leveraging private clean energy investment, in part, by supporting wind and solar power with sustained financial incentives. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates, German subsidies from 2004 to 2008 amounted to about $74 billion.

However it is in China where the combination of its dominant manufacturing base and comprehensive government policies has promoted clean energy technology. This salient fact has drawn significant American corporate investment in China. (See “Follow the Money Winds", March 18, 2010)

Pew reported that the U.S. still leads the world in clean energy innovation and venture capital funding in the sector. It is important that a national energy policy is created to leverage these strengths, if the United States is to be a world leader in the quest for clean energy.

Richard Wottrich

Your Government in Action, or the Nuclear Option

2010-03-23T08:08:00.000-06:00

By STEVEN CHU, U.S. Secretary of Energy

America is on the cusp of reviving its nuclear power industry. Last month President Obama pledged more than $8 billion in conditional loan guarantees for what will be the first U.S. nuclear power plant to break ground in nearly three decades. And with the new authority granted by the president's 2011 budget request, the Department of Energy will be able to support between six and nine new reactors.

What does all of this mean for the country? This investment will provide enough clean energy to power more than six million American homes. It will also create tens of thousands of jobs in the years ahead.

Perhaps most importantly, investing in nuclear energy will position America to lead in a growing industry. World-wide electricity generation is projected to rise 77% by 2030. If we are serious about cutting carbon pollution then nuclear power must be part of the solution. Countries such as China, South Korea and India have recognized this and are making investments in nuclear power that are driving demand for nuclear technologies. Our choice is clear: Develop these technologies today or import them tomorrow.

That is why—even as we build a new generation of clean and safe nuclear plants—we are constantly looking ahead to the future of nuclear power. As this paper recently reported, one of the most promising areas is small modular reactors (SMRs). If we can develop this technology in the U.S. and build these reactors with American workers, we will have a key competitive edge.

Small modular reactors would be less than one-third the size of current plants. They have compact designs and could be made in factories and transported to sites by truck or rail. SMRs would be ready to "plug and play" upon arrival.

If commercially successful, SMRs would significantly expand the options for nuclear power and its applications. Their small size makes them suitable to small electric grids so they are a good option for locations that cannot accommodate large-scale plants. The modular construction process would make them more affordable by reducing capital costs and construction times.

Their size would also increase flexibility for utilities since they could add units as demand changes, or use them for on-site replacement of aging fossil fuel plants. Some of the designs for SMRs use little or no water for cooling, which would reduce their environmental impact. Finally, some advanced concepts could potentially burn used fuel or nuclear waste, eliminating the plutonium that critics say could be used for nuclear weapons.

In his 2011 budget request, President Obama requested $39 million for a new program specifically for small modular reactors. Although the Department of Energy has supported advanced reactor technologies for years, this is the first time funding has been requested to help get SMR designs licensed for widespread commercial use.

Right now we are exploring a partnership with industry to obtain design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for one or two designs. These SMRs are based on proven light-water reactor technologies and could be deployed in about 10 years.

We are also accelerating our R&D efforts into other innovative reactor technologies. This includes developing high-temperature gas reactors that can provide carbon-free heat for industrial applications, as well as advanced reactor designs that will harness much more of the energy from uranium.

Just as advanced computer modeling has revolutionized aircraft design—predicting how any slight adjustment to a wing design will affect the overall performance of the airplane, for example—we are working to apply modeling and simulation technologies to accelerate nuclear R&D. Scientists and engineers will be able to stand in the center of a virtual reactor, observing coolant flow, nuclear fuel performance, and even the reactor's response to changes in operating conditions. To achieve this potential, we are bringing together some of our nation's brightest minds to work under one roof in a new research center called the Nuclear Energy Modeling and Simulation Hub.

These efforts are restarting the nuclear power industry in the U.S. But to truly promote nuclear power and other forms of carbon-free electricity, we need long-term incentives. The single most effective step we could take is to put a price on carbon by passing comprehensive energy and climate legislation. Requiring a gradual reduction in carbon emissions will make clean energy profitable—and will fuel investment in nuclear power.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Follow the Money Winds

2010-03-18T08:07:00.000-06:00

An old mentor of mine, long since passed away, used to instruct me to "follow the money winds." Indeed so, especially if we pay attention to China.

Research and Development spending (R&D) has been moving to China from all points worldwide in an accelerating trend.

General Motors has a huge and growing auto research campus in Shanghai.

Applied Materials has just completed one of its largest research labs near Beijing and has another in Xian.

Xian, a city 600 miles southwest of Beijing, has 47 universities and other learning institutions, graduating thousands of engineers whose starting pay is as little as $730 per month.

Thermal Power Research Institute is based in Xian; the world leading laboratory on perfecting cleaner coal.

Future Fuels is buying $100 million in licensing equipment systems from the institute.

NatCore Technology just reached an agreement with a Chinese consortium of Chinese companies to begin mass-production of its solar panels in Changsha.

The GE China Technology Center (CTC) based in Shanghai is home to more than 20 research labs, working on technology for a number of GE businesses both in China and around the world.

DuPont China Research and Development Center (Shanghai) and Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing) are examples of other substantial R&D operations in China.

Additionally Motorola Chinese Research Institute (capital investment of US$155 million), Lucent Chinese Research Institute (capital investment of US$200 million), Microsoft Chinese Research Institute (capital investment of US$80 million) and IBM Chinese Research Institute are all 100% self-owned capital R&D centers.

The list continues, including 3G-related mobile communications companies like Nokia, Ericson, Alcatel, Lucent and Siemens, automotive-related R&D centers for Nissan, and R&D activities by pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Roche as well as by chemical companies like Dan Chemical, DuPont and others.

Young people often ask me for career advice. My answer is simple. Follow the money winds.

Richard Wottrich

Strong Results For Renewable Energy in 2009

2010-03-17T05:42:00.000-06:00

The annual Clean Energy Trends 2010 report from the Clean Edge Inc. research firm shows strong growth for Renewable and Alternative Energy in 2009, despite the raging recession worldwide.

Driven by government stimulus funding, globally business and governments spent $63.5 billion on wind farms and turbines last year, up 23.5 percent from 2008. The global biofuel market rose 29 percent, hitting $44.9 billion

However solar revenues declined in 2009, as surging manufacturing capacity (especially in China) dropped the price of solar panels. Combined global revenues for photovoltaic companies fell 20.3 percent to $30.7 billion, the first drop since Clean Edge began tracking solar sales in 2000.

According to the report, about $100 billion of the $787 billion US stimulus package is being devoted to clean energy. The stimulus program has helped get large US renewable power projects launched, as it offers companies grants worth up to 30 percent of each project's total cost.

China is spending $440 billion to $660 billion on the industry in the next 10 years, in a state-sanctioned bid to be the dominant player in green technology.

The report estimates that by 2019, the global biofuel market will top $112.5 billion. Wind power revenue could reach $114.5 billion, while solar hits $98.9 billion.

Richard Wottrich

World's First Commercial Wireless Electric Vehicle

2010-03-11T18:05:00.002-06:00

SEOUL, South Korea, March 11 UPI reported today that South Korea has unveiled what is considered the world's first commercial wireless electric vehicle.

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has introduced an online electric vehicle, which can run up to 24.8 miles per hour. Power strips are buried one foot under the surface and connected to the national grid provide electromagnetic power to the OLEV wirelessly, charging an on-board battery and powering the bus's electric motor. The vehicle was introduced Tuesday at the Seoul Grand Park as one of the theme park's seven shuttles operating on a 1.37-mile beltway.

The Seoul government said it hopes to apply the technology to city buses as early as next year after trial operations. Buses account for about 30 percent of Seoul's traffic, with some 56 miles of bus lanes operating throughout the city.

The institute says the technology, in addition to reducing pollution, reduces problems often associated with hybrid vehicles such as weighty batteries, lengthy charging times and limited range of power. Whether running or stopped, the OLEV constantly receives electric power through the underground cables.

There is no similar project under way in the US at this time.

Richard Wottrich

Senate Discovers That It's a Global World After All...

2010-03-04T15:45:00.001-06:00

Chinese New Year

(Chicago, IL USA) Senators are balking at stimulus spending on several wind power projects that seem to be subsidizing jobs overseas in China and elsewhere. They apparently are surprised to find that major manufacturing companies worldwide are already building world class components for Alternative Energy.

This startling discovery by our worldly senators began after a planned Texas wind farm with substantial Chinese investment announced it would seek a $450 million stimulus tax credit. The developers initially said the project would support 3,000 jobs in China and about 300 in Texas (a Red state). Several Democratic senators, led by Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, are pushing legislation to make such projects ineligible for stimulus funds if they don't have a "substantial" impact on U.S. employment.

Under the terms of the $787 billion stimulus bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), the Texas project would qualify for a portion of its $32 billion in Alternative Energy grants and guaranteed loans, however the turbines would be produced by a Chinese company, A-Power Energy Generation Systems Ltd.

The project's developer, the U.S. Renewable Energy Group, is doing a quick two-step dance to avoid the deadly scrutiny of savvy senators. They now say that 70 percent of the turbine components would come from the U.S.

This blogger has warned repeatedly that gains in Alternative Energy in countries such as China will give them a head start on such projects. It is nice to see that the senate is finally getting ahead of the power curve - killing projects to spite the noses on their collective faces.

Richard Wottrich

A Bloom is a Bloom is a Bloom...

2010-02-28T14:14:00.000-06:00

"Pick a card, any card." Bloom Energy CEO K. R. Sridhar displays Bloom Energy Fuel Cells

Last week 60 Minutes featured Bloom Energy in a breathless rock star treatment of the company's CEO, K.R. Sridhar. As reporter Lesley Stahl fawned over Sridhar, he showed off a tiny square box composed of fuel cells supposdly capable of powering an Amercian home. Few other facts were evident or presented.

Just out of frame lurked John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), preening like a new father celebrating his first baby boy. KPCB has somewhere between $100 million and $400 million invested in Bloom Energy, depending upon who you listen to.

Too good to be true? Perhaps, but here are the real questions:

When will it be ready for prime time - the home market?
What will it cost?
How durable will it be?
Do you buy it or lease it?
Can you get off the grid, or sell energy to the grid?
If it's this good, then won't energy consumption spike up?

And last but not least, why are so many celebrities endorsing the Bloom Box? That's enough to scare Warren Buffett.

Richard Wottrich

Paint goes nanotech

2010-02-16T06:16:00.000-06:00

An IIT Mumbai and Jadavpur University alumnus has made an eco-friendly, long lasting product.

By Ritwik Mukherjee, mydigitalfc.com

Arup Kumar Chatterjee has used nano technology to produce a new paint for your walls made, which he claims, is robust, long lasting and offers high resistance to impact and abrasion. It has high water repellency, is anti-fungal, bactericidal, UV protective and, above all, environment-friendly. Chatterjee is an alumnus of IIT Mumbai and Jadavpur University.

“While conventional paints and coatings are made of large molecules where water, dirt and other particles can leach into the gaps and erode the surface, the nano-engineered paints are densely packed with robust molecules that act as a penetrative and functional barrier,” Chatterjee, who is an M Tech said.

Nanotechnology is the chemical manipulation of functional paints and coatings at the molecular level to create highly resistant, longer lasting and environment friendly products. Chatterjee’s invention from the stable of his own company—I-CanNano (Innovation Center for Applied Nanotechnology) has been certified by the Paint Research Association as being 99.99 per cent bacteria free and an eco-friendly paint.

“This is low cost paint compared to any other available. And all these paints are now being manufactured at a new state-of-the-art plant at Baruipur, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal,” said Chatterjee.

Chatterjee’s clientele already includes Godrej & Boyce, Parryware Roca, Mahindra, Shapoorji & Pallonji and more. “Although everything at ICanNano is indigenously developed, we are working in close collaboration with Caneus Jet Propulsion Lab, USA, National Research Center, Canada, Neumann-UK and Bell Helicopters,” said Chatterjee.

“We are quite happy and satisfied with these nano-engineered product,” says B J Wadia, president of Godrej & Boyce. “We had always been looking at hit conductivity in paints and there is no denying the fact that hit conductivity has improved significantly through this new-found technology.”

He is not the only one. Head of contracts at Shapoorji & Pallonji N D Tarapore said, “The whole world is going green, or atleast aspiring and trying to go green. We have been able to move in this direction with the help of these research-based nano technology engineered paints & coatings and composites. The quality and durability have also gone up substantially.”

At the company, former president and scientist APJ Abdul Kalam wrote in the comment book: “This is affordable nanotechnology for common man”.

The claims of the company appear to have been validated by Paint Research Association, UK. The recent PRA study shows that ICanNano’s paints are not only anti-fungal but also anti-bacterial and UV stabilised.

Chatterjee’s company wants to commercially take this technology to the common man. I-CanNano is driving industrial nanotechnology scenario across various industries in construction, automotive, biotech, renewable energy and filters. Paints and coatings is one of the first areas chosen for commercialisation, where nanotechnology impact is early.

In industrial segment, his product portfolio includes heat conducting paints, high electrically insulating paints that withstand 5,000V, high anti-corrosive paints, pollutant adsorbant paint, high impact and scratch resistant paints, high temperature resistant paints and clear coat paints.

“Besides, we have already started working towards commercialisation of composites. I-CanNano is envisaging development of world’s largest carbon nano-fiber manufacturing facility in India catering to not only light weight/high strength composites for aerospace, wind blade, automotive structures but also for high abrasion resistant rubbers, conducting inks, and electrodes,” Chattrejee said.

I-CanNano already has one US patent on fuel cell electrode and one Indian patent on super-capacitor electrode to its credit. It has research interest in hydrogen storage and fuel cell development.

The centre has also developed process technology for industrial scale manufacturing of nano-materials that are tunable in size and structure, scalable and pure in terms of quality.

Said Chatterjee, also a visiting scientist at IIT Mumbai and a governing body member of Calcutta University: “We have not restricted its activity in the field of nano-materials but also graduated to development of applications in various areas of paints and coatings, composites, filters, catalysts, electrodes and drug delivery. This development of nano-products is due to graduation from first generation to third generation nanotechnology.”

In nanotechnology, entry barrier is high and once a product gets developed dissemination is fast. ICanNano does not envisage any entry barriers where products are technologically and commercially competitive, yet affordable. Currently, I-CanNano has its foothold in USA, UK, Africa and UAE and is planning to expand further.

Proposal to Link the Nation's Grid Sparks a Debate

2010-02-07T05:53:00.001-06:00

By PETER BEHR of ClimateWire

The Tres Amigas transmission project in New Mexico, which seeks to link the nation's three power grids to share wind power across the United States, has attracted both eager allies and some determined foes.

Scandia Wind Southwest LLC, a venture led by Norwegian wind power developers, has proposed to build an initial 2,250 megawatts of wind power in the Texas Panhandle, with a potential capacity of 10,000 MW. That amount of power, the equivalent of 10 large nuclear power plants, could move into the Eastern and Western grid interconnections, and to Texas' independent grid, over the Tres Amigas transmission linkage.

The Tres Amigas project would operate three power switching hubs connected by several miles of superconducting direct-current lines, on a 22.5-square-mile section near Clovis, N.M., adjoining Texas and Oklahoma. The hubs would direct power flows in and out of the three regions, whose electrical systems are not synchronized, creating bridges for electric power to flow across the entire country, wherever transmission capacity permitted.

Tres Amigas has strong support from New Mexico's Democratic Governor, Bill Richardson. The American Wind Energy Association and the Solar Energy Industries Association support the concept of uniting the three non-synchronized grids. Landowners in the Panhandle area -- such as Crosby County Wind Farm LLC, a Dallas-based company with 100 landowners and 30,000 available acres -- are behind the project. A subsidiary of ITC Holdings, the Michigan-based independent transmission company, is interested in building lines to the Tres Amigas project.

No one, perhaps, is more enthusiastic than Harald Dirdal, a partner with Havgul Clean Energy, a Norwegian company that is developing several thousand megawatts of onshore and offshore wind power projects in its country. Dirdal said that he and his partners were prospecting for wind power opportunities in the United States when they learned last year about the Tres Amigas venture, led by Phillip Harris, former head of the PJM Interconnection, the grid operator in much of the mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes regions.

"We thought if we could do a big development in the Texas Panhandle, a really big development, we could interconnect into the three national grids ourselves," Dirdal said. "We had no clue about Tres Amigas' existence whatsoever. So literally I was jumping up and down in Oslo when I heard about, for about half an hour, in pure joy."

But lined up against Tres Amigas are units of Occidental Petroleum, the fourth-largest U.S. oil and gas company, whose sales totaled $24 billion in 2008 and $15 billion last year. Through its subsidiaries, Occidental is a major purchaser of power for its chemicals, hydrocarbon and manufacturing businesses, and a marketer of electricity, as well.

A transmission 'game changer' collides with 1930s law

As Harris has said, Tres Amigas is a "game changer," a facility that could move large amounts of power in any direction among the three grids, with potentially big impacts on prices and profits that existing generators now receive, as well as consumers' electricity costs. Tres Amigas' financial plan depends on selling its transmission access to generators and power marketers who would take advantage of the connection to buy cheaper power in one of the grids and sell it in another when prices are higher. That makes it a competitive outsider in parts of the established markets.

Occidental is the most vocal opponent of Tres Amigas' requests for two rulings from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that it says are essential. The project is seeking FERC approval to charge negotiated transmission rates for access to its network.

And it asks FERC to disclaim jurisdiction over any Texas transmission line owners that connect with Tres Amigas, a crucial procedural step that would maintain the independence of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs the grid in three-quarters of the state. Texas created its own grid in the New Deal to keep from being regulated by Washington's new Federal Power Commission, FERC's predecessor.

Occidental has filed several 50-page-plus broadsides with FERC against the Tres Amigas plan, and has brought forward an expert witness to challenge Harris' technical arguments on why his project's engineering design would keep Texas' electrons from "intermingling" with outside grids. Keeping the electrons separate means that the Texas system would not be linked to its neighbors as a policy matter, keeping it clear of FERC's jurisdiction over interstate wholesale electricity markets, Harris argues.

Harris stated that intermingling does not occur because the alternating-current energy flowing into the Tres Amigas "superstation" would be converted to direct current at each of the project's three hubs linked with the three grids. "Nothing is mixed," Harris said.

Occidental's expert, Songhoon Yang, with the consulting firm Bates White LLC in Washington, D.C., argued in a FERC filing that it is obvious that electric power will be moving among the grids through the Tres Amigas facility, so Harris' argument that the project's engineering interrupts the flow is not valid.

FERC has not ruled yet on either of the Tres Amigas petitions. Several of the parties that have commented in the commission's two dockets, ER10-396 and EL10-22, are urging the commission to take its time, because of the project's uniqueness and the difficulty of assessing its impact.

The Electric Power Supply Association, representing merchant power producers, said it took no position on the fate of the Tres Amigas project but urged FERC to move with care.

Is Texas wind power being undermined or efficiently shared?

The Public Utility Commission of Texas noted that it is in the midst of ruling on new transmission projects that would connect 18 gigawatts of wind power to the state's urban areas -- the result of lengthy renewable energy planning. It wants to see a stronger legal case made at FERC to ensure that it stays independent. Texas Industrial Energy Consumers, another Tres Amigas opponent, says the massive transmission investment Texas is planning to bring its wind resources to market could be undermined by Tres Amigas.

The American Public Power Association said that while it appreciates Tres Amigas' "bold vision," FERC needs to conduct its own analysis of the project's impact on electricity prices. "It should not simply rely on Tres Amigas's assertions that it 'cannot cause prices to rise above competitive levels' because power buyers would go elsewhere," the association said.

Three Occidental companies and Texas Industrial Energy Consumers have asked FERC to order discovery and hold a "contested evidentiary hearing" on the Tres Amigas project -- a lengthy process that advantages the side with the deepest pockets, attorneys note.

However FERC rules on Tres Amigas' two requests, the project may still face hurdles unless new policies are forthcoming from Congress or FERC to support the siting and financing of transmission projects for renewable power, energy experts say.

Dirdal, who has spent much of the past year traveling to potential wind power sites in the United States, has been in that field since 1995 but said he is still learning about U.S. energy politics.

He argued that linking the grids would permit the greatest possible sharing of wind power originating in different time zones and different climate regions, substantially smoothing out the effects of wind's variability and intermittency. The result would be a stronger wind energy network less in need of expensive backup generation, he said. But the venture does challenge the existing order on the grid, and that is evidently a force to be reckoned with, he said.

Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

For more news on energy and the environment, visit http://www.climatewire.net/

Wind energy job growth isn't blowing anyone away

2010-02-03T05:37:00.000-06:00

Wind farm near Palm Springs. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times / January 29, 2007)

Despite record growth in generating capacity, the industry is creating few employment opportunities overall.

By Jim Tankersley
jtankersley@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

America's wind energy industry enjoyed a banner year in 2009, thanks largely to tax credits and other incentives packed into the $787-billion economic stimulus bill.

But even though a record 10,000 megawatts of new generating capacity came on line, few jobs were created overall and wind power manufacturing employment, in particular, fell -- a setback for President Obama's pledge to create millions of green jobs.

Obama has long pitched green jobs, especially in the energy, transportation and manufacturing fields, as a prescription for long-term, stable employment and a prosperous middle class.

But those jobs have been slow to materialize, especially skilled, good-paying, blue-collar jobs such as assembling wind turbines, retrofitting homes to use less energy and working on solar panels in the desert.

On the campaign trail, Obama promised to create some 5 million green jobs over a decade. The stimulus bill approved last year allocated billions of dollars to the clean-energy sector. And the president continued to set high expectations for green-job creation in last week's State of the Union speech.

Administration officials admit that they are nowhere near that pace. Last month, government economists released their first tally of clean-energy jobs created or saved by the stimulus: 52,000.

Several factors accounted for the slow start, some of them linked to weakness in the overall economy. Electric power demand fell nationwide last year. Electricity from coal and natural gas is still by and large cheaper than wind or solar power. Renewable energy companies, faced with limited demand, often used parts and equipment in stock or imported renewable technology instead of building turbines or solar cells domestically.

Industry analysts and energy company executives said job growth is also hampered by lingering uncertainties in federal energy policy. Those include questions about when or whether existing tax breaks will expire and whether the Senate will pass a climate bill that would make fossil fuels more expensive -- and renewable energy more competitive.

The federal stimulus bill spared the wind and solar industries steep job losses last year, executives said.

In the wind industry, the bill saved about 40,000 factory, installation and maintenance jobs, according to the American Wind Energy Assn. The industry had gained as many as 2,000 installation and maintenance jobs in producing the record megawatts of new capacity, but wind power manufacturing lost just as many jobs, the trade group said.

Clean-energy leaders and many outside analysts added that green companies won't begin hiring in large numbers until the federal government mandates renewable power consumption nationwide and dramatically upgrades the nation's electric grid.

Wind turbine manufacturers "need more certainty" to add shifts and factories in the United States, said Elizabeth Salerno, director of data and analysis for the wind industry trade group.

"Demand is the trigger," she said. "But it has to be long-term, stable demand."

Obama's advisors said the biggest clean-energy benefits of the stimulus are still to come, and that they have planted the seeds for a green-job proliferation by financing worker training and leveraging tens of billions of dollars in private investment in green technology. The Energy Department projects that U.S. renewable power generation will grow four times faster from 2008 to 2012 than it would have without the stimulus.

"A lot more has to be done if we're going to realize the president's vision for a truly transformative clean-energy economy," said Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden's chief economist. "Our administration will pick up where [the stimulus] leaves off and finish the job. The president is completely committed to that."

Others said the administration's efforts, including stimulus grants and tax credits that fund some applicants but not others, may have pushed clean-energy investment dollars overseas, particularly to China. Since 2008, China has approved more solar-power capacity than the United States has installed in its history.

"The inconvenient truth for America's economic recovery is that China's Communist Party has cultivated a more favorable, predictable and hospitable market for private investments in clean-energy technology and energy infrastructure than the federal government of the United States," said Alexander "Andy" Karsner, a fellow at the Council on Competitiveness.

Energy Department officials said that instead of focusing on one or two technologies, they have funded a "portfolio of technologies" that will battle for a share of a growing domestic and global market.

"We are not in the business of picking winners," said Matt Rogers, a senior advisor at the Energy Department who oversees stimulus spending. "We're creating competition among innovative approaches in the marketplace."

Global clean-energy competition worries many of the staunchest champions of green jobs in Washington, including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chaired a hearing on solar jobs in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last week.

Among the executives testifying was Robert Rogan, senior vice president for ESolar Inc. in Pasadena. Rogan's young company secured contracts last year for 3,500 megawatts of solar power. One of its projects is set for California; another, in New Mexico, will create hundreds of construction jobs this year.

But the bulk of ESolar's power installations will come in China, which also provides some components of its solar plants.

In an interview, Rogan credited the stimulus for helping clean-energy companies through a "very bad" year in the American private finance market.

He insisted U.S. solar companies are poised for "explosive" growth, but that to maximize it, they need longer-term incentives and better transmission lines to link solar hot spots, such as the Southwest, and demand centers, such as the East Coast.

Oil Bigs to Obama: Get Real - That's Just the Way Davos Rolls

2010-01-29T04:32:00.003-06:00

Aramco Oil Production Command Center

Adam Lashinsky, Senior Editor at Large

The CEO of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, lashed out at the Obama administration Thursday, lamenting the oversupply of “rhetoric” from major oil-consuming nations regarding energy independence. Without naming the U.S. president directly, Khalid Al Falih couldn’t have been clearer who he was referring to. He called pervasive talk from nations that want to wean themselves from an addiction to foreign oil, a common trope in U.S. environmental circles, “unachievable and misleading to the public.”

Al Falih anchored an extraordinary collection of representatives of major oil producers at a morning session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Chaired by consultant and prizewinning author Daniel Yergin, the panel provided a heavy dose of reality into a debate often dominated in Western media and policy circles by a hopeful yearning for alternative energy.

Some highlights:

Tony Hayward, group chief executive of BP (BP), said that though the recession certainly had crimped energy demand in developed countries, BP is forecasting a 40% increase in energy consumption among non-OECD nations over the next 20 years. Furthermore, for all the development initiatives in alternative energy, oil and gas will remain predominant. “Even in the most aggressive climate change legislation perceived, hydrocarbons will represent 80% of energy consumption over next 20 years,” Hayward said. He also said that while gasoline demand is now in “structural decline” in Europe and won’t again exceed 2007 levels, that decline will be more than offset by increased demand in China alone.

Peter Voser, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, also offered his view of energy “realism.” Change in the energy industry, he said, doesn’t work like an on-off switch. “It takes 25 to 30 years to gain 1% of global market share from the moment we start investing in a major project,” he said.

Ilham Aliyev, president of major oil and gas producer Azerbaijan, said 85% of the country’s GDP is now industrial – as opposed to energy — up from zero when Azerbaijan became independent of the Soviet Union. He didn’t say it, but his country’s achievement is in marked contrast to Russia, which remains heavily reliant on oil revenues.

The sole representative of energy consumers was Andrew Liveris, chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical (DOW), which bills itself as the largest energy customer in the U.S. He said Dow’s energy costs jumped from $8 billion to $32 billion when the price of oil spiked. Interestingly, Liveris flagged the impact of oil-price volatility on his business. Normal hedging, he said, becomes impossible in such a climate, which in terms crimps investment given the uncertainty produced by an inability to hedge. Liveris said he supports neither a carbon tax, which merely would be passed on to consumers, nor cap and trade, which would reward speculators. He said he supports carbon pricing that changes behavior, but he didn’t supply his preferred method.

BP’s Hayward also gave an update on his company’s efforts in Iraq, where it is in the process of redeveloping an oil field BP discovered in 1953. The field is producing 1 million barrels of oil per day now, he said. BP intends for its investments in the field to boost production to 3 million barrels by 2020. Overall, Hayward predicted Iraq will be producing 10 million barrels a day in 10 years. That would be a five-fold increase and a gigantic accomplishment.

The star of the show by far was Aramco’s Al Falih. He believes the “peak oil” debate is dead, though it caused damage in the form of price increases and volatility. He said Saudi Arabia has 4 million barrels per day of idle oil capacity at the moment and that the country continued to invest in its fields through the recession, adding 2 million barrels of capacity last year despite the global decline in demand. His beef is that though Saudi Arabia continues to invest in production, “we don’t see reciprocal assurances from customers, by which I mean policymakers, to signal to us a long-term commitment.”

There was no discord on this panel of the global oil elite. With no time for Q&A, if anyone sympathetic to the Obama administration’s energy policy was in the room, they had no opportunity for rebuttal.

CNN

Our Ultimate Sustainability: More funds required to protect Earth against killer asteroids

2010-01-23T05:55:00.002-06:00

(Painting: Don Davis)

New York, January 23 -- NASA will not be able to detect the potentially devastating near Earth objects (NEOs) by 2020, concluded a report released Friday.

Explaining the reason, the report titled ‘Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies’ stated that the government has not provided enough money to carry out the searches to track asteroids or comets.

In 2005, the government had ordered a survey to track nearly 90 percent NEOs, about 140 meters in diameters.

Unfortunately NASA will not be able to complete the survey as searches, though mandated, have not been funded by the Congress.

Focus on large asteroids

The Earth has always been subject to threats from comets and asteroids, and these cosmic collisions have played a major role in the mass extinctions.

Scientists have over the years focused on large asteroids but the impact by these asteroids or comets is very rare. The last worst impact was 65 million years ago when an asteroid, around 10 kilometers in diameter, hit the Yucatan peninsula on the east coast of Mexico, leading to extinction of the dinosaurs.

Russians scientists had last month confirmed that an asteroid named Apophis is heading towards Earth and it could hit the planet in 2030s, leading to catastrophic disaster.

Having more than 20 years of warning about the potential impact, the Russian scientists are not sitting idle. In fact, they have already started making plans like to avert the menace.

More threat from small objects

But the report states that space rocks as large as that head towards Earth on very rare occassions, it is the smaller asteroids that pose more threat. The scientists at the National Research Council argued that currently the nation spends $4 million a year to search for NEOs but this amount is insufficient.

There are more than 2 million space objects that have a near-Earth orbit. Though it is normal for such objects to pass to pass Earth within the distance of a moon about once a week, asteroids could prove devastating if they strike the planet.

An object of about 50 to 75 meters in radius could lead to destruction equal to devastation created by nuclear explosion. In order to avoid the wreckage, it is imperative for the government to fund the survey so that NASA can launch space probes to the orbit of Venus to track the threats posed by Earth’s neighborhood.

As this could prove expensive, the cheaper option is that government should fund telescope so that the scientists can detect the 90 percent of asteroids by 2030.

Since a lot of planning is required to launch spacecraft to divert the path of an asteroid heading towards Earth, the nations should focus on organized evacuations and other civil defense efforts to deal with small asteroids, states report.

The Money Times

Electric Vehicles in the Caribbean

2010-01-21T06:45:00.000-06:00

(Photo: RLW)

GEM eS Electric

Collectivity of Saint Barthélemy, Caribbean

Wal-Mart completes a megawatt solar project in Apple Valley

2010-01-19T05:59:00.000-06:00

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. keeps moving ahead with its plan to shift its power supply to renewable energy with the completion of its largest solar-power project yet.

Earlier this month, Wal-Mart completed three other solar projects in Paramount, Baldwin Park and San Bernardino.

This time, the mega-corporation has wrapped up the installation of more than 5,300 solar panels across nearly 7 acres at its Apple Valley distribution center. The setup will generate 1 megawatt of power, the equivalent of the supply needed by 175 homes.

The company’s solar initiative was first announced in May 2007 and expanded in April 2009 to aim for 10 to 20 solar facilities in California over 18 months. A month later, in May, a San Bernardino Superior Court judge blocked the discount retailer’s plan for a Yucca Valley supercenter, in part because Wal-Mart’s proposal did not include solar-power provisions.

Tiffany Hsu, Los Angeles Times

Photo: The entire Apple Valley solar array. Credit: Wal-Mart

Twisted Physics: Scientists Create Knots of Light

2010-01-18T09:07:00.000-06:00

Like your shoelaces or electrical cords, light can get twisted into knots. Now, scientists have used a computer-controlled hologram and theoretical physics to turn a light beam into pretzel-like shapes.

Like your shoelaces or electrical cords, light can get twisted into knots. Now, scientists have used a computer-controlled hologram and theoretical physics to turn a light beam into pretzel-like shapes.

The twisted feat not only led to some pretty cool images, but the results have implications for future laser devices, the researchers say.

"In a light beam, the flow of light through space is similar to water flowing in a river," said lead researcher Mark Dennis of the University of Bristol in England. Even though the light from something like a laser pointer travels in a straight line, it can also flow in whirls and eddies, Dennis explained.

These swirls of light are called optical vortices. Along the vortices the intensity of light reaches zero, or no light. "The light all around us is filled with these dark lines, even though we can't see them," Dennis said. "Our work actually twists dark filaments within the light beam into knots."

The researchers knew these optical vortices could be created with holograms, which direct the flow of light. By using so-called fibered knot theory, a branch of abstract mathematics inspired by everyday knots, Dennis and his colleagues created customized holograms and reflected a regular laser beam from them.

"The hologram acts like a filter for incoming light, similar to the stained glass window in a church," Dennis told LiveScience. "After going through a stained glass window, the light has taken on the pattern of colors of the window." But there's a difference: "Whilst the stained glass window manipulates color, the hologram manipulates the phase of the light wave."

So each point on the hologram, like a small pane of window glass, changes the point of the wave's cycle in that part of the light beam. They created a hologram that would change the phase of light so that it flowed around a dark knot.

Then, the team scanned a camera through the laser field to get images of the knots. (A computer program applied before the team had created the hologram essentially made the field around the dark knot appear bright.)

Their results, detailed online Jan. 17 in the journal Nature Physics, are "firsts" for a couple of reasons. While so-called knot theorists have studied mathematical equations similar to dark knots, the new research created these knots with math functions that followed rules of propagating light. In addition, unlike other dark knots created that have been tangled up with other knots, Dennis and his colleagues produced isolated dark knots within the light beam, he said.

"For me, it shows how physicists can adapt existing pure mathematics, such as knot theory, and find it manifest in physical phenomena," Dennis said. "It also shows how finely we can control the flow and propagation of laser light using holograms. This degree of control is likely to find applications in future laser devices."

For those wanting to make their own knots, Dennis said all you would need is their hologram and a laser beam.

Copyright © 2010 LiveScience.com. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Geothermal Industry Struts Its Stuff for Wall Street, Capitol Hill

2010-01-16T03:40:00.001-06:00

By NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD of Greenwire

NEW YORK -- The geothermal power industry is maneuvering to escape the shadows of the wind, solar and biofuels sectors and get financiers and lawmakers to take notice.

But high up-front project costs and the impatience of investors keeps getting in the way, leaving industry with its hopes pinned on government grants and tax incentives.

Hoping to change its luck, the Geothermal Energy Association (GEA) held its largest gathering ever yesterday, drawing financiers, politicians and project developers to a posh hotel in Lower Manhattan. The gathering featured a lunchtime keynote speech by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). GEA representatives capped the day by ringing the closing bell at NASDAQ.

The goal: "to let Wall Street know about the fundamentals of geothermal energy, which has ... been around for more than 100 years," said Arni Magnusson, executive director of sustainable energy at Islandsbanki, a major geothermal player in Iceland.

Iceland is famous for using geological forces below ground for power. About 30 percent of Iceland's electricity needs are met with geothermal plants, the rest with hydropower, and nearly every Icelandic home is heated with a geothermal system. Iceland is also a major exporter of geothermal technology, explaining Islandsbanki's interest in expanding the market.

Far less known is that the United States is already far and away the world's largest home for geothermal. Of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of global geothermal capacity, about a third is in the United States, about 3,153 MW, according to GEA. Almost all of that is in California, with Nevada and Utah catching up.

"Nevada already has about 450 megawatts of conventional geothermal power in production," Reid told the gathering yesterday. "In the next three to five years, with the right mix of incentives and policy, my state alone could add 64 new projects that would bring that number up to nearly 2,500 MW."

Magnusson estimates that U.S.-installed capacity could easily double in the next five years as more projects come on line. But sustaining the momentum will require about $26 billion in fresh capital, money that geothermal developers have to compete with the wind and solar power industries to get.

GEA executive director Karl Gawell said Western states have the best potential for conventional geothermal power, which directly taps existing underground steam vents to spin turbines. A more unconventional and controversial technology proposes injecting water into super heated rock underground to generate the steam artificially.

Overall, advocates say, geothermal technology is proven and has distinct advantages over wind and solar. Geothermal power is a steady and reliable baseload, which electric utilities appreciate. And geothermal plants use less land than wind farms or solar arrays.

But Gawell admits major Wall Street investment banks shy away from geothermal because it takes years to see a return on investments. A Nevada project that came online last year took five years to complete, compared with a lead time of little more than a year for a standard wind farm.

"They're realizing that geothermal can be a good investment," Gawell said. "You've just got to stay in there a little bit longer."

The geothermal industry has also gotten a late start at building lobbying power in Washington. Its support on Capitol Hill does not approach that given to the ethanol industry or other renewable energy technologies.

"They built a reputation up over decades, but I think that we're getting there," said Gawell in an interview. "We're starting to get moving, and maybe in a number of years we'll catch up. But at least you're seeing that positive growth and excitement."

The industry is especially excited about the $400 million in the federal stimulus law devoted to research into new geothermal technology. But a lack of certainty about what kind of heat resource can be found thousands of feet beneath the surface makes geothermal-well drilling riskier than oil and gas exploration. One in five wells turn out to be dry holes, so enhancing developers' ability to read the underground potential is critical to enticing new investments.

Still, the industry seems to be expanding by leaps and bounds, and fast growth rates alone could be enough to draw in new capital.

Between 140 and 150 new U.S. projects are on the horizon, and 200 new megawatts of capacity came online last year. GEA estimates its industry is growing by about 15 percent annually.

Geothermal players are excited by predictions that capacity will shoot up to 10,000 MW in the United States as the nation's energy needs grows.

By 2012, "we think the strategic landscape starts to change quickly," said Paul Leggett, a vice president of investment banking at Morgan Stanley. "We do think the geothermal industry is ready for a takeoff."

Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved. For more news on energy and the environment, visit http://www.greenwire.com/

Solar energy: Russia sees huge potential for joint ventures

2010-01-12T11:36:00.004-06:00

Aerial view of the solar panels in Chennai. Russia keen to assist Indian firms to construct solar power stations. They are also planning to enter into series of MoUs with Indian partners. File Photo: S. Thanthoni

Russia keen to assist Indian firms to construct solar power stations. They are also planning to enter into series of MoUs (1) with Indian partners

Lauding the major renewable energy initiative of Jawaharlal Nehru Solar Mission, Russia on Tuesday expressed strong confidence that both New Delhi and Moscow had great potential for forging joint ventures and setting up manufacturing facilities for application of solar energy in the fields of industrial, military, civil and space sectors.

“In our opinion, India has adopted a very right approach in renewable energy. This is a very interesting and really ambitious programme and if implemented fully would put India among the world leaders in application of solar energy and its components,” said Sergey V. Seredin, First Deputy Director General (Economics and Finance) Open Joint Stock Company, Research, Production Enterprise ‘Kavant’ told The Hindu during this visit to New Delhi to take part in the conference on Solar Energy Mission.

Mr. Seredin said the Russian side was very much interested to participate in the solar mission programme and was ready to assist India and Indian companies to construct solar power stations on a turnkey basis as they had advanced technological knowhow in this field.

“We are open to forging joint ventures and also set up manufacturing facilities in India and Russia for solar energy components for industrial and other use, including supply of solar cells, modules or other such applications. We see huge prospects for joint ventures with India,” he added.

Mr. Seredin, accompanied by his associate, Sergey Dyachev, who is also part of the Russian delegation, said the company was planning to enter into a series of memorada of understanding (MoUs) with Indian partners as well as the Government agencies for providing them with solar power station technology and its installation.

Explaining further, he said that till now photovoltic panels (PV) technology was used only for space applications but now it was being adopted for industrial use as space technology had moved from silicon expertise to more advanced multi-layer and multi-junction structures.

“We are pioneers of new technology and we are working today on space technologies that could be used for industrial use in multiple applications,” he added.

Mr. Seredin said they were also part of the ambitious Brahmos missile project being implemented by India as they were supplying some components for this system.

“Our opinion is that this experience should be spread further to other fields. It would be a good solution to various issues and this could also involve production of solar panels in Russia or India. Such a work plan would be economically profitable for both the parties as production of solar components and cells requires huge consumption as large volumes, like the market in India, could bring down cost of solar energy,” he said.

Stating that energy was less costly in Russia, Mr. Seredin said volumes in India could bring down prices significantly in the coming years.

“All over the world there is tendency to reduce the price of each watt of installed solar power and this process is likely to continue. We are looking at new technologies to increase efficiency and reduce price levels. We are ready to transfer to India and our partners here the latest technology.

“The policy of the Indian Government in terms of solar energy production like fixed tariffs, guaranteed returns offered to buy electrical power produced by solar energy means is good. Without such support, it would be difficult to initiate business opportunities for the production of expensive electrical power,” he said.

The Hindu

1 - MoU - A memorandum of understanding (MOU or MoU) is a document describing a bilateral or multilateral agreement between parties. It expresses a convergence of will between the parties, indicating an intended common line of action. It is often used in cases where parties either do not imply a legal commitment or in situations where the parties cannot create a legally enforceable agreement. It is a more formal alternative to a gentlemen's agreement.

In some cases, depending on the exact wording, MoUs can have the binding power of a contract; as a matter of law, contracts do not need to be labeled as such to be legally binding. Whether or not a document constitutes a binding contract depends only on the presence or absence of well-defined legal elements in the text proper of the document (the so-called "four corners"). For example, a binding contract typically must contain mutual consideration—a legally enforceable obligations of the parties, and its formation must take place free of the so-called real defenses to contract formation (fraud, duress, lack of age or mental capacity, etc.).

China Becomes Top Exporter in the World

2010-01-10T15:10:00.002-06:00

Germany overtaken in list of top trading nations

Chinese economy on track to grow by 9.5% in 2010

China completed a resurgent 2009 with a huge rise in exports establishing China as the world's biggest exporter, ahead of Germany, for the first time. The juggernaut Chinese economy also revealed record monthly imports of crude oil and a vast renewed appetite for iron ore and copper.

Trade in December, according to figures from China's customs office, showed a massive 17.7% year-on-year jump in exports, dramatically outpacing a forecast for 4% growth. The huge increase came after 13 months of decline.

Crude oil imports averaged more than 5m barrels a day for a month for the first time in December, up by more than a fifth from November, as the country sucked in raw materials at a faster pace than expected.

Imports jumped by 56%, pushing China's overall trade surplus in the month down by 4% from November instead of the expected 3% increase.

While some experts said much of the increase was due to seasonal factors and quirks in commodities markets, it appears that the strength of demand from China is signalling a further rise in global trade during 2010.

Imports of unwrought copper rose by more than a quarter from November to 369,368 tonnes, more than expected, while copper scrap imports jumped an even bigger 46%. Soya bean imports hit a record 4.78m tonnes in the month, with a surge in supplies from the United States and Brazil. Exports of aluminium and finished steel were also up strongly. China's economy is predicted to grow 9.5% in 2010, topping last year's expected figure.

The figure will be welcomed by business leaders who argue that China needs to shrug off the effects of the downturn if global trade is to recover. China is widely seen as a key engine of growth, especially as the US economy remains in the doldrums, with rising unemployment and many of its major manufacturing industries still badly hit.

However, the increased consumption of raw materials is likely to fuel criticism that China is failing to meet its environmental obligations. A dash for growth is seen as incompatible with the need to minimise burning fossil fuels and felling rainforests. Open-cast copper mining and soya bean farming on previously protected rainforest, have been top of environmental concerns for several years.

The development research centre of the state council, a leading thinktank, said China's economy would remain robust as market-driven investment picked up while government-led stimulus spending slowed. It said real estate investment would buoy growth, while inflationary concerns remained mild.

China is understood to have bought oil contracts in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries to secure oil supplies ahead of a boom in manufacturing. US and Brazilian farmers are also understood to be ready to increase supplies of Soya beans as domestic demand from the meat industry, which uses soya beans as a feedstuff, soars to record levels.

Adding to environmental concerns, China's steel mills undertook a massive production drive in 2009, partly in response to a $585bn government stimulus plan. Disregarding a 60% collapse in the export market, they produced almost half the world's steel in 2009.

Guardian

Theolia Sells French Wind Power Assets To Boralex

2009-12-29T14:31:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal - PARIS (Dow Jones)--French wind energy company Theolia SA (TEO.FR) Tuesday said it has sold wind power assets in France with a capacity of 47 megawatts to Canada's Boralex Inc. (BLX.T).

Financial details of the transaction weren't disclosed. The assets include a seven-megawatt wind farm in operation since December 2006, as well as two wind projects with capacities of 30 megawatts and 10 megawatts respectively.

The commissioning of both wind projects, which will be built by Theolia, is expected by mid-2010, the company said. Theolia added that it expects to exceed its target to sell 200 megawatts of wind projects and assets in 2009 following this deal.

Earlier Tuesday, Theolia reached a debt deal with its main bondholders, including a project for a capital increase of up to EUR100 million, in a move to reduce its debt and to ensure funding for its projects. Theolia shares closed down EUR0.21, or 6.5%, at EUR3.03.

Company Web site: http://www.theolia.com/

By Elena Berton, Dow Jones Newswires; +33 1 40 17 17 65; elena.berton@dowjones.com

The Alternative Energy Conundrum

2009-12-26T06:15:00.000-06:00

The U.S. Department of Energy is in the process of transferring $32 billion of your tax dollars to various new and promising technologies in Alternative Energy. It is estimated that 40% of the nation's energy comes from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 23% from natural gas. Nuclear power supplies roughly 8.4% and renewable energy supplies less than 7%, mostly from hydroelectric dams. This means that your tax dollars are being directed into a tiny sector of Alternative Energy research and development; predominately solar and wind power.

What are the issues in this arbitrary focus?

First and foremost this puts the federal government in the position of picking winners and losers in the research, development and commercialization of Alternative Energy; a role that it is uniquely not qualified to perform.

Secondly force-feeding this much capital into such a tiny energy sector distorts the market, which attracts fraud, abuse, political decision-making and unqualified recipients.

Finally it is an inefficient way to promote energy efficiencies, as many of the companies receiving this money will ultimately fail, leaving just a few winners. Taxpayer funds expended on the losers will not be recovered, as much of it is in the form of grants and guaranteed federal loans.

What are rational methods of encouraging the transition to Alternative Energies?

Our congress has arbitrarily raised the ethanol content requirement for gasoline. Unfortunately the ethanol industry cannot meet the arbitrary targets set. Far more efficient would be to simply tax gasoline at a higher level, sufficient to trigger the profitability hurdle rates of more developed Alternative Energy technologies, including ethanol, other biofuels, electric cars and gas-driven systems.

Our congress is vested in responding to political power centers that contribute back to them a sliver of the very funds it bestows. At the same time they seek to keep the energy transition pain away from the voters who elect them. This is the recipe that distorts our energy decisions.

Today the U.S. uses roughly 21 million barrels of oil a day, of which roughly 15 million barrels is imported. Depending upon the cost per barrel this represents over $600 billion in import expenditures each year. As an example, a simple VAT tax of $10.00 per barrel would raise over $70 billion each and every year for transition costs to Alternative Energy. Such a tax would be market neutral and could be directed to reward the winners in new technologies with legislation that eases the way to new energy distribution systems for industry and the consumer.

Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

2009-12-25T05:31:00.001-06:00

Magnetic North, Arctic

Santa Claus reportedly has gone “green” with sophisticated new technologies powering his sleigh last night:

The runners are made of nano silicon, which reduces friction and increases mileage.

The sideboards have a nano skin composed of hundreds of thousands of micro-fans, capable of providing all the electricity required for the onboard computer.

Flexible solar panels on the backs of the reindeer team power an electric generator that connects to the main power source – still shrouded in secrecy after hundreds of years.

And finally, Santa himself has dropped about 50 pounds after a crash micro diet in November. Less weight in the sleigh means better mileage as well.

All in all a very good night!

Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

State funding fuels China's global push in wind, sun

2009-12-22T04:10:00.000-06:00

Reuters

When A-Power Energy Generation Systems secured a deal to supply turbines for a US wind farm project in October, the little-known Chinese firm had an ace up its sleeve to help it clinch the deal. A-Power was armed with USD 1.5 billion in financing from state-run Chinese banks to fund the 600 megawatt project in Texas.

While global peers have limited access to cheap state loans, Chinese renewable energy firms are getting a boost from Beijing as they win clean technology projects around the world. Much of that is via low-interest loans from big state banks for their clients to finance their purchases.

This support is giving China's renewable energy firms an edge over Asian rivals such as India's Suzlon Energy, Japan Wind Development and Australia's Infigen Energy, as well as heavyweights like German polysilicon firm Wacker Chemie and Danish wind energy firm Vestas Wind.

"I don't think A-Power could have done this deal without access to cheap financing," said Jacob Kirkregaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC, who recently published a paper on wind energy.

"China is clearly the big kid on the block, no doubt about that," he said, referring to the state support for renewable energy. "That's not something many Asian countries can emulate."

Shares of A-Power, which only entered the wind business in 2008, hit a 15-month high last Friday after it said it will supply wind turbines for the Texas project.

Such deals are unfolding as China aggressively develops its renewable energy sector and as its companies play catch-up with bigger, global peers including German solar cell producer Q-Cells AG and Spanish wind farm operator Iberdrola, which have built up solid track records, also with help from more than a decade of government subsidies.

Most of China's alternative energy makers, including solar firms Yingli Energy Holdings and Suntech Power Holdings, and wind gear maker China High Speed Transmission, already have access to low-interest financing from state-run banks to fund their growth as well as client purchases.

Interest rates on loans for wind power generator China Longyuan Power Group, for example, are 10 percent below the prevailing benchmark rate set by the Peoples' Bank of China (PBOC), said Morgan Stanley in a report.

"Chinese banks are motivated by the mandate from the government to develop renewable energy as a national priority," said Zhao Feng at Denmark-based BTM Consult ApS, a consultancy that specialises in renewable energy.

"In Europe, the banks, when they offer loans, tend to assess the project and look at it more closely from a risk perspective."

Such state-backed financing is a common policy tool for governments globally trying to support industries they want to develop. China also provides similar strong support for its energy firms for overseas acquisitions, and its telecoms equipment makers as they try to expand abroad.

Beijing's support comes as Chinese players attempt to create new markets as the cost of developing renewable energy falls and competition intensifies for projects at home.

China's USD 300 billion sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corp (CIC) [CIC.UL], is also helping to bolster the industry.

In the last several months, the fund has pumped about USD 1.1 billion into the sector, buying stakes in solar firm GCL-Poly Energy, the world's No.3 polysilicon company by capacity, and China Longyuan, the world's fifth-largest wind power company.

But analysts say access to cheap money will only get China's alternate energy firms so far. "Essentially, you need to get the product right," said Felix Lam, analyst with CCB International. "Cheap loans can't guarantee a project's success, you've got to have the technology. "It's the technology that will give you that advantage long-term."

Danish wind of change on energy

2009-12-21T05:43:00.000-06:00

BBC Wales' Environment Correspondent Iolo ap Dafydd looks at the contrast between who invests, owns and benefits from wind energy in Denmark, compared to Wales, and other problems which may face the wind industry.

Tall wind turbines usually provoke two types of reactions - either you don't mind them, or you loathe them.

As the UK wind industry is celebrating a never-before achieved 4 gigawatts of installed wind energy capacity, the sector now claims that wind energy powers over 2.3 million homes in the UK - and claims it saves 6 million tonnes of coal annually.

Compared to Denmark, though Wales and the UK has a way to go, despite a relatively flat few years for the Danish wind sector.

The real difference between Wales and Denmark though is not the 500 or so turbines on and offshore in Wales, or the 5,000 currently working in Denmark, but who owns them, and who pockets the profit.

According to Hans Christian Soerensen, a member of the Danish Wind Owners Association, 20% of the Danes' electricity comes from the wind and by 2020 the target is to have 50% of its electricity from wind.

The owners association is independent of the turbine manufacturers and their businesses in the UK. Mr Soerensen is involved with two co-operative wind farm businesses in Copenhagen. The 12-turbine Lynetten field - where I met him - and where four of whose turbines are owned by some 900 people, and the offshore Middlegrunden, literally the "middle ground". The 20 turbines on this bank out to sea between Denmark and Sweden are also part-owned by some 1,500 people.

In Denmark, people who live within five kilometres of wind farms are offered a chance to invest in them and in time benefit financially from the revenue of their shares.

He said: "If there's not enough to finance [the wind farm], it will be taken over by the remaining part of the local county. The local counties will be part owner."

New wind farms in Wales this year are the Norwegian-owned Alltwalis in Carmarthenshire, and the offshore Rhyl Flats, currently Wales' largest wind farm, off the north Wales coast. Owner RWE npower, also plans the much bigger 750 MW Gwynt y Mor site further out to sea.

But not all of Wales' wind farms are privately owned by multinational companies. Geraint Davies is the enterprising farmer, who with a few neighbours, built Moelogan wind farm. He said it was not for specifically for environmental or energy reasons but as a business venture for his farm.

Mr Davies said: "It's got to make a difference to the local economy, there's no two ways about it. If we turn things round then all the better for Wales and for the local economy.

"It also helps, in the planning system, if people see that maybe there's a greater advantage to the area where people have to live with the turbines."

A further nine turbines have been erected and are on line this year, overlooking the Conwy Valley. Despite the lengthy and slow planning process in Wales, Geraint Davies is planning a new 67 MW site in mid Wales.

But the biggest wind farms in Wales, all those over 50MW, are approved by the UK government, not the assembly in Cardiff. Most wind energy here is financed by large energy companies, which also bank the profits.

Just like in Denmark, not everyone is enthusiastic about wind farms, whether local or company-owned. Some think the turbines are a scam, and that there are "reasons for rejecting wind power as a large scale source of electricity," writes John Etherington who has published a book on wind technology.

The Wind Farm Scam is already being reprinted, and the former reader of ecology at University of Wales in Cardiff argues the biggest folly about wind farms is people believing them to be efficient, and capable of supplying enough energy in future.

He said: "It doesn't work like that. The electricity is not there continuously."

Consumers Shifting Gaze to Electric Scooters

2009-12-20T07:56:00.002-06:00

An international field of electric bike manufacturers is becoming crowded as sales rise.

By Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

The world of scooters already is competitive. It includes well-known manufacturers such as Honda Motor Co. and Piaggio Group that have established dealer networks as well as many smaller, niche manufacturers that import scooters from countries like China and India where two-wheeled transportation is the accepted norm.

Vespa, an Italian line of scooters manufactured by Piaggio, offers eight models from $3,200 to $6,900. Honda sells five scooters from $2,000 to $8,500. Plus, Vespa's and Honda's gasoline engine-powered scooters already make economical sense because they get 70 to 90 m.p.g.

Relatively speaking many of these scooters pollute proportionally more per gallon than environmentally friendly automobiles like the Prius. However changes are coming.

Even Peugeot plans a return to the electric scooter market by 2011 with its E-Vivacity scooter. While green rides are all the rage the past few years, the latest planned foray into electric scooter production is actually the second for the French manufacturer, as it made the first mass-produced electric scoot with its very own Scoot’elec that launched way back in 1996.

Smaller players like Current Motor Co. in Michigan USA aim to capitalize on the surging interest in more efficient electric vehicles with an electric scooter that can go more than 50 miles on a charge. Current Motor has developed two scooters -- the C124 and the C130 -- and plans to sell them for $5,499 to $6,799. The scooters have a range of 50 to 80 miles per charge and a top speed of 60 m.p.h.

Hero Electric (Hero Group) plans to launch new efficient scooter models in India soon, as reported by The Hindu. Perth, Australia, scooter manufacturer Vmoto has aso announced plans to manufacture an electric scooter. Vmoto will link with one of the world's leading electric scooter companies, Germany-based E-Max, to make the scooters at Vmoto's factory in China.

Taizhou Wangpai Automobile Industry Co., Ltd. and Beiyi Electric Bicycle Co., Ltd. are among dozens of Chinese manufacturers supplying the huge Chinese demand for scooters.

Worldwide production of motorcycles and scooters will top 225 million units in 2010, just 3.4% of our global population. There is plenty of room for growth.

Copenhagen Climate Summit Ends In Confusion

2009-12-19T04:54:00.000-06:00

By Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

The Copenhagen Climate Summit (COP-15) dissolved yesterday into a food fight between the haves and the have-nots.

The chairman of the plenary session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) declared on Saturday morning, "The conference decides to take note of the Copenhagen Accord of December 18, 2009," swiftly banging down his gavel. Everyone else exited stage right.

This was precipitated by a US-led group of five nations - including China, India, Brazil and South Africa - that tabled a last-minute proposal that President Barack Obama called a "meaningful agreement".

The language in this agreement purportedly does not even set 2C as a formal target; just that the group "recognizes the scientific view that" the temperature increase should be held below this figure.

The five-nation proposal had "promised" to deliver $30bn (£18.5bn) of aid for developing nations over the next three years, and outlined a goal of providing $100bn a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change.

The agreement also included a method for verifying industrialized nations' reduction of emissions, but this method is entirely voluntary. The agreement is not legally binding.

The main opposition to the five-nation accord came from the ALBA bloc of Latin American countries to which Nicaragua and Venezuela belong, along with Cuba, Ecuador and Bolivia.

To be accepted as an official UN agreement, any agreement requires the endorsement of all 193 nations at the talks.

China, U.S. Firms Enter Car-Battery Deal

2009-12-18T05:52:00.000-06:00

BEIJING—Two leading Chinese car makers have enlisted U.S. automotive-battery suppliers to help develop clean-energy vehicles as competition to bring an affordable electric car to the world's largest auto market heats up.

A123 Systems Inc., of Waterrown, Mass., on Thursday said it is setting up a joint venture with SAIC Motor Corp. to develop battery systems for hybrid-electric and pure-electric passenger and commercial vehicles. SAIC, China's largest auto maker by sales volume, will hold 51% of the venture, A123 said in a statement.

Shanghai Advanced Traction Battery Systems Co., as the joint venture is called, will be the preferential supplier of battery systems for hybrid-electric and electric vehicles made by SAIC, A123 said. SAIC is planning to develop a hybrid Roewe 750 sedan and a plug-in hybrid version of the Roewe 550. It also plans to launch electric vehicles in 2012.

Also Thursday, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. said it signed a wide-ranging global cooperation agreement with Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls Inc., an indication the Chinese auto maker is getting more serious about developing its own clean-energy vehicles.

The partnership will cover auto parts, including vehicle seats, and new energy, Geely said. It didn't give financial details of the deal. A person familiar with the matter said the cooperation will definitely involve batteries but details are still being discussed. JCI has a partnership with France's Saft Groupe SA to make lithium-ion batteries for hybrid, plug-in and electric vehicles.

Last month, Zhejiang Geely's listed unit, Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd., signed a deal to buy electric vehicles from Taiwan's Yulon Motor Co. The electric cars will be based on Geely's small Panda gasoline-powered car. Yulon Motor will be responsible for research and development and converting the Panda into an electric car powered by lithium-ion batteries. The car will be sold in both Taiwan and China, with shipments to China starting in 2011.

In addition to the deal with Yulon, Zhejiang Geely will continue to develop its own electric cars, the company has said. Geely, the preferred bidder for Ford Motor Co.'s Volvo unit, and SAIC join global car makers in ratcheting up their electric-car efforts.

Nissan Motor Co. plans to test-market its Leaf electric vehicle in China in 2011 by making it available to government agencies and other fleet customers in the city of Wuhan. General Motors Co. intends to mass-market the plug-in hybrid-electric Chevrolet Volt in China starting in 2011. The Volt is powered by lithium-ion batteries and is supplemented by a gasoline engine.

Toyota Motor Corp. has also said it will likely test-market a plug-in hybrid in China, and Daimler AG will introduce its electric Smart minicar in selected Chinese cities next year.

Chinese auto manufacturers such as BYD Co., which is partly owned by Warren Buffett's MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., have also developed their own battery technology.

The Wall Street Journal

So you think you're retaining water...

2009-12-17T08:17:00.000-06:00

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) say they've spotted a super-Earth waterworld orbiting a red type M star some 40 light-years from Earth

The new planet GJ1214b is circling a dim host star GJ1214 every 38 hours at a distance of 1.3 million miles. The star's surface temperature of 2,700°C, though, means that GJ1214b itself is a 200°C.

The planet has a mass and radius of 6.5 and 2.7 times that of Earth, respectively. The density obtained from these figures "suggests that GJ1214b is composed of about three-fourths water and other ices, and one-fourth rock".

According to the CfA the discovery was made as part of the ground-based MEarth Project, which uses "an array of eight identical 16-inch-diameter RC Optical Systems telescopes that monitor a pre-selected list of 2,000 red dwarf stars. Each telescope perches on a highly accurate Software Bisque Paramount and funnels light to an Apogee Alta U42 camera containing a charge-coupled device (CCD) chip, which many amateurs also use."

The 'scopes keep an eye out for dips in brightness where an exoplanet transits its host star. Whereas super-Earths (between five 5 and 10 Earth masses) transiting bright stars such as our Sun are impossible to spot from Earth, those like GJ1214b which transit a dim host are within the capability of ground-based technology. In this case, GJ1214 is around one-fifth the size of the Sun with a luminosity "only three-thousandths as bright".

Having made their discovery, the CfA team then used the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory "to measure the companion's mass and confirm it is a planet".

The exact nature of GJ1214b is unknown, but CfA has suggested "some of the planet's water should be in the form of exotic materials like Ice VII", described as "a crystalline form of water that exists at pressures greater than 20,000 times Earth's sea-level atmosphere".

The CfA also has tantalising evidence of an atmosphere surrounding the planet, since when the team "compared the measured radius of GJ1214b to theoretical models, they found that the observed radius exceeds the model's prediction, even assuming a pure water planet".

This anomaly could be explained by an inhospitable atmosphere which is "gradually boiling off", although it will fall to space-based instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope to determine the facts.

MEarth project head David Charbonneau concluded: "Since this planet is so close to Earth, Hubble should be able to detect the atmosphere and determine what it's made of. That will make it the first super-Earth with a confirmed atmosphere - even though that atmosphere probably won't be hospitable to life as we know it."

The CfA's findings are published in the 17 December issue of Nature

Germany’s Huge Green Tech Advantage

2009-12-16T07:23:00.000-06:00

By Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

The implications of the Copenhagen global summit on climate change (COP-15) are significant. Despite the intrigue, wrangling and external protestations, it is clear that no country will leave Copenhagen without being sensitized to the goal of slowing global warming. The targeted goal of a 2 degrees Celsius reduction is generally accepted and almost all attending countries have announced plans to reduce emissions in some manner.

The notable exceptions to this are of course the major oil producing nations. They would be the main beneficiaries if Copenhagen’s initiatives were to fail.

This is not to say that there is not a great deal of trickery and sleight-of-hand going on in Copenhagen. The US is pledging a 17 percent cut in emissions using 2005 as a baseline; a target that turns into a 2 percent decline if the 1990 European base line were used.

China’s figures are seemingly impressive: a 40 percent reduction, but they are based on a fictional gross national product assumption in 2020. The Chinese are really masking a massive increase in emissions that is inevitable given its 10 percent annual growth rates.

Russia’s impressive promised reductions of 30 percent are misleading as well, because they have saved that much and more during the course of economic restructuring following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The overriding significance here is that states feel the pressure to establish minimum reduction targets. Germany is a leader in this with announced reductions in CO2 emissions of 40 percent by 2020 relative to 1990. Germany is also one of the few countries that have adhered to the Kyoto climate agreement, albeit it did so by dismantling heavy industries in the former communist east.

Germany leads by example, as it makes no difference whether or not Germany produces 100 million tons less of CO2 in 2020, because China alone will be producing four BILLION tons by then. China will overtake Germany in per capita CO2 emissions by 2020, which is amazing given China’s 1.1 billion population versus Germany's 82 million.

Rather Germany’s huge green tech asset is in its ability to innovate and design technologies, systems and machinery that lead the way in consuming less energy – including carbon capture systems, efficient wind turbines and in energy storage techniques. Other than Denmark for example, Germany is the only country capable of building systems for large offshore wind farms.

Competitive pricing for alternative energies is of course crucial. Some claim that this competitive threshold is still far off, however historically it takes about 30 years for a new power system changeover. In the last 15 years solar and wind power have progressed to the point where it will soon compete without subsidies with coal, gas and nuclear power. When new energy storage techniques are added into the mix this threshold will be crossed.

Biomass is also closing in on this competitive threshold, with the decisive trip point being a relative cost of oil at $150 per barrel. In Germany fuel, electricity and biogas from its fields will account for 15 to 10 percent of its energy output in the coming decade.

This technology advantage for Germany will mean little until a global emissions trading system is in place. There must be a market for reducing CO2 emissions, or the major economies of the world will continue to expand with minimal lip service to emission restrictions.

Government subsidies alone will not accomplish targeted reductions, as politics always plays a role as shown at COP-15. Rather in this bloggers view, products could be assessed a value added emissions tax (VAET) based upon the emissions footprint of the country they originate in.

2009-12-15T10:03:00.001-06:00

Machinery from China Coal Overseas Development Co., Ltd. (CODCO), a state-owned coal enterprise, is a subsidiary of both China National Coal Group Corp. (ChinaCoal) and China National Coal Mining Equipment Co., Ltd. (CME).

This blogger has been arguing for months that the manufacturing might of China would significantly impact Alternative Energy and Clean Energy technologies. The Wall Street Journal article below updates us on its progress:

World's Top Polluter Emerges as Green-Technology Leader

BEIJING -- Xu Shisen put down the phone and smiled. That was Canada calling, explained the chief engineer at a coal-fired power plant set among knockoff antique and art shops in a Beijing suburb. A Canadian company is interested in Mr. Xu's advances in bringing down the cost of stripping out greenhouse-gas emissions from burning coal.

Engineers led by Mr. Xu are working to unlock one of climate change's thorniest problems: how to burn coal without releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

Mr. Xu is part of a broader effort by China to introduce green technology to the world's fastest-growing industrial economy -- a mission so ambitious it could eventually reshape the business, just as China has done for everything from construction cranes to computers.

China looms large over the global climate summit in Copenhagen, where Chinese officials are pressing the U.S. and other rich nations to accept new curbs on their emissions and to continue to subsidize poor nations' efforts to adopt clean-energy technology. China is the world's biggest source of carbon emissions. Less understood is the way China is now becoming a source of some of the solutions.

China's vast market and economies of scale are bringing down the cost of solar and wind energy, as well as other environmentally friendly technologies such as electric car batteries. That could help address a major impediment to wide adoption of such technologies: They need heavy subsidies to be economical.

The so-called China price -- the combination of cheap labor and capital that rewrote the rulebook on manufacturing -- is spreading to green technology. "The China price will move into the renewable-energy space, specifically for energy that relies on capital-intensive projects," says Jonathan Woetzel, a director in McKinsey & Co.'s China office.

China's government is backing the trend. It wants to replicate the success of the special economic zones that transformed cities such as Shenzhen from a fishing village near Hong Kong into one of the biggest manufacturing export centers in the world. Set up when China began its economic reforms in the 1980s, the zones were designed to attract foreign investment into light manufacturing to kick-start exports. They became engines of China's economic boom.

Regulators will announce several low carbon centers next year that will have preferential policies to promote low carbon manufacturing and exports.

China's goals face big challenges. China could end up becoming simply a low-cost manufacturing base, not a source of innovation. Worse, its drive to cut costs could stifle innovation overseas.

And Beijing has a long way to go to reducing China's carbon footprint. For each out-of-date power plant it shut down in a two-year cleanup campaign, it added the capacity of roughly two more. Even some of the better power plants are run poorly because company bosses don't want to pay to clean up their emissions.

In the fight against global warming, some of the biggest gains are to be made in scrubbing carbon from coal-burning power plants. China and the U.S. together have 44% of the world's coal reserves, and aren't about to give up on the cheap and reliable source of power. According to U.S. government projections, world coal use could increase nearly 50% by 2030.

"If emissions aren't reduced from power plants, global warming cannot be avoided," says Jonathan Lewis, a climate specialist at the U.S.-based Clean Air Task Force, which has sought to pair U.S. utilities with Chinese companies. "The solution can be led by the U.S. and China."

Capture technology traps carbon dioxide gasses released by coal plants. The gas can be pumped deep underground, typically into salt caverns or aging oil fields. The carbon can be stripped either before or after the coal is burned. Post-combustion capture is simpler and can be retrofitted on existing power plants. Current versions cut energy output by a fifth or more.

Far more complicated is precombustion carbon capture, which involves completely redesigning plants. Coal is turned into a gas, the carbon is stripped out and the rest is burned. Called "integrated gasification combined cycle" plants, these cost billions of dollars and haven't been developed on a commercial scale yet.

China has a technological lead in turning coal into gas. It has been using the technology widely to make petrochemicals and fertilizers as a substitute for pricier natural gas. Houston-based Future Fuels LLC has licensed gasification technology from China to use in a plant in Pennsylvania.

Chinese factories, such as the Suntech Power Holdings plant in Wuxi, have pushed down prices of solar panels. China hopes it can reshape green technology as it has businesses such as cranes and computers.

Critics say current carbon capture technologies are merely a Band-Aid for global warming. That's because they're so inefficient that even more coal has to be burned to produce the same amount of electricity. Also, the technology uses a lot of water and sequestering carbon underground isn't proven.

Still, some analysts estimate carbon capture could account for between 15% to 55% of the world's cumulative carbon emissions reduction by 2100.

Among those leading the ramp-up is Mr. Xu. These days, he is busy with three clean coal projects. One is on the outskirts of Beijing, underneath looming cooling towers of the Gaobeidian Huaneng power plant.

Mr. Xu and colleagues work at a state-run research institute partly owned by China Huaneng Group, China's biggest utility. The state-owned giant produces about 10% of China's electricity, nearly all from coal.

The Beijing project, started before the 2008 Summer Olympics, traps a fraction of the carbon dioxide emitted by the plant, purifying and selling it for use in food packaging and for the fizz in sodas. Using what he's learned in Beijing, Mr. Xu is building another capture facility in Shanghai that will be 30 times bigger.

If Mr. Xu's team can figure out how to bring the costs down -- mostly by recycling energy lost in the process of scrubbing out the carbon -- these units could be retrofitted to coal-fired power plants around the world.

China has become the world's biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases thought to contribute to global warming. But it is also turning into a dominant player in technologies such as carbon capture and solar panels that can cut emissions.

Mr. Xu is also involved in the GreenGen project, a $1 billion power plant led by Huaneng that will turn coal into a gas before burning it. The project is scheduled to go online by 2011. Burning gas is more efficient than burning coal -- meaning less coal is required to make the same amount of electricity. The less coal burned, the less carbon released.

Though carbon capture has moved into the mainstream, it is still at least five to 10 years away from becoming a widespread technology, analysts say.

In the meantime, China is reshaping two of the biggest green technologies in use already -- wind and solar power.

In 2004, foreign firms owned 80% of China's wind-turbine market, according to energy consulting firm IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Now, Chinese companies own three-quarters of the country's market, thanks to companies which make turbines a third cheaper than European competitors.

Chinese wind-turbine makers are starting to export. In October, Shenyang Power Group struck a deal to supply 240 turbines to one of the largest wind-farm projects in the U.S., a 36,000-acre development in Texas.

China already has a 30% share of the global market for photovoltaic solar panels used to generate electricity. Solar-power panel makers, including Suntech Power Holdings Co., Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar Ltd., export most of their product to Europe and the U.S., contributing to a 30% drop in world solar-power prices.

Chinese competition is forcing rivals to shift production. U.S. Evergreen Solar Inc. said it will move its assembly line from Massachusetts to China. General Electric Co. said it will shut a facility in Delaware. BP PLC's solar unit said this spring it would stop output in Maryland and rely on Chinese suppliers instead.

Yet, despite China's armies of fresh engineering graduates, foreign companies still create and own most of the key technologies. "China lags about 10 years behind in technology," says Bernice Lee, a research director at Chatham House, a London-based think tank that analyzed patent holders on renewable and low-carbon technology.

As in other industries, China's cheap manufacturing may spark protectionism. In one hint of battles to come, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) wrote a letter to the U.S. energy secretary protesting the use of federal stimulus money to support the $1.5 billion wind project in Texas unless it relies on U.S.-built turbines.

Critics in rich countries accuse China of unfairly subsidizing companies via cheap loans from state-controlled banks and dumping excess supply overseas.

Grab a Spot in the Sun

2009-12-14T06:10:00.003-06:00

By Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

Who says you can't grab your own spot in the sun. The Associated Press is reporting that Lowe's, the giant home improvement retail chain, is stocking do-it-yourself solar panels for homeowners. This is the first time that a customer can directly access solar power without going to a wholesale distributor.

To be sure this is not like buying a flat screen TV in time for the Super Bowl. Local utilities and building permits must be obtained; usually handled by a contractor. But it is no more difficult than adding an extra room to your home when you act as your own general contractor.

You need a separate electrical line and circuit breaker, just as you do with an electric washer and dryer. The rectangular 40-pound panels retail at $893 each; producing compatible AC power that runs in homes and plugs directly into a circuit breaker.

The panels are manufactured by Akeena Solar, based in Los Gatos, CA. A typical solar system installed by a professional usually has 20 panels. Each Akeena panel will generate about 175 watts of electricity, about enough to power a flat screen television. You can plug the panels into one another just like pop beads. Each Akeena panel is backed by a 25-year warranty

Lowe's is also selling computer software that allows the homeowner to monitor the performance of each panel through the Internet. Conceptually this means that an iPhone app probably will follow, meaning you can check on your system on the beach while on vacation.

Somewhere out there in innovative America there is a brilliant young teenager thinking about this. Who knows what solutions will arise when the people have access to technology. Just don’t buy a solar panel for your wife on your 20th anniversary. That’s a non-starter.

Geothermal Project in California Is Shut Down

2009-12-13T12:36:00.000-06:00

By JAMES GLANZ, The New York Times

The company in charge of a California project to extract vast amounts of renewable energy from deep, hot bedrock has removed its drill rig and informed federal officials that the government project will be abandoned.

The project by the company, AltaRock Energy, was the Obama administration’s first major test of geothermal energy as a significant alternative to fossil fuels and the project was being financed with federal Department of Energy money at a site about 100 miles north of San Francisco called the Geysers.

But on Friday, the Energy Department said that AltaRock had given notice this week that “it will not be continuing work at the Geysers” as part of the agency’s geothermal development program.

The project’s apparent collapse comes a day after Swiss government officials permanently shut down a similar project in Basel, because of the damaging earthquakes it produced in 2006 and 2007. Taken together, the two setbacks could change the direction of the Obama administration’s geothermal program, which had raised hopes that the earth’s bedrock could be quickly tapped as a clean and almost limitless energy source.

The Energy Department referred other questions about the project’s shutdown to AltaRock, a startup company based in Seattle. Reached by telephone, the company’s chief operations officer, James T. Turner, confirmed that the rig had been removed but said he had not been informed of the notice that the company had given the government. Two other senior company officials did not respond to requests for comment, and it was unclear whether AltaRock might try to restart the project with private money.

In addition to a $6 million grant from the Energy Department, AltaRock had attracted some $30 million in venture capital from high-profile investors like Google, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“Some of these startup companies got out in front and convinced some venture capitalists that they were very close to commercial deployment,” said Daniel P. Schrag, a professor of geology and director of the Center for the Environment at Harvard University.

Geothermal enthusiasts asserted that drilling miles into hard rock, as required by the technique, could be done quickly and economically with small improvements in existing methods, Professor Schrag said. “What we’ve discovered is that it’s harder to make those improvements than some people believed,” he added.

In fact, AltaRock immediately ran into snags with its drilling, repeatedly snapping off bits in shallow formations called caprock. The project’s safety was also under review at the Energy Department after federal officials said the company had not been entirely forthcoming about the earthquakes produced in Basel in making the case for the Geysers project.

The results of that review have not yet been announced, but the type of geothermal energy explored in Basel and at the Geysers requires fracturing the bedrock then circulating water through the cracks to produce steam. By its nature, fracturing creates earthquakes, though most of them are small.

On Friday, the Energy Department, which has put some $440 million into its geothermal program this year alone, said that despite the latest developments, it remained confident of the technology’s long-term prospects. Many geothermal methods do not require drilling so deep or fracturing bedrock.

“The Department of Energy believes that geothermal energy holds enormous potential to heat our homes and power our economy while decreasing our carbon pollution,” said Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman.

AltaRock has also received some $25 million in federal money for a project in Oregon, and some scientists speculated on Friday that after the spate of problems at the Geysers, the company wanted to focus on a new site.

But the company, whose project at the Geysers was located on land leased from the federal government by the Northern California Power Agency, has held information about its project tightly. Not even the power agency has been informed of AltaRock’s ultimate intentions at the site, said Murray Grande, who is in charge of geothermal facilities for the agency.

“They just probably gave up, but we don’t know,” Mr. Grande said. “We have nothing official from them at all.”

But a resident of the nearby town of Anderson Springs, which is already shaken by quakes generated by less ambitious geothermal projects, reacted with jubilation when told it appeared the new project was ending.

“How I feel is beyond anything that words can express,” said the resident, Jacque Felber, who added that an unnerving quake had rattled her property the night before. “I’m just so relieved, because with this going on, I’m afraid one of these days it’s going to knock my house off the hill.”

United Technologies Takes a Stake in Wind Turbines

2009-12-12T11:06:00.000-06:00

United Technologies said it had agreed to acquire a 49.5 percent stake in Clipper Windpower, a struggling California-based turbine maker, for $270 million to expand in alternative energy sources. Clipper began to look for investors earlier this year as customers delayed turbine orders while defects in some older turbines needed repairs. United Technologies said the deal, which was announced Wednesday, “allows U.T.C. to expand its power generation portfolio and enter the high-growth wind power segment.” Stock in United Technologies, which is based in Hartford, Conn., rose $1.47, or 2 percent, to $69.40 a share.

By TODD WOODY, The New York Times

Nanotech used to build batteries out of paper

2009-12-11T05:15:00.001-06:00

Computerworld - Researchers at Stanford University have used nanotechnology to create lightweight and even bendable batteries out of paper.

The paper batteries are designed to be folded, crumpled or even soaked in an acidic solution and still work, according to Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, at Stanford. The team created the batteries by coating a sheet of paper with ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires.

Stanford offered no indication of when the batteries would be ready for commercial use.

"The most important part of this ... is how a simple thing in daily life -- paper -- can be used as a substrate to make functional conductive electrodes by a simple process," said Peidong Yang, professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley, in a statement. "It's nanotechnology related to daily life, essentially."

The nanotubes used in the paper batteries and supercapacitors are one-dimensional structures with a small diameter, which enables the ink made from them to stick tightly to the paper. The university noted that the paper supercapacitors may be able to handle 40,000 charge-discharge cycles, which is an order of magnitude more than lithium batteries can take.

Cui pointed out that the nanomaterials make better conductors than traditional materials because they can move electricity more efficiently.

This is just the latest incidence of scientists using nanotechnology to further battery research. Last summer, IBM launched a multi-year battery research project using nanotechnology, materials science and supercomputing.

In April, researchers at MIT reported that they are combining nanotechnology with genetically engineered viruses to build batteries that could power hybrid cars and cell phones.

And before that, another team of researchers at Stanford used silicon nanowires to enable lithium-ion batteries to hold 10 times the charge they could before. That means a laptop could last for some 40 hours using the new battery, according to Cui.

The Politics of Global Warming - The EPA's New Clothes - Declares CO2 a Pollutant

2009-12-10T04:57:00.002-06:00

EDITORIAL: In the air - reviewjournal.com

The EPA will now regulate everything

The Environmental Protection Agency took a major step Monday toward regulating carbon dioxide, officially concluding that CO2 "pollution," by contributing to "climate change," threatens the human environment and thus the public health.

The announcement came as the Obama administration struggles to arm-twist (or bribe) other nations at an international climate conference in Copenhagen to join it in what those officials are claiming to be America's "aggressive actions to combat global warming," even though Congress has yet to act on climate legislation.

Back in the United States, the EPA said Monday that scientific evidence clearly shows greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people" and that the pollutants -- the EPA mainly singled out carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, though the oceans are a larger source of the gas, and by far the most prevalent and effective "greenhouse gas" is water vapor -- must be regulated under terms of the Clean Air Act.

Under a Supreme Court ruling, the so-called endangerment finding was needed before the EPA could regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases released from automobiles, power plants and factories.

The EPA has begun the early stages of developing permit requirements on carbon dioxide "pollution" from large emitters such as power plants. The administration also has said it will set the first-ever greenhouse gas emissions standards for automobiles and raise fuel economy to 35 mpg by 2016.

"Let's discuss something else that endangers human health," responded U.S. Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., chairman of the Republican Study Committee, "the inability to find a job. The EPA has achieved by fiat what leading Democrats in Congress haven't been able to accomplish via legislation -- establish a National Energy Tax. ...

"By seeking to sharply curtail carbon dioxide (and thus energy usage), the EPA is in effect working to decrease economic activity. Less economic activity equals higher unemployment equals more Americans choosing between paying rent and paying for food or medicine. That's not an equation that leads to better human health."

Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, noted that an "endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down, command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project."

The "science" that predicts disastrous consequences based on today's temperature trends is highly speculative. If EPA officials truly find that "science" convincing (though they are political appointees, let's recall), it's true that the high court's interpretation of the Clean Air Act leaves the EPA with little choice but to proceed with this economically crippling agenda.

The solution lies with the elected Congress. Reform the Clean Air Act -- now. For if this is what the law says, then the law is a ass.

Alternative Energy & Vertical Integration

2009-12-09T08:17:00.001-06:00

Swiss solar power firm Meyer Burger to buy 3S
By Emma Thomasson - Reuters

ZURICH, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Swiss solar industry supplier Meyer Burger is buying 3S Industries in an all-share deal worth about 300 million Swiss francs ($294 million) that should help cut the cost of solar power.

Shares in both companies rallied on Wednesday after the announcement of the friendly deal, which analysts expect to boost Meyer Burger's profit and increase 3S's reach into Asia.

Meyer Burger said the deal would create the first firm in the solar industry to cover the whole production process for making solar cells, thus helping it to slash solar power costs.

Meyer Burger, which makes precision saws for slicing silicon wafers, is offering one of its own shares for every 11.2 3S shares, valuing 3S at about 300 million francs based on Meyer Burger's Tuesday closing price.

The proposal would be presented to shareholders of both companies for approval at extraordinary general meetings set for Jan. 14. The deal is due to be completed around Jan. 21.

Meyer Burger shareholders would also be asked to approve a 10-way share split and a share capital hike of between 653,138 and 2.25 million francs, with the newly issued shares due to start trading on Jan. 18.

Vontobel analyst Michael Foeth said the Meyer Burger share dilution was about 35-45 percent, while the deal should boost earnings by 30-35 percent. "As such, the exchange ratios look fair and the deal makes sense," he wrote in a client note.

Meyer Burger shares, which had already doubled in value this year after slumping in 2008, were up 7.8 percent at 266.25 Swiss francs by 1044 GMT, while Berne-listed 3S shares jumped 20 percent to 23.10 francs.

The FTSE clean tech index was flat after solar stocks like Germany's Q-Cells, SolarWorld and Norway's Renewable Energy Corp rose on Tuesday on positive sentiment from the Copenhagen climate summit.

SOLAR MARKET SEEN GROWING
"From a strategic point of view, this transaction makes a lot of sense," said Helvea analyst Stefan Gaechter, adding that the deal will help 3S increase its exposure in Asia.

"Not only are the portfolios complementary but the cross-selling potential and the bundling of purchasing volumes with regards to material costs are also value-adding."

3S's chief executive, Patrick Hofer-Noser, said the merger should "generate excellent opportunities to take advantage of the promising and expected further growth of the solar market."

Meyer Burger's chief executive, Peter Pauli, added: "We will play a crucial role in further reducing the costs of solar power and thus help achieving the industry goal of grid parity faster."

The solar sector leans on government incentives to compete with traditional power sources, but industry experts believe it will be economically viable in the near future.

Meyer Burger had 2008 sales of 455 million francs, while 3S had sales of 102 million francs. The combined firm is expected to employ more than 900 staff.

Chinese and European solar power companies have been upbeat about next year, saying recently that demand for clean energy systems was rebounding after a dismal 2009.

'Nano materials are not a new invention'

2009-12-08T06:32:00.000-06:00

IIT Kharagpur - Nano materials - The Times of India

NAGPUR: Nano materials are not very new, scientists all over the world, especially chemists, have been creating them in medicines for over half a century, said Padmashree Kasturi Lal Chopra, honorary professor, IIT Delhi, and former director, IIT Kharagpur, on Monday. He was speaking at the inaugural session of the two-day international conference on 'nano-biomaterials for environmental applications' organised by National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (Neeri).

Chopra said, it is only recently that the 'nano' has been hyped worldwide. "What has changed the scenario and made nano materials more useful today is the coming together of pharmaceutical industry, the biotechnologists, the physicists and the life sciences scientists. Nano biotechnology and nano agriculture have a promising future," he said.

Prof Chopra also cleared a lot of myths about nano materials, like the one about these materials being new inventions. The second myth he busted was the one being projected by agencies like the UN task force on nano materials, that these technologies will save humanity. "These materials cannot solve problems of big countries like India, where they are being projected as technologies that can be used to purify drinking water. This is something totally non-viable, economically and socially," Chopra said.

Elaborating on the history of nano materials, Chopra said that these technologies have been around since 1950-60s, the beginning of the microelectronics era, though scientists didn't actually calling them by this name. He said that it is only now that the scientists can produce even metallurgical materials putting aside all theories of thermodynamics. However, large-scale application of these materials for production of mass scale products is just impossible, he said. "They are too expensive materials to be used on a mass scale, at least in developing countries," he said.

Prof GM Chow, professor and chair, department of material sciences and engineering, National University of Singapore, gave the key note address. Tapan Chakrabarti, acting director, Neeri, said that nano materials definitely have an important role in environmental applications while SR Wate, head, Environmental Impact Risk Assessment division, explained the role of newer nano materials in changing the water and environmental technologies.

Chinese wind power companies target foreign markets to profit from climate efforts

2009-12-07T06:12:00.001-06:00

This Blog Editor has poiinted out several times that countries that think green jobs will "appear" simply because they pay for them with taxpayer funding should consider that the same advantages that created Chinese manufacturing in the first place will favor the Chinese in wind and solar manufacturing as well. Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

By Joe Mcdonald (CP) – The Canadian Press

BEIJING — China's Goldwind Science & Technology Ltd. is one of the world's biggest makers of wind turbines - a cornerstone of the booming clean power business - but is unknown outside its home country.

Goldwind aims to change that. In a Minnesota farmer's cornfield, the company is erecting three 20-story windmills in its first American project and hopes it will help to woo other buyers.

"There are a lot of leads and we are following them up," said Kerry Zhou, Goldwind's director of development. "We certainly expect that by 2011 we can get good results."

China's market for wind equipment is on track to overtake the U.S. this year as the world's largest, spurred by a government campaign to promote renewable energy to clean up its battered environment and curb surging demand for foreign oil and gas.

Now the biggest Chinese manufacturers want to expand to the United States, Europe and other markets. Western suppliers could face new competition as low-priced Chinese rivals seek to profit from global efforts to limit climate change.

Chinese manufacturers could get a boost if officials at this week's UN climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, agree on new measures to spread use of clean energy.

Beijing is promoting the industry as part of sweeping efforts to transform China into a creator of profitable technologies. Utilities have been told to step up clean energy spending even as the global crisis cuts into investment elsewhere.

"China is a major player and will dominate the future development of wind," said Lars Andersen, president for China of Denmark's Vestas Wind Systems A/S, the world's biggest maker of wind turbines.

Chinese wind companies' technology lags behind global leaders such as Vestas and General Electric Co. But their prices are up to 50 per cent lower, which industry analysts say should make them competitive abroad.

"The performance-to-price ratio is quite attractive," said Victoria Li, who follows the industry for Credit Suisse in Shanghai. "I think they could see strong growth from export revenue within two years."

Last year, China accounted for 22 per cent of new global wind capacity, while the United States was 29.6 per cent, according to BTM Consult, a Danish research firm. This year, Credit Suisse says China will install up to one-third of new capacity.

The industry has gotten a boost from a flow of money through the Clean Development Mechanism. The UN program allows industrialized economies to meet commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by paying developing countries to cut their own instead. China is the biggest recipient of CDM money.

Chinese demand is so huge that with almost no foreign sales, Goldwind and rivals Sinovel Wind Co. and Dongfang Electric Co. already rank among top global manufacturers.

Sinovel, Goldwind and Dongfang together made one of every eight wind turbines sold worldwide in 2008, according to BTM. Vestas led global sales with 19.8 per cent and GE was second with 18.6 per cent.

Beijing-based Sinovel made its first foreign sale last year, shipping 10 1.5-megawatt turbines to India, said a company spokeswoman, Liu Chang. Also in 2008, Goldwind sold six of its smaller 750-kilowatt units to Cuba.

In Minnesota, Goldwind is installing three 1.5-megawatt turbines on a farm in the town of Pipestone. Zhou said the company hopes the site will prove its turbines operate reliably under U.S. weather conditions.

Beijing's tactics in promoting its suppliers have caused strains in trade ties at a time when other governments are scrambling to preserve jobs.

The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China complains that foreign producers have been shut out of bidding for major wind projects. Beijing also required that 70 per cent of parts in turbines used in China be domestically made - a rule that was dropped in September only after major foreign producers had set up Chinese factories.

November's announcement that a Chinese manufacturer, A-Power Energy Generation Systems, would build a Texas wind farm prompted an outcry from American critics that stimulus money the project might receive should not go to China. A-Power and its American partners said they would open a U.S. factory.

"We definitely are closely watching the controversy and obstacles for this current project to see what will happen," said Goldwind's Zhou.

Aggressive government goals issued in 2005 call for at least 15 per cent of China's power to come from wind, solar and hydropower by 2020. Officials say that target might be boosted to 20 per cent.

In July, Beijing raised its wind power goal to 150 gigawatts of generating capacity by 2020 - the equivalent of 300 standard coal-fired power plants - up from the 2005 plan's target of 30 gigawatts.

But the industry faces technical hurdles to its growth. Wind farm construction has raced ahead so fast that 25 per cent have yet to be connected to the national power grid. Like the United States, China faces the problem that its windiest areas in the desert northwest and northern grasslands are far from populous cities, requiring expensive transmission lines.

Other companies are developing technology ranging from solar panels and fuel cells to more far-out systems that make power from garbage and used cooking oil.

China's solar cell producers have competed abroad in Spain, Germany and California since they got into the business early this decade because the technology was too expensive for Chinese buyers. The biggest, Suntech Power Holdings Ltd., is on track to pass Germany's Q-Cells SE as the world's top supplier as early as this year.

"In an incredibly short space of time China has taken the lead in the race to develop and commercialize a range of low-carbon technologies," said The Climate Group, a London-based environmental organization, in a report in August.

Many manufacturers still rely on technology licensed from General Electric Co. and other foreign producers but Goldwind, Sinovel and others are developing their own. Zhou said Goldwind has spent 500 million yuan ($75 million) since 2007 on research and owns the technology used in its turbines in Minnesosta.

Goldwind, founded in 2001, says more than 1,200 of its 1.5-megawatt units have been installed at 40 wind farms across China. Last year, it bought a German company, Vensys, with a factory that can produce 100 turbines a year.

Zhou stressed that Goldwind plans to make or buy most components wherever its turbines are installed, rather than shipping bulky towers and blades up to 90 metres (300 feet) long from China. That could help to avert political strains by creating local jobs.

"We don't want to aggressively enter a market with simple thinking that we can just export our equipment there," Zhou said.

♪♪ ...Oh the weather outside is frightful... ♪♪

2009-12-06T06:26:00.000-06:00

World record: 0.01mm nano-snowman

Relative to nothing... Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

You're looking at the tiniest snowman ever built. Well, it looks like a snowman, but this minuscule model — about a fifth the width of a human hair — is not made out of snow. It's constructed of two tiny tin beads that are usually used to calibrate an electron microscope, and welded together with platinum.

It's built by David Cox, a nanotech expert at the Quantum Detection Group of Britain's National Physical Laboratory. He's accustomed to working with such astonishingly small objects, and used his nano-particle manipulation tools to demonstrate the astonishing accuracy of his work.

He bathed the snowman in blue light to give us this entertaining, snow-blown image. The remarkable flourish of his smiling snowman is its little happy face, carved into the top orb using a focused ion beam. That's no small feat.

Daily Mail, via Gizmo Watch

Sustainability - Stop Carp"ing"

2009-12-05T05:10:00.000-06:00

States Cast for Way to Stop Carp
Officials Poison Canal Near Key Barrier to Keep Giant Leaping Fish Out of Great Lakes

By DOUGLAS BELKIN, The Wall Street Journal

ROMEOVILLE, Ill. -- A decades-long battle to stop the northern migration of a voracious, invasive fish that can leap eight feet out of the water and batter boaters with enough force to break bones has come down to a six-mile stretch of muddy brown water here.

WSJ's Joe Barrett explains why Illinois officials have launched a big campaign to kill carp in the Great Lakes region.

On Wednesday night, officials pumped 2,200 gallons of fish poison into the narrow channel of the Chicago Shipping and Sanitary Canal to stop the spread of the Asian carp. By Thursday morning, scores of workers in 20-foot boats had scooped tens of thousands of pounds of dead and dying fish from the gritty canal, which is lined with weeds and hulking grain elevators.

The effort was launched to allow the routine maintenance of an electric barrier a few miles upstream that was put in place in 2002 to stop the carp from entering Lake Michigan. The torpedo-shaped fish can grow up to 100 pounds, and its tendency to leap out of the water at the sound of approaching watercraft has made some sections of the Mississippi treacherous for boaters.

Voracious eaters that reproduce rapidly, the Asian carp can quickly displace native species. In some stretches of the Illinois River, the carp account for as much as 90% of the fish population by weight, and scientists fear they could do the same in the Great Lakes, potentially destroying the lakes' $7 billion recreational fishing industry. What's more, the fish tend to be bony and have an unpleasant taste to the American palate.

Associated Press Crews dump poison into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal Thursday as part of an effort to keep the invasive Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes. The fish can grow up to 100 pounds and tend to leap out of the water at the sound of approaching craft, threatening boaters.

"The barrier is the best weapon we have to keep the Asian carp from the Great Lakes," said Chris McCloud, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, which was overseeing an effort that drew about 300 workers from a half-dozen Great Lakes states as well as Canada. "We need to push them back right here."

The Asian carp were imported to fish farms in the Mississippi Delta in the 1970s to clean holding pens. They escaped during floods in the 1990s and have been heading north ever since. The electrical fence here was supposed to be the last backstop between the fish and Lake Michigan, but this fall genetic material from the Asian carp was detected on the other side of the barrier.

That discovery sent shock waves across Great Lakes states. On Wednesday, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, supported by five environmental groups, asked the state attorney general to pursue "every legal means" to force the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to temporarily shut three frequently opened shipping locks near Chicago as a last-gasp measure to stop the fish.

On Thursday night officials found one 22-inch Asian carp in the stretch of the canal that had been poisoned. The poison was pumped into the canal as a precaution to make sure none of the fish breached the barrier while it was shut down. The operation is expected to continue through Sunday.

Several environmental groups and Ms. Granholm have said it is only a matter of time before the barrier is breached. They have called for the drastic and massively expensive action of separating the Great Lakes from the Mississippi water basin. The two systems were connected in an epic feat of engineering a century ago when the Chicago River was reversed so that the city's waste would flow away from Lake Michigan -- which provides the city's drinking water -- rather than into it.

Army Corps of Engineers Brig. Gen. John Peabody, who oversees the Great Lakes and the waterways around Chicago, said the possibility of a complete separation is being studied but warned that such a project would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and be complicated by the urban environment.

In 2007, barges moved 16.9 million tons of goods through the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal. Permantly shutting down the canal to separate the Great Lakes from the Mississippi basin would have a tremendous impact on the local economy, said Del Wilkins, vice president of business development for the Canal Barge Co. near Joliet, Ill.

"There would be a massive impact on jobs and the costs of moving goods," said Mr. Wilkins.

Most of the goods shipped through the inland waterways are commodities like salt, gravel and petroleum products. Mr. Wilkins said it would take 20 rail cars or 75 trucks to move the freight carried on a single barge.

Pentagon's 25M Acres Could Ease Renewables Siting Debate

2009-12-04T06:05:00.000-06:00

Photovoltaic solar array at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, the largest solar array in the US. It occupies 140 acres and has 70,000 panels. It was constructed by the SunPower Corporation, and produces a maximum rated 14 MW which is approximately 25 % of the power requirements for Nellis AFB.

By SCOTT STREATER, The New York Times

While not central to its war-fighting mission abroad, the U.S. military is quietly becoming one of the nation's most aggressive energy innovators, retrofitting thousands of acres of military installations with renewables technologies that will help meet the bases' future power demand while also aiding host states in achieving renewable energy targets.

From commercial-scale solar installations at the Army's Fort Irwin, in the heart of California's Mojave Desert, to smaller projects such as a 30-megawatt geothermal plant at Fallon Naval Air Station in Nevada, the Pentagon perhaps more than any other federal agency has adopted the Obama administration's call for a rapid deployment of renewable energy resources as part of a broader strategy to reduce greenhouse gases.

"The military's mission is not to battle global warming," noted Matthew Kahn, an environmental economist at the University of California, Los Angeles' Institute of the Environment. "But if the military demands renewables, that sends a clear signal to green businesses that there will be a market for their products.

"In this way, the military could unintentionally help to green our economy," Kahn added.

Experts say the Pentagon's renewables push is motivated by two factors -- reducing the cost of operating large, energy-consumptive bases, but also advancing national security by making its facilities less vulnerable to energy shortages.

With those goals in mind, the Pentagon has embarked on several recent major renewables projects, including this year's announced 500-megawatt concentrated solar plant at Fort Irwin, near Barstow, Calif., in the high Mojave Desert. The $1.5 billion project is a joint venture with Clark Energy Group and Acciona Solar Power, and could be producing at full capacity by 2022, according to the Army (ClimateWire, Aug. 7).

More recently, the Air Force announced it would install as many as 80,000 solar panels, both on the ground and atop buildings, at southern Arizona's Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. The 6-megawatt project, while tiny compared to the Army's proposal at Fort Irwin, is nonetheless a significant step for the Air Force, which will use the electricity to power about 900 houses on the base.

Joe Salkowski, a spokesman for Tucson Electric Power, which will help finance the project, said the Davis-Monthan solar panels "will represent the largest distributed solar-power system in our portfolio by far," and will help Tucson Electric and other Arizona utilities meet a 15 percent statewide renewable portfolio standard by 2025.

Meanwhile, the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory is working with the Army to develop another large-scale solar array at Fort Bliss in southwest Texas, just north of El Paso, said John Barnett, supervisor of NREL's project development and finance section in Golden, Colo.

Solving the siting problem

The recent proliferation of renewable energy proposals on military installations, while promising energy and environmental benefits to the bases themselves, also offers a broader benefit to the Obama administration as officials try to identify hundreds of public land sites that could support alternative energy projects.

The Defense Department owns about 25 million acres, much of which is already disturbed by troop training and other activities. As a result, the Pentagon could help resolve what has become the leading obstacle to expanding renewable energy -- opposition to the siting of power plants in sensitive or pristine landscapes.

Federal efforts to authorize construction of commercial-scale solar and wind-power projects, particularly in California's Mojave Desert region, have met stiff resistance because of the projects' expected impacts to wildlife habitat and water resources.

In many cases, environmental groups say they welcome the expansion of renewable energy as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they want such projects sited in areas with little or no ecological value.

Military bases in many instances offer an ideal solution.

"It's not the whole answer, but it's part of the answer," said Carl Zichella, director of Western renewable programs for the Sierra Club in Sacramento.

Jerry Hansen, the Army's senior energy executive, said such views are not lost on the Army, which has more than 12 million acres in its lands portfolio.
"It's been interesting to hear from proponents of renewable energy who have asked the DOD to step up and help in that area," Hansen said. "We recognize and accept that responsibility."

Included in the Army's efforts is a directive that each base perform surveys to identify areas that are suitable to support renewable energy projects.

But Hansen and other Pentagon officials remain wary about renewable energy development becoming a revenue engine, as is expected with Fort Irwin's 500-megawatt solar project. According to base officials, Fort Irwin's peak demand for electricity is 35 megawatts, meaning the Army's partner companies will be able to sell the remaining 465 megawatts to other utilities.

"Renewable energy is a key area for DOD to invest, but renewable energy is very expensive and the business cases may not return on investment," said Brian Lally, facility energy director for acquisition, technology and logistics with the Office of Secretary of Defense. "In a future 'low-carbon' economy, the business case may change."

Success stories

But if existing projects are any indication, the Pentagon has already proved itself to be a renewable energy leader.

Consider that the largest operating solar power plant in North America sits on a 140-acre patch of scrubby desert land in the Yucca Flats at Nellis Air Force Base, just northeast of Las Vegas.

The $100 million photovoltaic solar-power system, which began operating in 2007, consists of 72,416 ground-fixed solar panels that generate 14 megawatts of electricity -- enough to power about 2,350 homes on the base.

The Air Force estimates that the solar array saves the base about $1 million a year in electricity costs and reduces emissions of carbon dioxide by 24,000 tons a year, the equivalent of removing roughly 4,000 cars from the road, according to the military. It also occupies a site otherwise unusable for military training, a long-abandoned landfill.

Brigid Lowery, director of the center for program analysis in U.S. EPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, said the Nellis project is "a good example" of the size and scope of renewable energy projects that can be done on military bases.

And when President Obama visited Nellis last May, he remarked that "this base serves as a shining example of what's possible when we harness the power of clean, renewable energy to build a new, firmer foundation for economic growth," according to a White House transcript.

Two other Air Force facilities -- Dyess Air Force Base in Texas and Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington -- are meeting 100 percent of power demand by consuming renewable energy, further burnishing the Pentagon's reputation as an energy innovator.

And at the Army's Fort Carson in southeast Colorado, the Army in 2008 installed a 2-megawatt solar power facility, also atop a closed landfill, that provides enough electricity to power 540 homes, or roughly 2.3 percent of the fort's energy needs. The Army has since set a goal of powering the entire training facility with renewable energy sources by 2027.

Sites like these offer "great hope" for renewable energy development, because there are huge swaths of already disturbed military land that could be utilized for renewables, said Barnett, the NREL official.

"The military can make a great partner, and that's what we've seen with projects like at the Nellis Air Force Base," said Jessica Goad, an energy and climate change policy fellow at the Wilderness Society.

Meanwhile, federal regulators continue search for other reuse sites that could house new energy projects, including Superfund hazardous waste sites, landfills, abandoned mines and shuttered portions of military bases. Among 12 contaminated sites announced by EPA last month as having potential for renewable energy development was Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island.

"We need to look at those sites first before we look at greenfields," said EPA's Lowery.

Ongoing challenges

Optimism notwithstanding, not all military bases are suitable for renewable energy projects. In fact, wind turbine technologies could interfere with military equipment such as radar, said Laurie Jodziewicz, manager of siting policy for the American Wind Energy Association.

As a result, wind power development on bases tends to be of a smaller scale. To date, the only sizable wind projects involving military lands are a 2.4-megawatt wind farm that the Air Force operates on Ascension Island, and a 1.3-megawatt wind farm at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.

"We know this issue is not a showstopper for the wind industry, but it is something that needs to be researched more," Jodziewicz said.

Military bases are also not exempt from concerns about impacts to sensitive landscapes and wildlife. In fact, many bases provide vital habitat for threatened and endangered species.

Zichella, the Sierra Club official in Sacramento, points to the recent transfer of 600 federally threatened desert tortoises from Fort Irwin to accommodate additional training exercises. More than 90 of the tortoises died, prompting the Army and Bureau of Land Management to temporarily halt the $8.7 million translocation program.

"That's a potential problem, and we need to be concerned," he said. "The general rule that should be applied ... is to choose the best sites possible with the fewest environmental impacts, whether on military bases or not."

Streater writes from Colorado Springs, Colo.; Copyright 2009 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.; For more news on energy and the environment, visit http://www.greenwire.com/.

Copenhagen Cul-de-sac

2009-12-03T04:21:00.000-06:00

By Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

Jack Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is a leading U.S. scientist who helped alert the world to dangers of global warming.

Hensen told the Guardian newspaper yesterday that any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations in the impending sessions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP-15) in Copenhagen would be so deeply flawed that it would be better for future generations if we were to start again from scratch.

"I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it's a disaster track," said Hansen.

"The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means."

Reuters reported that on Wednesday China and other big developing nations rejected core targets for a climate deal proposed by the Danish hosts in a draft text, such as halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Developing nations want richer countries to do much more to cut their emissions now before they agree to global emissions targets which they fear may shift the burden of action to them and hinder their economic growth.

Hansen is strongly opposed to carbon market structures, in which permits to pollute are bought and sold, seen by the European Union and other governments as the most efficient way to cut emissions and move to a new clean energy economy.

Hansen opposes U.S. President Barack Obama's plans for a cap and trade system for carbon emissions in the United States, preferring a tax on energy use.

Hansen said, "This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50 percent or reduce it 40 percent."

"We don't have a leader who is able to grasp it and say what is really needed,"

Chicago - That Solar Town

2009-12-02T06:18:00.001-06:00

Chicago’s cloudy skies make huge South Side solar project extra costly

(Blog Editor's Note: This blogger has been predicting market distortions as a result of outsized federal stimulus spending in Alternative Energy markets. This article describes but one should example.)

by Emma Jackson, Medill

The country's largest urban solar project, which Commonwealth Edison's parent Exelon Corp. is constructing on Chicago's South Side, will produce expensive power compared to other low-carbon energy sources. Chicago's limited sunlight makes it even more expensive than other solar projects. But the company says government incentives make it economical.

The $62-million, 10-megawatt, photovoltaic facility will generate enough electricity to power about 1,200 to 1,500 homes, Exelon said. California-based SunPower Corp. will provide the project with 32,800 solar panels, using its one-axis Tracker System. The system automatically tilts the solar PV panels to follow the sun, increasing daily energy production.

The solar photovoltaic capacity factor--the percentage of actual power output relative to the power output that could have been produced if the solar panels were operating at full capacity continuously--is a measure of solar efficiency. It's diminished by clouds and other atmospheric conditions.

“The capacity factor of course is going to be lower in a place like Chicago where you don’t get as much sunlight as you do in Arizona or in Texas or Florida,” said Mary J. Hutzler, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research.

The estimated capacity factor for solar PV in 2012 is about 21 percent, making it much smaller than other low-carbon energy sources. In sharp contrast, the estimated capacity factor in 2012 for nuclear and geothermal is about 90 percent, according to the U. S. Energy Information Administration.

A lower capacity factor produces higher electricity costs. The cost of electricity generated by Exelon's project would be about 39 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to Yangbo Du, a research assistant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The same project in Phoenix would be about about 27 cents per kwh, he said.

Severin Borenstein, co-director of the Energy Institute at Haas School of Business, at the University of California at Berkeley, said investing in large-scale solar projects will crowd out less costly low-carbon energy sources.

“If what you’re trying to get is the maximum clean energy bang for the buck, solar PV is probably not the best investment right now,” he said.

Solar PV is an expensive energy source. Factoring in the energy-incentive provisions in the government's stimulus program, the estimated costs of new electricity generation in 2016 include solar PV at about 40 cents per kwh, wind at 14 cents per kwh, nuclear at about 11 cents per kwh and natural gas at about 8 cents per kwh.

The installed cost of solar PV in the U.S. declined by more than 30 percent from 1998 to 2008, according to a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The driving force in the expansion of the industry has been financial incentives provided through state and federal programs, the report added.

Although solar PV costs have come down, solar continues to provide only a tiny percentage of the nation's energy. In 2008 solar represented 0.09 percent of all energy consumed in the U..S. and 0.02 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S., according to the EIA.

With the limited sunshine in Chicago, a utility-scale solar project becomes even more costly. Chicago had an annual average percentage of possible sunshine of 54 percent, sunny Phoenix Arizona averaged 85 percent, and rainy Seattle, Wash., averaged 43 percent, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

“Solar output costs are inversely proportional with the amount of sunlight. So, of course if you have less sunlight, costs per kilowatt-hour go up,” said Ken Zweibel, director of the George Washington University's UniSolar Institute. “In the U.S., the Southwest and some parts of the Midwest have better sunlight than Chicago, so of course you’re paying more for kilowatt-hour.”

To make the project economical, Exelon has utilized a multitude of government incentives, including the federal investment tax credit, Illinois Enterprise Zone ITC, and a federal loan guarantee of 80 percent of the cost. The company plans to sell solar Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs, from the output of this plant. Companies that exceed their allowable production of air pollutants may buy these certificates to achieve compliance with government renewable-energy standards.

Peter Elsberg, a spokesperson for Exelon, said the company wouldn’t have undertaken the project if it wasn’t cost effective. Referring to the government incentives, he said, “when you put all those things together, it lowers the financial risk enough to make this project worthwhile.”

Aimee Curtright, an associate physical scientist at RAND Corp., said less sunlight will mean higher electricity costs.

“And you have to ask yourself how much other low-carbon technology you could buy for that same price,” she said. “Energy efficiency improvements, for example, would be a much better deal.”

For the cost of the Chicago project, she added, one could insulate at least ten times the number of homes that Exelon expects to serve with PV-produced electricity, and achieve a financial payback in energy savings of a decade or less. She estimated the payback time for a solar PV project at 30 years.

Atlantis to test world's biggest tidal turbine

2009-12-01T02:59:00.000-06:00

By Nao Nakanishi

LONDON (Reuters) - Atlantis Resources Corp is to test the world's biggest tidal turbine in the rough waters off the Orkney Islands next year in preparation for Scotland's plan to use ocean energy for half a million homes by 2020.

Tim Cornelius, chief executive officer at Atlantis, said the company was investing about 15 million pounds ($25 million) to build and test the turbine, which has rotors that are 18 meters in diameter, the height of five storey building.

The AK-1000 turbine, which has a capacity of 1 megawatt (MW) -- in line with other pioneering marine energy converters -- will be deployed at the European Marine Energy Center (EMEC) test site in Orkney.

"We are finalizing the tender for manufacturers. We are making this in the UK for the first time," Cornelius told Reuters in an interview. Previous smaller versions were made elsewhere. "We will be committing at least 15 million pounds just for this testing regime in EMEC."

Atlantis is working with Norway's state-owned utility Statkraft to win a bid in Britain's Pentland Firth marine energy project, the world's first industrial scale wave and tidal energy program, which is intended to reach at least 700 MW of capacity by 2020.

The Crown Estate, which owns the seabed within 12 nautical miles off Britain's coast, plans to sign lease agreements for the Pentland Firth program with developers by April.

While there are around 100 companies around the world working on marine energy, including wave power, only a handful have installed their devices at sea. Others are running tests in tanks or on computers.

Last year, Britain's Marine Current Turbines Ltd (MCT) became the world's first company to install a commercial-size turbine, SeaGen, with a capacity of 1.2 MW, at Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland.

In March, Statkraft invested 45 million crowns ($8 million) in Atlantis, joining Morgan Stanley to become a minority shareholder in the company that since 2007 has been testing small tidal turbines -- one for 150 kilowatts and another for 400 KW.

"We took everything we learnt over the last 10 years...to create AK-1000, which we believe to be the best for the North Sea," Cornelius said Friday by telephone from Singapore.

"This one is built for the harsh marine environment we will get as we go into the North Sea in Orkney. This is one of the harshest environments in the world," Cornelius said.

Atlantis, which started up in Australia but now has its headquarters in London, has invested more than $50 million over the last 10 years in designing, developing and testing tidal turbines.

Neil Kermode, EMEC's managing director, said the only company currently testing a tidal energy converter at the center was Ireland's OpenHydro, while Britain's Tidal Generation Ltd was installing its device.

The Atlantis turbine would be the third. Asked about the potential, he said a number of reports suggested Britain could eventually source a fifth of its electricity from marine energy, including wave and tide. "We are looking forward to playing that part," he said.

The AK-1000 is a horizontal axis turbine, with a twin rotor set and fixed pitch blades and it is more effective in water speeds that are faster than 2.6 meters per second.

Biofuels Not a Factor Until 2020 Says Shell

2009-11-30T08:13:00.002-06:00

By Richard Wottrich - Blog Editor

Three factors seemingly are slowing the momentum towards alternative energy significantly impacting global energy production.

1) Peak Oil - The concept that we are near or past the peak of available oil has been discredited in many quarters as new technologies open more and more avenues to increased oil production. It is likely that oil has 50 to 100 years left before serious consequences arise via scarcity.

2) Natural Gas - New extraction technologies in the US have increased gas reserves by 40 percent or more, dropping prices to historic recent lows. New development of the Australian Gorgon fields for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) has perhaps initiated for the first time a global market based on LNG shipments.

3) Advanced Biofuels - Royal Dutch Shell has said that advanced biofuels will not be in widespread use until about 2020, puncturing hopes that they could be on the verge of a commercial breakthrough. Peter Voser, who took over at the head of Shell in July, told reporters at a briefing last week that it would take “quite a number of years” before there is a commercially proven plant.

Taken together it would be wise to temper exuberance regarding the role of alternative energy around the world to a more realistic role, supplemental to the trinity of oil, coal and natural gas.

Success for Large Hadron Collider as first atom smashed

2009-11-28T19:22:00.003-06:00

Why do we care?

John March-Russell, University of Oxford

'Quite part from the commonly touted LHC predictions, some possible discoveries might even revolutionize technology. For example, our quest for a source of almost unlimited climate-friendly energy might be answered by the creation of exotic unstable, but long-lived, charged particles. Rather like enzymes catalyze chemical reactions in the body, such exotic particles can efficiently catalyze nuclear fusion, obviating the need for the absurdly high temperatures necessary in conventional plasma fusion reactors and stars. It might also turn out that the number of space and time dimensions is ambiguous, rather as a conventional hologram is simultaneously both flat (two-dimensional) and three dimensional.'

GENEVA — Two circulating beams on Monday produced the first particle collisions in the world's biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), three days after its restart, scientists announced.

In a statement, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said two beams circulating simultaneously led to collisions at all four detection points during the afternoon and evening.

"It?s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. "But we need to keep a sense of perspective. There's still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme."

CERN had declared earlier Monday the relaunch of the 3.9 billion euro (five billion dollar) collider "an enormous success," after it was out of action for 14 months due to a serious electrical fault.

Scientists are looking to the collider -- inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border -- to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe.

"Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions," CERN said in its statement.

"With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring," it explained.

The first collision was picked up at 2:44 pm (1344 GMT) by the Atlas detector, beneath the Swiss town of Meyrin, one of several laid out along the route of the world's most powerful physics experiment.

Smash-ups then followed at the three other detectors, known as CMS, Alice and LHCb.

"It was standing-room-only in the Alice control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions," said Alice spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. "This is simply tremendous."

"The tracks we're seeing are beautiful," added LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, quoted in the CERN statement. "We're all ready for serious data taking in a few days time."

Earlier in the day, scientists injected the first sub-atomic particles back into the collider, then got particle beams circulating within the accelerator.

The LHC has an operating life of up to 15 years, and the collisions that it produces should generate masses of data that could unlock mysteries about the creation of the universe and the fundamental nature of matter.

Scientists want to get the collider running at 1.2 teraelectronvolts or 1.2 trillion electronvolts by year's end -- with one teraelectronvolt equal to the energy of a flying mosquito, said a CERN spokeswoman.

That would match the maximum output of what now is the largest functioning collider in the world, at the Fermilab near Chicago in the United States.

By next year, however, the LHC should be ramped up to 3.5 teraelectronvolts, reaching "close to five" teraelectronvolts in the second half of next year. Maximum power is 7.0 teraelectronvolts.

"Already with 3.5 TeV, we can open new windows into physics. That can already happen next year," said Heuer earlier Monday, refraining however from predicting how soon fresh data could be generated.

The LHC took nearly 20 years to construct and aims to resolve physics enigmas such as an explanation for "dark matter" and "dark energy" that account for 96 percent of the cosmos and whether other dimensions exist parallel to our own.

The Holy Grail will be finding a theorised component called the Higgs Boson, which would explain how particles acquire mass. The frustratingly elusive Higgs has been dubbed the "God particle".

AFP

Note - ATLAS is a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Starting in Spring 2009, the ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS will learn about the basic forces that have shaped our Universe since the beginning of time and that will determine its fate. Among the possible unknowns are the origin of mass, extra dimensions of space, microscopic black holes, and evidence for dark matter candidates in the Universe.

Osmotic Power Debuts in Norway

2009-11-28T19:06:00.000-06:00

By KATE GALBRAITH, The New York Times

The world’s first osmotic plant opened today in Tofte, Norway, harnessing the saltiness of the sea, along with freshwater, to produce electricity through a polymer membrane.

The project, run by Statkraft, a Norwegian renewable energy company, is a tiny pilot, generating up to 4 kilowatts of electricity for the grid — or roughly enough to run a coffee maker.

But while Stein Erik Skilhagan, the vice president of osmotic power at Statkraft, acknowledged that the project marked a small start, he said that he hoped to develop it quickly. The concept, according to a question-and-answer page on Statkraft’s Web site, holds the potential to provide half of Europe’s power and is a baseload resource that could run all the time.

“We really need to increase the speed to bring this technology into the market,” Mr. Skilhagen said. “We should do this much faster than we did with solar power and wind power.”

The concept of osmotic power was thought up by an American professor, Sidney Loeb, in the 1970s. Mr. Loeb passed away last year.

As explained on Statkraft’s Web site, the process works in the following way:

Freshwater and saltwater are channeled into separate chambers, separated by an artificial membrane. The salt molecules in the seawater draw the freshwater through the membrane, causing the pressure on the seawater side to increase. This pressure is equivalent to a water column of 120 meters or, in other words, quite a significant waterfall. This pressure can be used in a turbine to make electricity.

The concept has been little explored since the 1970s — until now. Part of the reason, in addition to a growing push for renewable energy, has to do with membrane technology, Mr. Skilhagen said.

“The first membranes were really bad and really expensive,” he said. Now, partly due to their extensive use for reverse osmosis in desalination plants, the membranes, which are made from different kinds of polymers, have improved, he said.

Mr. Skilhagen said that the plant had cost about $7millon to $8 million to build and that Statkraft has put about $20 million into research on osmotic power. The concept has also received backing from the Norwegian government and the European Council, he said.

Research into osmotic power is also happening in the United States, according to Mr. Skilhagen, including at the University of Kentucky, Virginia Tech and the University of Texas.

Rick Stover, the chief technology officer of Energy Recovery, a California-based technology company that made the pressure exchangers for the Norwegian plant, said that the technology could theoretically be applied “wherever like a river comes close to the ocean.”

But it might also fit well near existing desalination plants, Mr. Stover suggested, because seawater from those plants is extremely salty, with two times the osmotic potential of regular seawater.

In addition, he said, if a wastewater treatment plant were near to the desalination site, an osmotic power plant could put a membrane between the salty seawater from the desalination plant and the treated freshwater from the wastewater plant.

That is clearly a long way off from a pilot that can power a coffee maker. Nonetheless, Mr. Stover said, “We’re really proud to be part of this ambitious pilot plant.”

Energy Push Spurs Shift in U.S. Science

2009-11-25T06:50:00.000-06:00

By GAUTAM NAIK, The Wall Street Journal

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- The Obama administration's push to solve the nation's energy problems, a massive federal program that rivals the Manhattan Project, is spurring a once-in-a-generation shift in U.S. science.

The government's multibillion-dollar push into energy research is reinvigorating 17 giant U.S.-funded research facilities, from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory here to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. After many years of flat budgets, these labs are ramping up to develop new electricity sources, trying to build more-efficient cars and addressing climate change.

In fiscal 2009, the Obama administration increased the funding by 18%, to $4.76 billion, to the Department of Energy's Office of Science, which oversees 10 national labs and funds research at another seven. The office will receive $1.6 billion in government stimulus spending, as well, much of which it will also channel to these laboratories.

The Office of Science estimates its bigger budget allowed it to create nearly 1,400 research jobs at the 10 labs it oversees in the fiscal year ending in September, up 11% from the previous year's staffing levels. It estimates it created another 1,400 science jobs at universities. In addition, it says, funds from the Obama administration's stimulus package created hundreds more government lab jobs. As a result, the balance of U.S. science is shading a few degrees -- away from the pure research typically practiced at universities, and toward applied science.

These efforts mark a third wave of spending at national labs such as Oak Ridge, a vast complex of woods and research facilities not far from Knoxville, Tenn. Oak Ridge was one of three labs set up to help build the atomic bomb during World War II. It boomed again during America's energy-independence push in the 1970s.

Oak Ridge plans to increase its staff by 25%, or 800 positions, over the next 18 months -- even as its neighbor, the University of Tennessee, has lost state funding and pared back faculty searches.

"We have a renewed sense of mission and urgency," says Oak Ridge's director, Thom Mason.

Critics of big government say the Obama energy plan gives politicians too big a role in how the nation conducts science, just as they fret about the government's increased role in the financial sector. They also question whether the government's funding push is sustainable amid mounting budget deficits.

Others, in academics and industry, say that while government-funded research has made big gains, including advances in DNA mapping and magnetic-resonance imaging, the cost of administering such research is unnecessarily high. University-funded pure research has its own string of successes in areas from physics and chemistry to biomedicine and genetics, they say, including breakthroughs that led to the laser, pacemaker, ultrasound technology and rocket fuel.

"Most of our great breakthroughs have not been through [top-down government] funding," says Michael Witherell, a former head of the government-funded Fermilab and now vice chancellor for research at the University of California in Santa Barbara. balance of article

Climate change: Copenhagen in graphics

2009-11-24T03:48:00.002-06:00

BBC

If the changes proposed for discussion in Copenhagen are implemented immediately it is projected that global temperatures would rise by 2C rather than 3C over the next 20 years. The impact of that 1C reduction is impossible to predict. Climate alarmists state that 3C is a "tipping" point for the climate. This blogger’s prediction is that the attendees at Copenhagen will “kick the can down the road.”

United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009

Will Green Energy Spending Kick-Start Job Growth?

2009-11-23T05:05:00.000-06:00

By Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

The Midwest Alternative Energy Venture Forum Keynote Speaker last week in Chicago Matt Roger, Senior Advisor to the Secretary U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Roger had been directly responsible for the release of over $32 billion in federal stimulus money in the form of direct grants and loan guarantees since Feb. 2009 into alternative energy projects. Over 250 full time peer reviewers have been screening project selection.

This attending blogger wonders, (1) what market distortions will result from such an unprecedented influx of funding, (2) how can politics and corruption possibly be kept away from this taxpayer cash, and (3) how funding such long term projects is additive to the immediate goal of ending a severe recession.

Perhaps the larger question is, "Will Green Energy jobs kick-start job growth in this recession?" The evidence suggests not.

The Obama Administration has proffered that up to 5 million jobs would be created by spending $150 billion over the next decade on new technologies such as solar and tidal power, in addition to making existing buildings and residences more energy-efficient.

"We know the jobs of the 21st century will be created in developing alternative energy," the president said as he campaigned last year. "The question is whether these jobs will be created in America ... or overseas."

The reality speaks differently, with perhaps 100,000 jobs created thus far in Green Energy federal grant and loan guarantee projects - a cost per job initiated of over $300,000.

"This is not the spark" that will pull the economy out of recession and put it in a lasting expansion that creates millions of jobs, said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University. "This is not the solution to the current big unemployment problem."

To the contrary, many alternative energy projects in the U.S. were shut down in this recession, as they were typified by very low equity ratios. Many of these projects were based upon high oil and gas energy costs, government subsidies and cheap credit. Two of these conditions have changed dramatically.

Max Schulz, an analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank, said "Renewables can't produce the large volumes of useful, reliable energy that our economy needs at attractive prices. Government subsidizes renewables because -- all things being equal -- the free market won't," he said. Even before the stimulus was enacted, solar and wind projects received more than 16 times the subsidies given to nuclear, coal or oil, and yet still provided only a tiny fraction of the nation's energy, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The administration has claimed that its stimulus spending has "saved" 64,000 jobs, but offered little detail in support. Even if that figure were accurate many of the jobs are in reality just extending payrolls in governmental entities, or subsidizing business plans that could not survive alone in the private market.

A study by the United Nations found that renewable energy projects such as solar are less efficient and more labor intensive than traditional energy, generating as many as nine jobs for each megawatt of electricity produced, compared with one job at existing coal- and gas-fired power plants. But the cost per job can exceed $700,000, according to a study of Spain's experiment with green jobs frequently cited by conservative groups, the Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources.

In the Great Depression the government put hundreds of thousands directly to work building projects across America in the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) which gave jobs to unemployed youths and to improve the environment, and in the WPA (Works Progress Administration). Today about 3 percent of the first stimulus bill, or $27 billion, was funneled into transportation projects - not enough to prevent more than 1 million construction jobs from being eliminated in the past year.

The Great Depression was ended by WWII. The present recession started with America already in two wars. We will have to find other solutions.

Singapore launches pilot project for "Intelligent Energy System"

2009-11-22T04:18:00.000-06:00

By Imelda Saad, Channel NewsAsia

SINGAPORE: Singapore's Energy Market Authority (EMA) is launching a pilot project aimed at helping households and businesses save more on electricity bills. The initiative comes on the back of higher consumption patterns and more diversified energy sources.

When you switch on the fan or light, chances are you won't know how much electricity you have used or how much you have spent until you get your power bill at the end of the month. That is because of the current design of Singapore's energy grid. The limitation also presents a challenge for power companies.

EMA's chief executive, Lawrence Wong, said: "Most utilities have limited visibility into what happens after electricity has been despatched and so are unable to tell if a power outage has occurred."

The growing use of renewable power like wind and solar will create complications as power source becomes intermittent and variable. To address these challenges, the EMA is rolling out its pilot "Intelligent Energy System" project aimed at developing and testing what it calls smart grid solutions.

It includes deploying "smart meters" to more homes. These are special electricity meters which provide households with real-time information on their electricity usage.

Trials in some 400 households in Marina Parade and West Coast resulted in a reduction in electricity consumption by some 2 per cent. The trials also tested differentiated electricity tariffs. As a result, households shifted about 10 per cent of their electricity load from peak periods to off-peak periods, thus enjoying savings in their electricity bill.

EMA's Mr Wong said: "These findings also have important implications at the system level. If demand can be shifted away from peak periods, power companies would not need to build extra power plants to cope with such high demand requirements. "We would also be able to reduce the spare generation capacity that power companies are required to maintain and thus bring down the overhead costs in our power system."

Having a smarter power grid will also ensure continued reliability in electricity supply, using renewable energy sources, and offer the ability to tap into electric cars as an energy storage system to feed power back to the grid during peak periods.

Mr Wong said that as technology takes off, there will be increasing demand for electricity charging by both plug-in hybrids and full-battery electric vehicles.

10 per cent of the vehicles in Singapore are electric. To power them up, an additional 1.3 terra watt hours of electricity per annum is required. That is equivalent to six times the energy needed to power up a housing estate like Ang Mo Kio.

Mr Wong said: "These vehicles will contribute less to greenhouse gas emissions compared to regular cars running on fossil fuel.

"The technology for vehicle-to-grid power is still several years away, but we need to start thinking about an intelligent interface to coordinate and facilitate interactions between electric vehicles and the power grid."

The pilot project, which could take up to three years to complete, will be carried out at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University and other commercial buildings in the west.

EMA will call a tender to identify and select companies interested in offering smart grid solutions to work on the project.

Infra "Red Badge of Courage"

2009-11-21T04:14:00.001-06:00

Spray-On Solar-Power Cells Are True Breakthrough

Stefan Lovgren, for National Geographic News

Scientists have invented a plastic solar cell that can turn the sun's power into electrical energy, even on a cloudy day. The plastic material uses nanotechnology and contains the first solar cells able to harness the sun's invisible, infrared rays. The breakthrough has led theorists to predict that plastic solar cells could one day become five times more efficient than current solar cell technology.

Like paint, the composite can be sprayed onto other materials and used as portable electricity. A sweater coated in the material could power a cell phone or other wireless devices. A hydrogen-powered car painted with the film could potentially convert enough energy into electricity to continually recharge the car's battery.

The researchers envision that one day "solar farms" consisting of the plastic material could be rolled across deserts to generate enough clean energy to supply the entire planet's power needs.

Infrared Power

Plastic solar cells are not new. But existing materials are only able to harness the sun's visible light. While half of the sun's power lies in the visible spectrum, the other half lies in the infrared spectrum. The new material is the first plastic composite that is able to harness the infrared portion. The researchers combined specially designed nano particles called quantum dots with a polymer to make the plastic that can detect energy in the infrared.

With further advances, the new plastic "could allow up to 30 percent of the sun's radiant energy to be harnessed, compared to 6 percent in today's best plastic solar cells," said Peter Peumans, a Stanford University electrical engineering professor, who studied the work.

Also MSNBC article

Midwest Alternative Energy Venture Forum

2009-11-20T06:24:00.001-06:00

MAEVF 2009 Chicago – This Blog Editor attended the third consecutive MAEVF in Chicago on November 18. The conference was sold out with nearly three hundred entrepreneurs, sponsors, hosts, speakers and attendees. MAEVF was held at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The University of Chicago leads the world with 85 Nobel Laureates alumnus, including President Obama most recently for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Keynote Speaker was Matt Roger, Senior Advisor to the Secretary U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Roger had been directly responsible for the release of over $32 billion in federal stimulus money in the form of direct grants and loan guarantees since Feb. 2009 into alternative energy projects. Over 250 full time peer reviewers have been screening project selection. This attending blogger wonders, (1) what market distortions will result from such an unprecedented influx of funding, (2) how can politics and corruption possibly be kept away from this taxpayer cash, and (3) how funding such long term projects is additive to the immediate goal of ending a severe recession.

Nine emerging technology companies presented their business plans at the MAEVR, including Air Water Treatment, Bias Power, Inc., Coskata, Inc., Digital Optics International, e-One, Intelligent Generation LLC, KGRA Energy, Paradigm Sensors, LLC and PyroPhase Inc. These presenters were highly vetted and had significant new technology applications.

Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

The Iceman Cometh

2009-11-19T06:37:00.000-06:00

Ice Battery - Renewable Energy Storage

Air conditioning during the summer can be the largest single contributor to a building's energy cost. A hybrid cooling system from Calmac uses an ice bank thermal energy storage tank to make and store ice for use in air conditioning systems when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining - such as after dark.

For buildings without on-site renewable energy power generation, the ice can be made at night during off-peak times when electricity rates are cheaper and when cleaner baseload generation is used. In this scenario, Calmac says their system can reduce cooling costs by up to 40 percent.

According to Calmac, for every kilowatt-hour of energy that is shifted from on-peak usage to off-peak, there is a reduction in the source fuel needed to generate it - between 8 and 30%.

The IceBank tanks are made of heavily insulated polyethylene and contain a spiral-wound, polyethylene-tube heat exchanger surrounded with water. The tanks are available in a variety of sizes ranging from 45 to over 500 ton-hours.

During the charging cycle, a solution containing 25 percent ethylene or propylene glycol is cooled by a chiller and then circulated through the heat exchanger inside the IceBank tank. The ethylene-based or propylene-based glycol recommended for the solution is an industrial coolant that is specially formulated for low viscosity and superior heat-transfer properties.

The ice is built uniformly throughout the tank during the charging process and a full charging cycle of an IceBank tank requires approximately 6 to 12 hours, which makes it viable to be used in conjunction with a solar panel array.

Energy Matters

Praj was recently conferred the 'Forbes Best Under a Billion Company' in Asia

2009-11-18T05:29:00.000-06:00

Praj Industries Ltd. (BSE:522205) - It has been 25 years of entrepreneurship for Pramod Chaudhari. A successful entrepreneur, he describes his experience as an exciting journey full of ups and downs.

After his engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Pramod Chaudhari worked for a multinational company for a few years. Later, he decided to start his own venture. Passionate about green technologies, he established Praj Industries in 1984.

It was not an easy ride. He failed many times but that did not deter him from taking new initiatives and moving ahead. His never-say-die attitude and optimism made sure he built a world-renowned company. Under his leadership, Praj focusses on offering innovative solutions to add value in bio-ethanol, bio-diesel, brewery plants and process equipment and systems for customers worldwide.

Praj has been creating innovative technology platforms to make biofuels a sustainable choice toward making a greener planet. Praj was recently conferred the 'Forbes Best Under a Billion Company' in Asia, for the second consecutive year, based on its consistent growth and profitability over three years.

Chaudhari has also contributed to the National Biofuels Policy as a member of the Committee on Development of Biofuels, Planning Commission for introduction of renewable fuels to India.

He believes that innovation and entrepreneurship must go hand in hand to build sustainable solutions. Stressing the importance of intrapreneurships, he says, young managers within a company, who have good skills and ideas must be encouraged to develop their ideas. Chaudhari shares his views on entrepreneurship and his company's initiatives to promote green technology.

Disagreement Over Goals at U.N. Meeting on Hunger

2009-11-17T00:34:00.003-06:00

Rice Paddies in Pune, India (Photo: RLW)

The United Nations estimates that the number of people facing starvation around the world rose to more than one billion this year. This represents 15% of our world's total population. The United Nations summit meeting on combating hunger that opened in Rome on Monday made no mention of overpopulation being a proximate cause of starvation, in much the same way that gravity is the proximate cause of falling down. You would think that by now they would get it. After all, Sustainability really starts with appreciating the appropriate number of humans this earth can sustain. Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

The New York Times, By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

A United Nations summit meeting on combating hunger that opened in Rome on Monday underscored the split between rich and poor countries on the issue, with the industrialized nations balking at concrete targets.

Sixty leaders attended the meeting, but apart from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy there were no leaders from the wealthiest nations. Some of those who attended, including Pope Benedict XVI, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, lashed out at what they called unfair agricultural policies by more developed nations.

In the hard-fought negotiations over a draft declaration from the three-day talks, richer nations succeeded in removing a goal to end world hunger by 2025 and declined to commit to increasing agricultural aid to nearly 20 percent of all international development aid, where it peaked in 1980 before gradually falling.

Instead, the draft declaration restated the United Nations target of halving world hunger by 2015 and said that eradicating hunger should come “at the earliest possible date.” Diplomats from wealthier countries argued that creating a deadline for eradicating hunger was unrealistic, according to officials involved in the negotiations. The United Nations estimates that the number of people facing hunger around the world rose to more than one billion this year.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations had hoped the meeting would set an agriculture aid target of $44 billion annually toward helping farmers in poorer countries. To meet demand by 2050, agriculture output needs to grow by 70 percent, the organization said.

The draft declaration instead commits to “substantially increase” agriculture aid. Leaders of industrialized nations meeting in Italy last July agreed to spend more than $22 billion on agriculture aid over the next three years, but not all of that constitutes new aid, and the nations have been slow to figure out how it might be distributed.

The Rome conference was prompted by a sharp rise in the price of basic commodities like rice and wheat that incited food riots in many countries in 2008, a crisis that Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, warned could easily be repeated.

The pope decried the “greed which causes speculation to rear its head even in the marketing of cereals, as if food were to be treated just like any other commodity.” Rising demand, weather and supply shocks, and not speculation alone, are considered to be at the root of the food crisis.

Mr. da Silva said that the developed world had to help rather than undermine the world’s poor. “They sabotage emerging agriculture in the poorer countries, wiping out their hope to create a bridge to development,” he said at the conference.

Colonel Qaddafi said that African states had to be wary of richer nations buying up vast tracts of land to ensure food security in their own countries without helping the people where the farming took place. He also called the monopolization of improved seed technology among a few companies “diabolical.”

Some leaders said they worried that the gathering would merely reiterate old promises without leading to innovative change in fighting hunger. “We end up leaving with a stomach full of promises and think we have found a solution,” Amadou Toumani Touré, Mali’s president, was quoted as saying by Bloomberg. “Then, at the next conference, we start all over again.”

India to Boost Funding for Solar Power

2009-11-16T05:19:00.006-06:00

Sinhagad near Pune, India (Photo: RLW)

India's problems with energy are self inflicted, in the sense that extreme population pressures are the root cause of nearly all its problems. India will take over China as the world's most populous country by 2025 by some estimates. India accounts for 50% of its electricity from coal. Over 400,000,000 million Indians are not on the national electrical grid. It depends on glaciers and snow packs for water for its northern multitudes and these sources are diminishing. Water tables in some regions of India are dropping 12 feet per year. The one variable in all this that is not addressed in a manner that produces concrete results is population control. Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

The Wall Street Journal, By AMOL SHARMA

NEW DELHI—India plans to announce increased subsidies for solar-power generation, a senior government official said, as the country looks to scale up production of renewable energy and show it is committed to mitigating climate change.

India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy is expected to release details of the latest solar-power policy in the next several weeks. In an interview, Dr. B. Bhargava, a director in the agency, said the plans will increase significantly the number of solar projects that can receive government support.

The hope, Mr. Bhargava said, is that the new policy will encourage manufacturers of solar panels such as Moser Baer India Ltd. and Tata BP Solar India Ltd. to ramp up production, thereby reducing per-unit costs and driving down the high price of solar power.

It is currently about five times more expensive to generate solar power than oil-based power. "If the costs aren't reduced, this [subsidy] policy can't be sustained on a long-term basis," Mr. Bhargava said.

India's revision of its solar policies comes ahead of a global climate-change conference at Copenhagen in December. The differences between developed and developing countries are part of the reason world leaders have lowered expectations for what's possible in Copenhagen, saying the purpose will be to set a political roadmap for further negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Developing countries such as India are under pressure to show greater commitments to controlling greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate change will be among the issues on the agenda when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits the White House next week.

India currently generates a tiny fraction of its power from solar energy. Coal accounts for more than half of the country's power capacity, and wind makes the biggest contribution among renewable sources, which together provide about 7.5% of India's energy.

Solar power is promising, because sunlight is abundant everywhere, unlike wind and hydro power, which are better for only some regions. The government's new policy is aimed at increasing solar-power generation to 20,000 megawatts by 2020 from three megawatts. "The potential is infinite with solar," Mr. Bhargava said.

India's existing policy supports a modest amount of solar-power capacity—50 megawatts—with subsidies of up to 25 cents per kilowatt hour. Mr. Bhargava said that program is already "fully subscribed" and will be expanded substantially through the new policy, though he declined to offer specifics. He said the new guidelines also will streamline the process for solar-power developers to collect subsidies and payments from state utilities.

The major challenge for scaling up solar power has been providing the start-up capital to create demand. Many state electricity boards—which purchase power from generating companies and sell it to consumers—are in shaky financial positions. But Mr. Bhargava said the central government will take on most of the costs of the solar program in the early going. "Initially, we'll have no choice but to do that for a few years," he said.

Beyond expanding solar power, India has pledged in a "national action plan" on climate change to pursue a range of other measures, from increased fuel-efficiency in automobiles to more-efficient consumer appliances.

The U.S. and other developed countries have sought to persuade India to accept mandatory curbs on greenhouse-gas emissions. "Developing countries can't say 'this isn't my problem' ... because most of the increase in carbon emissions in the future will be from developing countries," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who was in India last week to meet with government officials.

But India has resisted, arguing that its per-capita emissions are still well below those of developed countries. Indian officials and corporate executives say they don't want to put the brakes on economic growth and make it harder to provide electricity to 400 millions Indians who aren't on the national grid.

Mr. Chu said India and the U.S. are exploring ways to combine efforts on basic research into new green technologies. He said India could be severely affected by receding glaciers and changing weather patterns if climate change isn't addressed urgently in coming years.

He added that India will have no choice but to look beyond coal to alternative-energy sources as its population swells. India already faces a shortfall of power—with capacity about 12% below demand during peak hours—and demand is expected to increase five-fold by 2030, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. report.

Business as Usual - NIMBY

2009-11-15T06:46:00.001-06:00

Wind farm plan irks activists

As usual everyone wants safe, clean, alternative energy - they just don't want it in their own back yard. NIMBY is just another way to kick the can down the road. Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

A remote corner of East County is shaping up as a battleground between companies pushing wind farms as clean and cheap power generators and activists who view them as a blight on the landscape. It has put environmentalists in the position of opposing renewable energy because, they say, it's in the wrong place.

Drawing the most attention is a plan by the Spanish conglomerate Iberdrola to build about 100 skyscraper-sized towers in and near the McCain Valley, a federal conservation area abutting Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

The project, called Tule Wind, would produce about 200 megawatts when the wind is blowing favorably. To put that in perspective, San Diego County uses about 2,000 megawatts on a typical day and 4,500 megawatts when it gets really hot.

Tule Wind would stretch for miles from a spot about a mile north of Interstate 8, across land controlled by the federal Bureau of Land Management and into the Ewiiaapaayp Indian Reservation.

Iberdrola wants to start construction late next year if it gets past the federal and state approval process. It says the project will bring clean energy to a region that needs it. Environmentalists and residents vow to vigorously fight the plan they say will forever change the area. “There is no worse place for wind development than McCain Valley,” said environmental advocate David Hogan. He and others tie the project to other planned developments nearby, including the Sunrise Powerlink.

The Campo Indian band has made a deal with San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Invenergy, a wind developer, for a 160-megawatt project to add to its 25-turbine, 50-megawatt wind farm visible from Interstate 8.

Just south of the border in Mexico, hundreds of wind turbines are being proposed by San Diego County companies looking to sell the generated power in the United States.

These wind proposals are in addition to two projects SDG&E says are needed to bring that power to market: the $1.9 billion Sunrise Powerlink and a $270 million substation it calls ECO for East County.

The companies are hoping to capitalize on California's requirement that utilities provide 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by next year and 33 percent by 2020. They also stand to benefit from state and federal subsidies.

SignOn, San Diego, By Onell R. Soto

Our Ultimate Canteen - Moon Water

2009-11-14T06:30:00.001-06:00

This artist's rendering of prospecting on the Moon for water.

Water Found on Moon, Researchers Say

There is water on the Moon, scientists stated unequivocally on Friday

“Indeed yes, we found water,” Anthony Colaprete, the principal investigator for NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, said in a news conference. “And we didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount.”

The confirmation of scientists’ suspicions is welcome news to explorers who might set up home on the lunar surface and to scientists who hope that the water, in the form of ice accumulated over billions of years, holds a record of the solar system’s history.

The satellite, known as Lcross (pronounced L-cross), crashed into a crater near the Moon’s south pole a month ago. The 5,600-miles-per-hour impact carved out a hole 60 to 100 feet wide and kicked up at least 26 gallons of water.

We got more than just a whiff,” Peter H. Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator of the mission, said in a telephone interview. “We practically tasted it with the impact.”

The New York Times, By KENNETH CHANG

The Politics of Energy #32 - Water Wars

2009-11-13T04:01:00.001-06:00

The Mighty Brahmaputra River

China dams may hit plans in Arunachal

There is evidence that China is building a number of projects on the Brahmaputra, said a top official at the ministry of water resources who did not want to be identified

livemint.com - Utpal Bhaskar, New Delhi

There’s a new bone of contention between India and China, and it’s water. The Indian government is concerned that the hydroelectric power projects planned in Arunachal Pradesh may be affected by China’s plan to divert water from rivers that flow into the Brahmaputra river to the arid zones of Xinjiang and Gansu.

India’s ministries of water resources and power have expressed their reservations over China’s ambitious $62 billion (Rs2.9 trillion) south-north water diversion scheme as Arunachal Pradesh alone, among the north-eastern states, has a potential to generate 50,328MW of hydropower—the highest in the country, according to the Central Electricity Authority, India’s apex power sector planning body.

China and India, the world’s fastest growing major economies, have been sniping at each other over border issues, including the status of Arunchal Pradesh, an Indian state that China claims. Tensions have also risen after articles in the Chinese media criticizing Indian policy regarding Arunachal Pradesh.

The firms that are developing hydropower projects in Arunachal Pradesh include state-run NHPC Ltd, Reliance-Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (R-Adag)-owned Reliance Energy Ltd, Jaiprakash Associates Ltd, Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL) and GMR Group.

“There is a concern that any construction on the Brahmaputra will affect hydropower generation in Arunachal Pradesh,” said Union power secretary H.S. Brahma. “While 60% of the water in the Brahmaputra comes from India, 40% comes from Tibet. We have to study the impact.”

There is evidence that China is building a number of projects on the Brahmaputra, said a top official at the ministry of water resources who did not want to be identified. “While we expect minimal effect on Assam, hydropower generation on upstream projects in Arunachal Pradesh will get affected,” the official added. “While the issue has been taken up with China, it says it has no (such) plans.”

India’s foreign secretary Nirupama Rao had said on 4 November that China had denied it was building a dam on the Brahmaputra. She was responding to a question on the reported construction at the Zangmu site on the Chinese side of the Brahmaputra, which was confirmed by the National Remote Sensing Agency, according to media reports. “What I want to say is that this matter has been taken up not just once, but on a number of occasions with China, and China has consistently denied that it is engaged in any such construction activity on the Brahmaputra,” Rao said.

The Chinese embassy in New Delhi did not reply to email queries from Mint on the issue. Geopolitical concerns over the sharing of river water make hydropower projects a major challenge, said K. Ramanathan, distinguished fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute. “Projects in Arunachal are anyway difficult to execute. There is a veil of secrecy about the availability of water from international rivers,” he said. “With China planning to divert Brahmaputra water, there will be an impact. How much will be affected is difficult to say. The way forward will be expediting the construction of projects in the North-East over the rivers originating in China to establish prior user commitment.”

Mint had reported on 21 March that the Planning Commission had recommended the accelerated construction of hydropower projects in the North-East on rivers originating in China to establish a certain degree of prior use claim. According to international laws, having a prior use claim strengthens a country’s claim.

S.K. Garg, chairman and managing director of NHPC, said: “We will have to study the impact (of the Chinese dam). It is too early to say anything on this issue at this point of time.” NHPC plans to develop hydropower projects that will generate 6,500MW of power in the state; construction has already begun on the 2,000MW Subansiri lower project.

While spokespersons from JSPL and GMR denied that water diversion in China would affect their projects as the rivers they are to be developed do not originate there, an R-Adag spokesperson declined to comment on the issue. Questions emailed to Jaiprakash Associates on 6 November remained unanswered at the time of filing this story.

Hydropower projects are difficult to build as construction requires more specialized technology and design compared with thermal power projects. They also have to deal with delays in environmental clearances. The hydropower sector accounts for only 32,326MW of India’s 150,000MW power-generating capacity. The country plans to add another 16,501.17MW of total capacity by 2012.

utpal.b@livemint.com

Water Shortages Will Define Economic Growth

2009-11-12T05:57:00.001-06:00

Access to fresh water worldwide is becoming a determinate factor in economic growth; the new alpha. Roughly half of the populations in Third World countries rely on water runoffs from mountain ranges for example - a resource being severely impacted by shrinking glaciers and snow packs. And of course the main factor in all this is that ever more humans are stressing water resources. Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

Venezuelans struggling with water shortages

NPR - ‎Nov 6, 2009‎

by AP Enlarge AP A woman fills barrels with fresh water from a water distribution truck in Filas de Mariches neighborhood in Caracas, Friday, Nov.6, 2009. ...

China Says Hong Kong Drought Support Not Yet Needed

Bloomberg - Sophie Leung, Kelvin Wong - ‎Nov 11, 2009‎

Fresh water for Hong Kong was a concern during British colonial rule, which ended in 1997 with the city's return to China. Local storage was the main source ...

Macau's gambling industry faces nightmare of water rationing

Times Online - ‎Nov 9, 2009‎

Some forecasts suggest that Macau may have only ten days of fresh water left. Stocks of bottled water may have to be shipped in unless a deal can be struck ...

City may use water to lure businesses

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - John Schmid - ‎Nov 2, 2009‎

At a time when regions such as metro Atlanta and the Southwest face acute water shortages, the Milwaukee Water Works operates at only a third of its ...

Would remake California's water system

Central Valley Business Times - ‎Nov 4, 2009‎

“Severe water shortages have forced family farmers in parts of California to spend many sleepless nights, trying to figure out how to save their farms and ..

Global access to safe drinking water likely to decline next year

Water World - ‎Nov 9, 2009‎

Reduced supplies of freshwater resulting from climate change and over use are leaving more nations facing chronic water shortages. ...

The Need for Smart Grids & Redundancy in Power Systems

2009-11-11T03:16:00.000-06:00

Dam failure triggers huge blackout in Brazil

(CNN) -- An important hydroelectric dam shared by Brazil and Paraguay failed Tuesday night, pushing a large swath of central and southern Brazil into darkness, said the country's minister of mines and energy, Edison Lobao.

At about 10:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m. ET), the Itaipu dam shut down completely, Lobao said in a radio interview.

Power began to slowly return Tuesday night, and authorities expected a restoration of power overnight, Lobao said.

An official at Brazil's National Electric System Operator told CNN that the incident at Itaipu caused an outage of 18,000 megawatts. The official declined to be named because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

The outage was approximately equivalent to the amount of energy needed to power the state of Sao Paulo and its 20 million residents, the official said. "Everything's fine," the official said, adding that as Itaipu rebooted, it would repower the affected regions.

Millions of people were affected by the blackout in six Brazilian states that included the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. The capital, Brasilia, was unaffected, CNN en Español reported. Neighboring Paraguay and Uruguay also reported related blackouts, Lobao said.

Rio's main streets and avenues were in a total blackout. Video footage showed long lines of cars at a near standstill on the roads, and the subway system in Rio came to a stop. Itaipu provides more than 20 percent of Brazil's energy.

Red Sun Rising - Solar Power in Space

2009-11-10T06:56:00.000-06:00

Japan Moves to Built Solar Power Capabilities in Space

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) [Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer (USEF)] has announced plans to collect solar power in space.

The Space Solar Power System (SSPS), will position photovoltaic dishes several square miles across and would hover in geostationary orbit outside the Earth’s atmosphere as soon as 2030.

The Japanese government has recently chosen a consortium of companies and scientists charged with implementing this ambitious goal in as little as 20 years. The team, called the Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer (USEF), also includes Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp.

Tadashige Takiya, a spokesman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), told reporters that the beams would then be collected by gigantic parabolic antennae, most likely located in restricted areas at sea or on dam reservoirs.

At this stage, the consortium are hoping to create a one gigawatt system, equivalent to a medium-sized nuclear power plant, that would produce electricity at eight yen (nine cents) per kilowatt-hour, six times cheaper than the current cost in the country.

Tatsuhito Fujita, one of the JAXA researchers heading the project said that within several years, “a satellite designed to test the transmission by microwave should be put into low orbit with a Japanese rocket.”

The next step, scheduled for around 2020, is to launch and test a large flexible photovoltaic structure with 10 megawatt power capacity, to be followed by a 250 megawatt prototype.

Richard L. Wottrich, Blog Editor

The New Energy Equation - Investment Patterns

2009-11-09T15:07:00.006-06:00

By Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

Cascadia Capital LLC has published an alternative energy analysis based upon a Deloitte and Cleantech Group LLC New Energy Finance Report entitled, “Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2009 Report.”

Venture capital investing in clean energy jumped 10 percent between Q209 and Q309, reaching $1.6 billion; VC investing in clean energy has risen steadily this year, albeit from lower levels.

Clean energy was the largest investment category in Q309 for venture capitalists, with a 27 percent share of investments, up from 15 percent in Q109. Increased government spending on clean energy is stimulating private investment in the sector.

The average size of clean energy deals transactions in 2009 is $52.6 million and the 2009 YTD total transaction values are $18 billion.

Cascadia Capital Newsletter

Putting Green Technology Into Bricks

2009-11-08T05:14:00.002-06:00

The Wall Street Journal - Start-Ups Seek to Use Recycled Materials, New Methods to Reinvent Building Materials.

By CARI TUNA

Amid buzz about algae biofuel and electric cars, some start-ups hope to use "green" technology to reinvent more mundane products like bricks and cement.

CalStar Products Inc. plans to open a factory next month to make bricks from fly ash, a byproduct of coal burning. It claims to use roughly 85% less energy than traditional clay brick manufacturing, with an equivalent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions.

The Newark, Calif., start-up is one of many companies scrambling for a slice of the "green" building market, projected to grow to between $96 billion and $140 billion by 2013 from about $45 billion last year, including materials, technology and labor, according to research firm McGraw-Hill Construction.

Currently, the start-ups face a difficult market. Construction spending has plunged, a result of falling home prices and commercial real-estate values. But "the construction that is occurring is more likely to be green," says Michele Russo, a research director at McGraw-Hill Construction.

Some investors are following the same logic. Venture capitalists invested $465 million in the U.S. green-building sector in the first nine months of 2009, compared with $284 million in the year-earlier period, says market-tracker Cleantech Group.

"While the rest of the industry has retreated...green construction has actually grown," says Paul Holland, a partner at venture firm Foundation Capital, which has invested in CalStar.

Other start-ups developing green construction materials include Calera Corp. and Integrity Block Inc., both in California, which make cement and concrete blocks, respectively. Icynene Inc., Mississauga, Ontario, uses castor oil to create a foam insulation spray that is a substitute for fiberglass insulation.
"Innovation is not necessarily discovering new things, but discovering how to use old things in a new way," says Amitabha Kumar, CalStar's director of research and development.

The process for making clay bricks—mining clay, forming it into bricks and firing in kilns using coal or natural gas—has remained largely unchanged for decades, though manufacturers have made improvements to reduce environmental impacts.

CalStar forms its bricks from fly ash—a gray, chalky byproduct of burning coal— and a proprietary stew of chemicals. During eight hours of steam baths, the calcium in the fly ash hardens, making bricks that look, feel and act like their clay counterparts, Mr. Kumar says.

CalStar says the bricks are designed to meet standards set by ASTM International, a standards-setting organization, for things like strength, durability and water absorption—and will be installed in buildings for the first time early next year. CalStar says the bricks will be priced competitively with commercial clay bricks. In Chicago, for instance, its bricks will sell for 53 cents apiece on average, compared with 55 cents on average per commercial clay brick, Calstar says.

Executives at the Brick Industry Association argue that CalStar's fly-ash products aren't bricks by definition, and question whether they'll last as long as clay bricks. "No one knows how the fly-ash unit will really perform," says Dick Jennison, the trade group's president.

Richard Klingner, a civil engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin who sits on the ASTM's panel for brick standards, says the ASTM's standards don't apply to fly-ash bricks. That doesn't mean they are unsuitable for buildings, he says, "it just means that there isn't a standard for them yet."

The Environmental Protection Agency says fly ash is not hazardous and has advocated its reuse in building materials, though an EPA spokeswoman says the agency is reconsidering the classification this year. Most fly ash is mixed into concrete or disposed of in landfills.

CalStar's Caledonia, Wis., factory will recycle fly ash from a neighboring Wisconsin Energy Corp. coal plant, making 40 million bricks annually and shipping only to nearby cities, to minimize carbon-dioxide emissions.

Cement maker Calera aims to capture carbon-dioxide emissions before they are released into the atmosphere. The start-up, is backed by nearly $50 million from Khosla Ventures.

In Moss Landing, Calif., Calera will pipe exhaust fumes from Dynegy Inc.'s natural-gas-burning power plant to its pilot facility, set to open this year, where it will flush the gas through seawater or brackish water. That will produce chalky substances it can use to make cement.

Producing one ton of traditional cement releases roughly one ton of carbon dioxide, says Calera founder Brent Constantz. But making one ton of Calera cement captures half a ton of the greenhouse gas. And like CalStar's bricks, Calera's cement is less expensive to produce than traditional cement, he says.

Write to Cari Tuna at cari.tuna@wsj.com

The Politics of Energy #31 - Red States vs. Blue States vs. China?

2009-11-07T07:10:00.002-06:00

Obama Takes Another Hit From Support Group

Editor's Note: As this blogger has often pointed out, the manufacturing advantages of Emerging Economies such as China do not magically stop when "Green" energy projects are planned and built. Amercians have to decide whether or not they want clean alternative energy choices, or tiangular wars among the politcal parties and Emerging Economy manufacturers. Richard Wottrich)

New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer (Blue) is asking the Obama administration to block millions of dollars in stimulus aid from going to a clean energy wind farm in Texas (Red), because all of the turbines would be made overseas.

Schumer sent a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu calling the plan "quite troubling": "The purpose of the Recovery Act was to jump start the economy to create and save jobs — American jobs. Yet the Texas wind farm project would create an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 clean energy manufacturing jobs in China."

The New York Times reports only about 30 permanent positions would be created in Texas along with 300 temporary jobs; a fact that the liberal Daily Kos Web site is not pleased about: "This is a problem... if we're watching our tax dollars go to finance companies that set up jobs for people overseas I guarantee — guarantee — we're going to see any current support for alternative energy dry up fast."

Wind Power in Texas
The State of Texas currently produces more wind power than any other state according to the American Wind Energy Association. As a potential provider of wind power energy Texas is ranked second overall. Current production statewide is 4356 + MW with projects now under construction expected to increase that by 25%.

Personalized solar units could power homes and cars, M.I.T's Nocera says

2009-11-06T16:13:00.000-06:00

By Eric Mortenson, The Oregonian

Ready to jump off the grid? Researchers believe the day is coming when the electricity you use will be your own. Instead of relying on large central generating stations -- hydroelectric dams, coal plants and the like -- scientists say we're moving toward an era of "personalized solar energy."

A recent issue of the American Chemical Society's journal, Inorganic Chemistry, describes an inexpensive method of solar energy storage that could provide power for homes and plug-in cars.

Solar researcher Daniel Nocera of Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains that the global energy demand will double by mid-century and triple by 2100 as the world population continues to increase and living standards rise. Capturing and storing solar energy could meet the demand, especially in poorer, emerging regions, according to Nocera.

He describes a home solar system with an innovative catalyst that splits water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen that become fuel for producing electricity in a fuel cell.

The oxygen-evolving catalyst works like photosynthesis, the method plants use to make energy, producing clean energy from sunlight and water. "Because energy use scales with wealth, point-of-use solar energy will put individuals, in the smallest village in the nonlegacy world and in the largest city of the legacy world, on a more level playing field," the report says.

Dye-Sensitive Solar Cells (DSSC)

2009-11-05T02:24:00.002-06:00

Chinese National Institutes Sign Collaboration Agreement with G24i to Drive Industrial Development of Dye-Sensitive Solar Cells

Reuters - CAMPBELL, Calif -- Just three weeks after G24 Innovations (G24i) successfully launched the world`s first commercial application of Dye-Sensitive Solar Cells (DSSC), the global pioneer of DSSC announced that it has signed a formal agreement with three of China`s most prestigious institutes to accelerate industrial development of the technology. Continuing its expansion, G24i has signed an agreement with the China National Academy of Nanotechnology & Engineering (CNANE) in Tianjin, together with the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry (CIAC), which is part of the China Academy of Sciences, and the Nanotechnology Industrialization Base of China (NIBC).

Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells are unique in that they are extremely robust, lightweight and durable, and produce electricity in low-light conditions indoors as well as outside. G24i`s DSSC modules are so versatile that they can be used in industries as diverse as personal electronics, building and construction, and military and defense where rugged conditions and wide variations in lighting can apply.

The contract signals the intent of the parties to establish an accelerated growth platform for the industrialization of G24i`s technology. The three national Chinese institutes have agreed to commit their resources to industrializing DSSC with the objective of making significant advances in materials, manufacturing and scientific aspects of G24i`s thin-film solar technology. The agreement comes on the heels of G24i`s debut at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair where the announcement of G24i`s new solar products received widespread attention from industry and top tier media in the region.

Commenting on the signing of the agreement, chief executive officer of G24i, John Hartnett, explained: "This agreement represents a very significant opportunity for G24i to tackle some developmental challenges. With the help of these major Chinese Institutes, we are confident that we can achieve significant cost reductions in the near term and drive commercialization at an even more accelerated pace."

Inventor of the DSSC `Graetzel Cell` and professor at the Swiss institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Dr. Michael Graetzel, lauded the signing of the MOU: "This agreement with G24i is a major step toward inexpensive and large scale commercialization of dye sensitized solar cells."

The commitment to developing DSSC technology runs deep with Professor Peng Wang, the principal investigator of DSSC at CIAC and CNANE. Professor Wang was one of the principal contributors in the development of DSSC during his tenure as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Graetzel`s group at EPFL in Switzerland, and is now China`s leading scientist for high-performance DSSC. He commented, "I am so excited and proud to be bringing Dr. Graetzel`s technology to China in a meaningful way. I am deeply impressed by the advancements G24i has made in being the first to have the capability to mass-produce flexible dye-sensitized solar cells."

China has adopted what is effectively a hybrid model for driving economic development by blending government and market forces with scientific and professional disciplines. Professor Xu Jianzhong is president of CNANE and NIBC, located at China`s Binhai Economic Development Area in Tianjin, and is responsible for seeing that work at CNANE supports the high tech sector in which NIBC must attract industry for job creation. "I want to see manufacturing with technology invented here," emphasizes Xu. "Peng is doing great work here as he builds up his nanotechnology team. However, the research team doesn`t focus on manufacturing and that`s why we want to work together with G24i."

U.S. advanced biofuel sector finds lenders wary

2009-11-04T04:56:00.002-06:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lenders are leery of putting money into cellulosic ethanol and other new-generation biofuels due to the recession and an industry shakeout, Agriculture Department and biofuel leaders said on Thursday.

That is one reason near-term production of advanced biofuels is unlikely to meet targets set by a 2007 energy law, said William Roe of Coskata Inc, which has a demonstration-size biomass plant in Pennsylvania.

Several witnesses at a House Agriculture subcommittee hearing on the future of new-generation biofuels pointed to difficulties in securing credit.

"Given the current recession and the banking sector's financial difficulties, lending has become scarce in the biofuels space," said Susan Ellerbusch, president of BP Biofuels North America.

Agriculture Undersecretary Dallas Tonsager said lenders also were discouraged by an industry shake-out last year that included the bankruptcy of the largest producer due to rising grain costs and a drop in petroleum prices.

Plants with roughly 12 billion gallons of annual capacity are in operation now while 1.2 billion gallons in capacity is idle.

USDA has awarded two loan guarantees totaling $105 million for advanced biofuels projects. Two applications remain under consideration.

Some applicants were rejected because they did not have a lender behind the project, Tonsager said.

New-generation projects often have costs that equal $10 a gallon or more for small-scale plants, well above corn-based ethanol and petroleum. Proponents say costs will drop rapidly for a commercial-size plant and as technology is refined.

Rajiv Shah, Agriculture undersecretary for research, said he was optimistic of a significant improvement over the next five to seven years in the economics of new-generation biofuels. Feedstocks account for one-half to two-thirds of the cost of biofuels, he said, so it is important to develop biomass crops and improvements in converting crops into fuels.

The Politics of Energy #30 - Embarassment of Riches

2009-11-02T21:45:00.005-06:00

It has been a national joke really. For years the wealthy denizens of Nantucket, Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard have fought the building of a wind farm off their coasts because it would “spoil their view.” The Nantucket Sound project, Cape Wind, has survived eight years of tortuous federal and state environmental reviews to prove what Europe has know for decades – wind farms produce safe and clean energy. All the studies were but surrogates for the rich who want nothing to do with clean energy if it impacts their beautiful ocean view homes because, well, that’s just the way they roll.

The only “green” around the region has been ordinary folks green with envy; they call a $100 bill a Nantucket single.

Now after all options had been exhausted, Cape Wind was slated to begin construction of 130 440-foot wind towers when out of the blue the local Wampanoag Native American tribe has asked the Interior Department to declare Nantucket Bay a “traditional cultural property.”

The tribe claims that their culture requires them to meet the sunrise each day with an “unobstructed view.” You can’t make this stuff up!

Years ago the wealthy could pay poor folks to go fight in their place in the Civil War. Centuries ago the wealthy in Europe paid the poor to make the Camino de Santiago de Compostela Pilgrimage - Way of St James - on their behalf to find salvation. Today the wealthy of Nantucket, Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard (Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound) pay Native American tribes to claim their cultural heritage is at risk so the rich can save the view from their ocean homes.

As Marie Antoinette was inaccurately aledged to have said long ago, "Let then eat cake." (Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. J’achetai de la brioche.)

Richard L. Wottrich, Blog Editor

The Politics of Sustainability #4 - "He was a bold man that first ate an oyster."

2009-11-02T05:32:00.002-06:00

(Photo: RLW)

POINT REYS STATION, Calif. - What is sustainability? Is it the perfect balance between humans and their work in harmony with nature? Or is it the preservation of “nature” thrown back to a time before humans arrived?

Point Reyes is a spot of beauty seemingly in perfect harmony between man and nature. Kevin Lunny is the owner of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, a 70-year-old company that predates the park it is in, Point Reyes National Seashore. The company works under a special permit, similar to that utilized by hundreds of such businesses that happened to be within the boundaries of our national parks when created.

The National Park District has said it will not renew Mr. Lunny’s permit when it expires in 2012. Federal law requires them to return the park to an “area of wilderness” by eliminating commercial activity. Does that mean “pre-Native Americans” I wonder.

Environmentalist groups and the federal government are against Mr. Lunny and his oyster farm. Politicians like Senator Dianne Feinstein (D) and local business groups are for the farm. It is an argument born of our marvelous heritage – the national park system. But it is a harbinger of the ultimate question for us here on earth, “How shall humans reach a sustainable balance on earth?”

Drakes Bay Oyster Company produces about 40% of the oysters grown in California. If the company is banned from the park those oysters will likely come from overseas, where sustainability is perhaps not as pressing an issue. When a developed country imports products from Third World countries to avoid despoiling their own shores, how does that help sustainability?

That is the rub really. Where do humans fit in the classic purist vision of pristine wildernesses? There are two billion humans on earth who have nothing – little food – no clean water – no land ownership. What of sustainability for them?

Richard Wottrich, Blog Editor

The Politics of Sustainability #3 - Yemen's Water Crisis A Mideast Warning

2009-11-01T04:08:00.001-06:00

SANA'A, YEMEN - Sanaa may be the first capital city in the world to run out of water. If that happens, it will be a signpost to the conflicts over shrinking resources that scientists and sociologists see coming in the decades ahead.

The ancient city, which dates back to the Sabean dynasty of the 6th century B.C., is expected to run out of drinking water as early as 2025 at current consumption levels, according to the Sanaa Water Basin Management Project funded by the World Bank.

The people of Yemen, which lies on the southwestern tip of the Arabian peninsula, have lived on scarce water resources for centuries. But the current water crisis has been heightened by a rapidly expanding population, accelerating urbanization and the ravages of climate change.

Sanaa's population, currently pegged at 2 million, had quadrupled since the 1980s and is growing by about 8 percent a year, overwhelming the available water supply. The national growth rate last year was 3.46 percent, one of the highest in the world. A decade ago Sanaa got water from 180 wells. These days that's down to 80 as the aquifers dry up.

In 2008 a World Bank report found that groundwater levels across Yemen were dropping by 20-65 feet a year. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted that 19 of Yemen's 21 main aquifers were not being replenished because of lower rainfall.

Many of the people moving into Sanaa are the first wave of what are becoming known as "climate refugees." These are expected to number in the millions in the next few decades as global warming melts polar icecaps, floods coastal regions, accelerates the spread of deserts and destroys farmland.

Much of Yemen's water problem is self-inflicted. An estimated 40 percent of available water is consumed by the cultivation of qat (khat), a leafy stimulant that is chewed by 70 percent of Yemeni males daily. Farmers prefer to grow it for the high profit involved in the narcotics trade.

The government in Sanaa has been unable to do much to ameliorate the crisis. Its authority does not run much beyond Yemen and other major urban centers, and its oil reserves, never particularly big, are running out like the water resources.

It is also grappling with a tribal insurgency in the lawless north, an increasingly volatile secessionist movement in the south and the resurgence of al-Qaida forces in the east.The water shortage is starting to cause civil unrest. Water available across the country, much of it rocky highlands, amounts to 100-200 cubic meters per person per year, well below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic meters.

"We have a water shortage that reflects itself in fighting between the people," says Deputy Planning Minister Hisham Sharaf. "If we continue spending this much water on qat, Sanaa has 10 to 15 years."Yemen's problems are probably more acute than those of other regional states, but not by much, and the danger lies in the seeds of conflict that it contains.

Conditions have been exacerbated by a four-year drought that has affected all of the Middle East, from Iran to Morocco. The urban population drift this has caused is dramatically changing the demographics of the region and putting greater strain on water resources. The subsequent poverty and social discontent this engenders increases the risk of destabilization and armed conflict within and between states. "Water is definitely a security problem in the region," according to Samir Taqi, director of the Orient Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank in Damascus, capital of Syria.

"It's always been this way in the region, but now what's making it of much greater amplitude is that from one side the drought is much heavier, and second, the region itself is much more vulnerable geopolitically speaking."

Editor's Note: China is in Yemen and recently extended $300 million in development loands to Sana'a.)

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Tata Power in JV with Norway firm to build hydropower plants

2009-10-31T05:24:00.001-06:00

Starting with a 600MW project in Nepal, the two companies aim to have an installed capacity to produce 200MW by 2015 and 4,000MW by 2020

Mumbai: - India’s largest private sector power utility Tata Power Co. Ltd on Friday signed an agreement with Norway’s SN Power to jointly build hydropower plants in India and Nepal.

Starting with a 600MW project in Nepal, the two companies aim to have an installed capacity to produce 200MW by 2015 and 4,000MW by 2020, the utilities said.

Tata Power executive director S. Ramakrishnan said the firm plans to invest Rs15,000 crore till 2015 to generate hydroelectricity. “It will be a 70:30 investment-to-debt ratio with around Rs4,500 crore coming from equity, which will be shared by both the companies,” Ramakrishnan said.

SN Power has a licence to generate hydropower in Nepal, procured in 2006 through its majority owned company, Himal Power Ltd, and is generating 68MW of power, said Nadia Sood, its executive vice-president, South Asia. In India, the firm has a joint venture to generate 86MW of power in Himachal Pradesh.

The deal will allow Tata Power to diversify away from coal-fired plants. It has an installed capacity to generate 2,900MW, mostly thermal-based.

liveMINT.com The Wall Street Journal by Joel Rebello

Is Energy the Key to China’s Brand Name Dreams?

2009-10-30T07:27:00.002-06:00

By Michael Kanellos, Seeking Alpha

For the past several years, China has wanted to see its companies become more than just anonymous manufacturers in the background. And it seems that alternative energy is giving the country that chance.

Chinese companies are moving rapidly from providing products to acting as integral partners in energy projects in the U.S. China's A-Power Generation (APWR) today announced that it will provide the wind turbines for a $1.5 billion, 600-megawatt wind farm in Texas. The farm itself is being developed by a joint venture formed by Shenyang Power Group, the U.S. Renewable Energy Group and Cielo Wind Power. Shenyang will own 49 percent of the project. Jinxiang Lu is CEO of both SPG and A-Power. Commercial banks in China will provide financing.

The deal marks the first large-scale contract for wind turbines for a Chinese company in the U.S. and the second deal this month that will lead to power plants that will be built and/or operated with Chinese participation in the U.S. In these deals, Chinese companies are effectively going to provide the value-added types of services typically provided by U.S., Japanese or European companies. These deals also give Chinese banks something to do while China gears up.

"Chinese banks are currently not actively lending in the Chinese project finance market due to uncertainty about government regulation; however, Chinese banks are looking to be more active in lending to international projects," wrote Sanjay Shrestha in a research note from Lazard Capital Markets this weeik.

Does this mean that more U.S. jobs are going overseas? Not necessarily, but it might mean working for the U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese company one day.

Last week, China's ENN, which makes thin-film solar panels and develops solar farms, announced it was teaming up with Duke Energy Generation Services to bid on contracts for utility-scale solar farms and large commercial solar projects in the U.S. Duke will bring its expertise in navigating through public hearings and the legal hurdles of getting large-scale projects off the ground along with technology for building them to the 50/50 partnership, while ENN will provide expertise for building solar farms and possibly solar panels, said a Duke spokesman. The various projects could employ panels from different vendors.

Until recently, Chinese companies – Suntech (STP), Upsolar, JA Solar (JASO), Grape Solar – have largely confined their activities in the U.S. to selling equipment like solar panels.

China's presence in the U.S. energy market, though, has been growing. Suntech last year formed Gemini Solar Development with MMA Renewable Ventures to build power plants. Gemini has already landed a deal with Austin Energy.

Suntech, arguably, has become the first company from China to establish a brand in the U.S. Suntech is one of the largest suppliers of solar panels in the U.S. Haier, the Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer, has been selling consumer electronics under its own brand for a few years and even has marketed products with the NBA, but Haier rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Samsung or Sony (SNE).

Chinese universities and companies have also signed research agreements with their U.S. counterparts.

A few deals have gone the other way. Earlier this year, First Solar signed a deal to build a 2-gigawatt solar farm in China. As part of the deal, First Solar (FSLR) will share some of its expertise on building large solar farms with Chinese officials and companies. The U.S. government is also pressuring China to open its market for export.