Solar Power Heading Mainstream  

The SMH has a report from Reuters on solar power going mainstream as manufacturing capacity soars in China. The piece includes a quote from Travis Bradford of "The Solar Revolution" fame.

Solar power should become a mainstream energy choice in three or four years as companies raise output of a key ingredient used in solar panels and as China emerges as a producer of them, according to a report by an environmental research group. "We are now seeing two major trends that will accelerate the growth of photovoltaics: the development of advanced technologies, and the emergence of China as a low-cost producer," Janet Sawin, a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute and an author of report, said in a statement.

Investors have flocked to solar and other renewable energy sources amid worries about the high costs of oil and natural gas and greenhouse gas emissions. Solar is the fastest growing energy source, but still provides less than one per cent of the world's electricity, in part because its power can cost homeowners twice as much as power from the grid. But costs could fall 40 per cent in the next few years as polysilicon becomes more available, Sawin said. ...

In some of the world's sunniest places, like California, electricity from solar panels costs the same as power from the grid. A drop in solar panel prices could expand that to places that only get average sunlight, making solar more of a mainstream choice, Sawin said in an email. Last year, China passed the United States to become the world's third largest producer of solar panels, trailing only Germany and Japan.

"To say that Chinese PV producers plan to expand production rapidly in the year ahead would be an understatement," Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute, a Massachusetts-based group that promotes renewables, said in a release. "They have raised billions from international IPOs to build capacity and increase scale with the goal of driving down costs," said Bradford, who helped write the report.

Many companies are producing thin-film solar technologies that cut the amount of silicon used in panels. Thin-film could grab a 20 per cent share of the market by 2010, up from 7 per cent of the market in 2006, the report said.

Renewable Energy Access has an article on China's solar powered city - where solar hot water is the norm. I suspect in 10 years time a lot of these greened Chinese cities will have solar panels on most buildings and solar thermal power stations in the nearby countryside.

Buildings in Rizhao, a coastal city of nearly three million on the Shandong Peninsula in northern China, have a common yet unique appearance: most rooftops and walls are covered with small panels. They are solar heat collectors.

In Rizhao City, which means City of Sunshine in Chinese, 99 percent of households in the central districts use solar water heaters, and most traffic signals, street and park lights are powered by photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. In the suburbs and villages, more than 30 percent of households use solar water heaters, and over 6,000 households have solar cooking facilities. More than 60,000 greenhouses are heated by solar panels, reducing overhead costs for farmers in nearby areas.

In total, the city has over a half-million square meters of solar water heating panels, the equivalent of about 0.5 megawatts of electric water heaters.

The fact that Rizhao is a small, ordinary Chinese city with per capita incomes even lower than in most other cities in the region makes the story even more remarkable. The achievement was the result of an unusual convergence of three key factors: a government policy that encourages solar energy use and financially supports research and development, local solar panel industries that seized the opportunity and improved their products, and the strong political will of the city's leadership to adopt it.

As is the case in industrial countries that promote solar power, the Shandong provincial government provided subsidies. Instead of funding the end users, however, the government funded the research and development activities of the solar water heater industry. Mayor Li Zhaoqian explained: "It is not realistic to subsidize end users as we don't have sufficient financial capacity." Instead, the provincial government invested in the industry to achieve technological breakthroughs, which increased efficiency and lowered the unit cost.

The cost of a solar water heater was brought down to the same level as an electric one: about $190, which is about 4-5 percent of the annual income of an average household in town and about 8-10 percent of a rural household's income. Also, the panels could be simply attached to the exterior of a building. Using a solar water heater for 15 years costs about 15,000 Yuan less than running a conventional electric heater, which equates to saving $120 per year.

A combination of regulations and public education spurred the broad adoption of solar heaters. The city mandates all new buildings to incorporate solar panels, and it oversees the construction process to ensure proper installation. To raise awareness, the city held open seminars and ran public advertising on television. Government buildings and the homes of city leaders were the first to have the panels installed. Some government bodies and businesses provided free installation for employees, although the users pay for repairs and replacement.

After 15 years of effort, it seems the merit of using a solar heater has become common sense in Rizhao, and "you don't need to persuade people anymore to make the choice," according to Wang Shuguang, a government official. Widespread use of solar energy reduced the use of coal and help improve the environmental quality of Rizhao, which has consistently been listed in the top 10 cities for air quality in China.

Meanwhile the Australian reports that the coal industry is desperately seeking enormous handouts of taxpayer money to try and stay competitive. There were also several advertisements in todays press - a full pager for Queensland's FutureGen project and another large one for the BP / Rio Tinto joint venture. How they plan to deal with the risk of a huge carbon dioxide burp wiping out life over wide areas still seems to be a subject that is best swept under the carpet. I'm thinking of calling the clean coalers the "Cult of Lake Nyos" from now on.

Leaving aside the current difficulties in obtaining good quality pipes (one more global warming feedback loop in play in the form of GOM hurricane damage creating a shortage of pipes and thus afflicting plans to pipe water to the Queensland power stations currently running at 30% capacity due to limited water supplies as they are having trouble getting enough pipes of the right quality), another issue I remember from the Norwegian experience at Sleipner was corrosion of the pipelines by the CO2 - as a lot of anti-corrosion work needs to be done this is going to be an expensive set of pipelines. Why should my tax money be put into it when it could be put back in my pocket instead and spent on clean power sources that are a lot more cost effective and less risky in the long run ?

THE coal industry is pushing for a national plan to construct the thousands of kilometres of pipeline needed to ferry carbon dioxide emissions around the country to underground geological formations. The sector will also be looking to federal and state governments to help shoulder the cost of building the network.

Yesterday, resource giants BP and Rio Tinto launched a $2 billion project to build, in Western Australia, the country's first project aimed at gasifying coal emissions and burying them deep underground in a process called carbon sequestration. But the key to keeping Australia's coal power viable in a carbon-constrained world will be developing giant underground storage reservoirs along the country's coal-rich east coast. This will involve developing a massive pipeline network.

While there are plenty of suitable geologically formed storage sites around the country, they are not always where the power stations or coal resources are. In Victoria, coal emissions are likely to be pumped into oil and gas wells in the Bass Strait. NSW and Queensland generators face having to pipe emissions hundreds of kilometres to geological formations in the west.

"You are looking at building long pipelines and they will be common-user pipelines," Australian Coal Association chief executive officer Mark O'Neill said. "The infrastructure network is something we'd like to see in a national plan," he said, suggesting development under the banner of the Council of Australian Governments.

One of the reasons the coal industry is sceptical about the Queensland Government's own $1 billion ZeroGen coal gasification and sequestration plan is that it involves piping the carbon dioxide from the Stanwell power plant in Rockhampton, some 220km away, for geological storage in the west, near Emerald.

TreeHugger (prompted by the ABC) has a report on a wave power proposal from Seapower Pacific to drive the latest Perth desalination plant.

Perth, Western Australia, as we’ve noted before, is considered the most remote city on the planet. And one thing they are running out of, like much of drought declared Australia is fresh drinking water. Plans are in train to provide a chunk of this via a desalination plant, but such facilities do require a hefty amount of energy to run. Wind is being considered. But a new alternative hopes it might get a look in.

Inventor Alan Burns has his idea with Seapower Pacific (Carnegie), who’ve invested $10 million AUD on R&D to bring the concept towards the market. In brief: hypalon bladders are affixed to a piston that moves inside a tube secured to the seabed. As the ocean swell ebbs and flows the bladders rise and fall providing momentum to the piston. It subsequently pumps high pressure sea water to an onshore desalination plant. Some of the pressurised water can be then used to spin a turbine, generating power for the the production of freshwater.

The intention is to have a forest of these bladder thingees (called CETO) fill an area 2 km x 60m about 8km offshore. Unlike many other wave energy devices, everything is underwater and operates in a passive rather than resistive mode. Apparently the CETOs are relatively simple to manufacture and transport, and their component materials have a proven 20 year submerged life. An independent technology assessment says the concept has significant potential and more trials are now underway with commercial units planned for 2009.

TreeHugger also reports that there will be no carbon trading scheme proposed at APEC (maybe they'll do the right thing and propose carbon taxes instead !).

Australia was developing a regional carbon trading scheme, which would have included China and the US. It was to present it at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum leaders' summit in Sydney in September.

However, it now seems as though the plan has been dropped. Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, said an agreement between all the nations was unlikely. "You need to understand that in terms of an emissions trading scheme, both China -- particularly China -- and the United States -- and I think .... there would be some smaller countries in the region which might share this view -- have been opposed to establishing an emissions trading scheme."

Despite this apparent set-back, Prime Minister John Howard has recently gone on record as believing some type of scheme is inevitable. Indeed, he has commissioned an inquiry into the effects on the Australian economy of a carbon trading scheme in preperation.

The SMH has an article reporting that the US is trying to freeze climate change talks at the G8.

THE United States is battling to stop next month's Group of Eight summit in Germany from pushing for urgent talks on a new deal to fight global warming after the Kyoto Protocol lapses in 2012. In a draft of the final communique for the June 6-8 summit seen by Reuters, the Bush Administration wants references to the urgency of the climate crisis taken out as well as the need for a United Nations conference in Bali in December to open talks on a new global deal.

According to the draft, the US wants the following paragraphs deleted: "We firmly agree that resolute and concerted international action is urgently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and sustain our common basis of living.

"To this end we will, in the face of the UN Climate Change Conference at the end of this year, send a clear message on the further development of the international regime to combat climate change."

The increasingly erratic Rodent is being accused of bizarre behaviour as he tries to dodge voter annoyance over global warming, rising energy prices, the drought, Iraq and numerous other government outrages over the past decade.

Labor has accused Prime Minister John Howard of behaving bizarrely in his attempts to turn around opinion polls. Opposition MPs say Mr Howard's warning to colleagues of being annihilated is the latest in a series of attempts win back favour with voters.

"Last week the Prime Minister said it was all a joke, this week he says he's going to be annihilated," treasury spokesman Wayne Swan told reporters in Canberra today. "The only thing that's going to be annihilated around here is taxpayers' money."

Mr Swan said the Prime Minister was indulging in blatant political advertising campaigns to improve his short-term prospects instead of the long-term national interest. "I think that's pretty evident from his bizarre behaviour in recent days. We started off with the smear campaign back in February, then we had the fear campaign, now of course we've got the ad campaign."

Mr Swan said Mr Howard's short-term approach was why opinion polls had turned against the Government.

Grist has a guest piece by Timothy E. Wirth, Vinod Khosla and John D. Podesta on how new energy rules could unleash an economic boom and help quash climate change.

In 1997, as the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change was being negotiated, the U.S. Senate voted, 95-0, to reject any agreement that "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States." The senators were acting on the widespread fear that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy would hurt American businesses and cost millions of jobs. Those were the beliefs and the politics of the times.


But times change. Ten years later, it's increasingly clear that it will be more costly not to act on global warming than to act. Clean, renewable, efficient energy will not be a burden but a boon -- the next in a series of revolutions, beginning with telecom and digital that have invigorated our economy with new ideas, new industries, and new jobs.

Voters, investors, activists, business leaders, and policy experts are pushing for clean energy to create jobs, limit climate change, and reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. And yet, progress is slow: oil imports and carbon emissions continue to rise. Why?

Because the rules of the game -- the laws, regulations, subsidies, and tax credits that shape the energy market and the way it acts -- continue to make fossil fuels a less expensive, more convenient choice for consumers. These rules are both the heart of the problem, and the key to a solution.

In 1931, Thomas Edison met with Henry Ford, whose popular cars were driving up demand for gasoline, and told him: "I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."

Seventy-four years later, the three largest technology IPOs of 2005 were solar-energy companies. We're finally catching up with Edison.

Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems, says that clean energy is where we'll find "the Googles, the Microsofts of the new era." Venture capitalist John Doerr -- whose firm, Kleiner Perkins, got rich investing early in companies like Google, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems, has called clean energy "the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century."

They base these predictions, in part, on advances in technology. Wind power now costs about 5 percent of what it did 25 years ago. Solar energy costs are down more than 90 percent since 1970. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory says that the price of renewable energy will drop another 45 percent over the next 20 years. Indeed, this estimate may be low, given that scientists like Craig Venter, who cracked the human genome, and Steven Chu, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics, have turned their attention to clean energy. ...

The rules we have now encourage the use of energy -- especially oil and electricity. For most of the 20th century, this was smart policy. Electrification of the U.S. economy produced huge gains in productivity and quality of life. The increased mobility of people, goods, and services had similar benefits. Using more energy did not make us dependent on foreign oil. As late as 1940, the U.S. produced 63 percent of the world's oil, compared to the 5 percent that came from the Middle East.

But the world is very different today. Geologists estimate that the Middle East has over 60 percent of the world's oil reserves, the U.S. just three. And carbon dioxide emissions from our power plants and vehicles are wrecking the world's climate. The rules need to change.

The rules today give oil and gas companies -- the most profitable industry in the history of the world -- billions of dollars in tax breaks and research subsidies. The rules do not factor in the indirect costs of oil -- the cost of protecting oil supply lines to the Middle East, the cost of oil price shocks that lead to recessions, and the cost of intensified storms that make coastal property uninsurable. Insurers have priced insurance in Florida so high that the state has stepped in and pledged tens of billions of dollars in public money if a major hurricane strikes -- despite the fact that neither the state's catastrophe fund nor the state-chartered insurance company has anywhere near enough money to pay the claims.

The rules perpetuate our energy habits. Auto companies sell cars that get as little as 13 miles per gallon -- something they could never do in Europe, Japan, or even China. Utility companies make more money when their customers waste energy and less when they save it. Developers build with energy-inefficient materials because they don't have to pay the utility bills. And power plants use the atmosphere as a free garbage dump for their global-warming emissions.

We need new rules that will make the best choice for the country also the best choice for consumers.

We don't have to undo investments we have already made. We don't need to take old cars off the road or shut down coal-fired power plants prematurely. But the next investments we make -- the next cars and buildings we design, the next power plants we build -- should follow new rules that reflect our need for clean, renewable, efficient energy. ...

Many of our economic competitors are moving more quickly than the United States to capitalize on the new jobs and new industries that will come with clean energy -- Japan and Germany in particular.

Japan, which has very limited fossil-fuel resources, has supported solar energy with government research-and-development funds and a decade-long subsidy for consumers who install solar panels. Germany, since the late 1980s, has supported wind and solar energy with tax breaks and a tariff that guarantees renewable-energy producers a competitive price. Cornelia Viertl, a senior adviser at the German Federal Environment Ministry, explains: "We feel there's a chance for Germany to be innovative, to create an industry and possibly be the leader."

Because of their rules, our competitors are farther along than the United States in the transition from old energy to new energy, and they have captured most of the growth and jobs along the way. Just 10 years ago, the United States produced 44 percent of the world's solar cells; today its market share is less than 10 percent. Japan is now the world leader, producing 43 percent of the world's solar-energy products. Europe, meanwhile, produces 90 percent of the world's wind turbines. Brazil, where the government requires all gasoline to contain ethanol, has led the way on biofuels.

Even Abu Dhabi is getting into the game. The oil-rich emirate recently pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward developing alternatives to fossil fuels. In the past year, it has announced plans to build a 500-megawatt solar power plant -- the first in the Middle East -- and has also announced a partnership with MIT to develop a research center for the study of clean energy technology. They're not just out to get the industries and jobs that we want here, they're using our oil payments and our intellectual power to help them do it.

We still have a chance to reassert our leadership. Our educated workforce, top-level universities, and culture of innovation still position us to capitalize as the world moves to clean energy. We have to decide whether we're going to lead the world -- and claim the economic benefits -- or follow, and send money to other countries for clean energy technology, in the same way that we now send money to the Middle East for oil.

The Rule Changes

The future of energy is not terribly complicated to envision:

* Clean energy: We'll use new, renewable sources of energy: more biofuels and less oil, more wind and solar, and less coal and natural gas.
* Energy efficiency: Our homes, office buildings, cars, and appliances will require less energy, and we'll have better ways to manage that use. ...
* A "smarter" grid: Digital technology will finally come to the electric power grid, making it more efficient, more reliable, and better able to draw on renewable resources. It should become a national grid, like our highway system, so any renewable or non-renewable electricity generated in any part of the country can be transmitted to market. ...


All the arguments against action -- from "global warming is not proven" to "India and China have to go first" -- share the same assumption: that accelerating the move to clean energy will impose huge economic costs on the country. That's a false premise. As soon as we get the rules right, we will create a multibillion-dollar market for new products and technologies here in this country. The sooner we create that market, the sooner companies will emerge to profit from it. Any delay simply forfeits an economic advantage to countries that are more far-sighted in setting their rules.

Of course, if you don't like lots of rules, you could just introduce a carbon tax, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and cut back on income taxes...

"Biopact" has an article claiming "Brazilian biofuels can meet world's total gasoline needs". Of course, you'd probably need to shop down the entire Amazonian rainforest and import an enormous army of slaves to man the fields, and one day the whole thing would turn into a dustbowl. But since when have minor problems like that stooped anyone ?

The business of projecting the technical biofuels potential of a given region is extremely complex because it is dependent on so many uncertain factors and sub-projections (population growth, GDP, food, meat, wood and fuel demand projections, advances in technology, effects of climate change on agriculture, and so on). All these factors determine how much land will ultimately be available for energy cropping.

Still, a handful of experts study the matter in-depth and arrive at projections and scenarios that may differ considerably from those of their collegues. One of the new and highly optimistic estimates is made by professor Luis Cortez, Vice-Coordinator on a project for the expansion of ethanol production in Brazil and a professor at the State University of Campinas.

Currently, Brazil uses only 0.8% of its entire territory (8.5 million square kilometres) for the production of biofuels - an insignificant patch of land, so to speak. But if it were to cultivate energy crops for biofuels on a quarter of its territory (around 212 million hectares), the country could supply the entire world's current gasoline needs (which stand at around 24 million barrels per day).

This projection is based on the idea that second and third generation biofuels become viable. Such biofuels, based on the use of entire crops the lignocellulose of which is transformed via biochemical and/or thermochemical conversion techniques, would double the output per hectare of land for sugarcane. There are some indications that second generation biofuels may enter the market sooner than expected: Dedini SA, Brazil's main ethanol plant manufacturer recently announced a breakthrough in cellulosic ethanol production, which increased the output of a hectare of sugarcane by 30%. A doubling of the output is expected in the coming years (earlier post). Moreover, such a scenario would also entail the introduction of new, high yielding energy crops designed specifically for particular environments, as well as new forms of livestock production (no grazing on pastures).

Tyler Hamilton has hopped about the terra preta bandwagon with a Toronto Star article called "Biochar turns a negative positive".

Charcoal – it's great for barbequing hamburgers and hot dogs over a long weekend. But can it help save humanity?

Dozens of scientists who gathered in Australia three weeks ago for the first annual International Agrichar Initiative conference say that making "char" and burying it in soil – a process called "sequestration" – could prove a valuable approach to managing climate change.

It seems an odd suggestion, but early research shows that "agrichar" or "biochar" sequestration not only keeps carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere, it can actually extract it and contribute to the goal of reducing atmospheric concentrations. Instead of being "carbon neutral," the storage of biochar in soil is being dubbed as "carbon negative."

"Our calculations suggest that emissions reductions can be 12 to 84 per cent greater if biochar is put back into the soil instead of being burned to offset fossil-fuel use," Johannes Lehmann, an associate professor of crops and soil sciences at Cornell University, wrote in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature.

Lehmann, a co-chair of the Australian conference and one of the leading experts on biochar sequestration, said the potential could be huge but more study is necessary. In fact, a keynote speaker at the conference was scientist Tim Flannery, author of the top-selling book on global warming, The Weather Makers, who has become a vocal supporter.

To better understand the concept of biochar sequestration, it's important to distinguish between an approach that's carbon "neutral" and one that's "negative." ...

Biochar sequestration, by comparison, is considered carbon negative because it results in a net decrease in atmospheric CO{-2}. The idea behind it is that part of the biomass, instead of being completely burned, is turned into carbon-rich char through a process called pyrolysis, which essentially bakes the biomass in the absence of oxygen.

In fact, pyrolysis turns material such as wood chips and crop waste into three main components: gas (methane and hydrogen), a renewable "bio-oil" that can be used as a fuel or for "green" chemical production, and a char that contains roughly 60 per cent of the carbon contained in the biomass.

Everything from chicken droppings to municipal organic waste could be partially converted into these components through pyrolysis.

Canadian companies such as Dynamotive Energy Systems, Agri-THERM, and Advanced Biorefinery are experts in the pyrolysis field, but the char has held little value to them. They use the gas and bio-oil as replacements for fossil fuels and they burn the char to help power the pyrolysis process – though all are carbon neutral uses.

What Lehmann and his colleagues are suggesting is that the char, considered highly stable and resistant to chemical breakdown over hundreds of years, be mixed with topsoil. This permanently removes that carbon from the plant lifecycle and, as a result, achieves a net reduction of atmospheric carbon – that is, it's carbon negative.

Tom Konrad has "A Hard Look at the Ethanol Industry" at EE/RE Investing, which introduces the interesting concepts of Energy Net Present Value (ENPV) and Energy Internal Rate of Return (EIRR).

My weekly column for AltEnergyStocks again doubles as part of my study for the second CFA(R) exam. The Equity valuation part of the curriculum contains a chapter by Michael Porter on analyzing competitive pressures in an industry. I decided to apply it to the corn based Ethanol industry, and, as often is the case, it changed my way of thinking about the industry. I’ve never been bullish, because I worry about a classic commodity squeeze: both ethanol and the main feedstock (corn) are commodities, and are subject to forces outside the industry which effect their prices. For instance, if corn harvests were to be poor because of drought or pests, at the same time that oil prices fell, many ethanol producers would be forced out of business because their costs exceed their selling prices.

I also went on a little rant about the typical measures of Energy Payback and Energy Return on Energy Investment (ERoEI) often used in the industry. These measures are often used to criticize ethanol, but it is a weak criticism, because they do not take into account the time value of energy: namely that a kWh of electricity today is a lot more useful than a kWh produced 30 years from now. We should instead be thinking in terms not only of how much energy we have to use to get energy out, but also in terms of how soon we get that energy.

I propose a couple measures, of Energy Net Present Value (ENPV) and Energy Internal Rate of Return (EIRR) which I think would give us a clearer view of the undying energy economics (and hence the potential economic profitability) of various energy production technologies. But that is a column for another week. ...

The Energy Blog notes that "Off the Grid Is A Growing Trend".

From the International Herald Tribune -- A growing number of Americans are shunning power lines, choosing to live "off the grid," without commercial power — and still enjoying their computers and large-screen televisions. ... Off-the-grid living is edging into the American mainstream. About 180,000 homes, mostly in the West, operate on it, though the power industry has not yet felt the shift. ...

But the number of people going off the grid increases by about a third each year, said Richard Perez, who publishes Home Power magazine, and Lori Ryker, who has written two books on the subject. ...

In the 250-home Oregon community of Three Rivers, everyone gets most of their power from solar panels on their rooftops or on nearby structures positioned to more efficiently capture the sun. ... living off the grid is not cheap. High demand for solar panels and improved technology has kept the price up, and Three Rivers homeowners say an advanced solar energy system can cost $25,000 (€18,496) for the panels, batteries, inverter and other equipment. The federal government and most states offer tax credits. ...

[In some places] Some supplement the solar power with windmill-generated energy. ...

Residents with wells need generators for their pumps, and propane powers high-demand appliances such as stoves.

Beyond that, the sun does the job.

Distributed energy at its best. 180,000 homes is a very small number when compared to the total population of the U.S., but by increasing by a third each year this could turn into a more significant number. Although expensive there are millions of people who could afford it. The significance to me is that we have the technology to do it and prices are going down. The trend should really accelerate after 2010 when solar power prices start to drop significantly.

The Energy Blog also has a post on "Project Hydra" and the development of a secure super grid for New York. Cryptogon has a less mainstream interpretation of this news.

American Superconductor Corporation (AMSC) (NASDAQ: AMSC) and Consolidated Edison, Inc. (Con Ed) (NYSE: ED) have teamed with the Department of Homeland Security on a project to protect New York's power grid with surge suppressing superconductor cable technology.

Work has started on what is expected to be a $39.3 million project for Con Ed to develop and deploy new high temperature superconductor (HTS) power grid technology in Con Ed’s network in New York City. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is expected to invest up to $25 million in the development of this technology to enable “Secure Super Grids” in the United States. Secure Super Grids utilize customized HTS wires, HTS power cables and ancillary controls to deliver more power through the grid while also being able to suppress power surges that can disrupt service.

Concurrently AMSC introduced a new surge-suppressing, high-capacity superconductor power grid technology – a system-level solution that increases the capacity of power grids while also being able to rapidly suppress power surges. This technology is expected to significantly enhance the capacity, security and efficiency of electric power infrastructures in urban and metropolitan areas around the world, enabling “Secure Super Grids.”

Many companies around the world including AMSC have been working to develop stand-alone superconductor fault current limiters that are capable of suppressing power surges – or “fault currents” – to prevent damage to expensive electrical equipment in today’s power grids. AMSC’s Secure Super Grids technology is the first to combine the benefits of high capacity HTS cables and fault current limiters in one system, providing compelling space and cost advantages, particularly for urban and metropolitan areas. AMSC expects the global market for this technology and stand-alone fault current limiters will exceed a billion dollars annually.

“Project Hydra” as the Con Ed Secure Super Grids project has been code named by DHS, in honor of the multiheaded mythical Greek monster, utilize multiple paths for electricity flow in city power grids to ensure system reliability when individual circuits are disrupted due to severe weather, traffic accidents or willful destruction. In addition, they utilize the special properties of superconductors to not only relieve grid congestion, but also instantly suppress power surges that often damage utility equipment and disrupt customer service. The deployment of a commercial high-capacity, surge-suppressing HTS cable system in New York City is projected for completion in three years, concurrent with Con Ed’s “System of the Future” grid enhancement plans. The project will occur in two phases.

The project’s first phase, which is now underway, focuses on the development and operation of a prototype system. Testing of the first Secure Super Grid system is targeted for completion by the end of 2008.

Commenter Paul Dietz offers the following interpretation:

I would think this was intended to help protect against interference with the power grid itself, by providing a redundant feed to a critical area. Superconducting technology is relevant because under major cities the space in tunnels is limited, and SC cables are more space efficient (as well as not putting a thermal load on the tunnel system).

Reuters reports that Russia is cranky about American plans to sue OPEC.

Russia said the US House of Representatives broke international law when voting to approve a bill to allow the US government to sue OPEC and similar organisations for price manipulations. ... The bill would revoke the sovereign immunity OPEC members currently enjoy from US legal action and allow the Justice Department to sue them in US courts. The White House threatened to veto the bill saying it could spur crude oil and petrol prices higher, and that foreign nations would likely retaliate by limiting US access to global oil supply.

Russia, the world's second largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, has repeatedly said it would not join OPEC. But the country, which is also the world's largest gas producer and supplier of a quarter of Europe's gas, shocked the West last year when it said broader cooperation was needed between gas producing nations. A meeting of top gas exporters in Qatar last month, which also involved Iran, Algeria and Venezuela, ended without any formal agreement to form an OPEC-style group.

Mobjectivist has an update to his Discovery/Shock model.

Khebab posted a discovery profile that demonstrates how backdating affects the historical record. Basically, much like what happens with economic metrics, what gets reported today may grow in the future.

We can clearly make out a peak in the early 1960's. We compare it to the well-known smoothed discovery profile superimposed on an oil production curve popularized by Laherrere.

I fit a yearly discovery model to Khebab's backdated data assuming a cubic growth model of constrained limit 3430 billion barrels (D0) and an acceleration term of 0.033 (k).

dD/dt = 4kt3*(1-exp(-D0/kt4)*(1+D0/kt4))

The green curve below shows discovery growth and decline superimposed on the non-backdated data in red. Note that reserve growth will conservatively fill in the tails to the right of the peak according to the model.

For the shock model production curve, I applied the discovery model as stimulus and used the perturbations in the extraction rate as shown below.

The blue and black curves suggest two possible future trends, a status quo on extraction rate starting at year 2005 that leads to an immediate decline or a monotonic increase in extraction rate that will stretch the peak out slightly beyond the 2020 time frame. In the past I had used extraction rates approximately double those shown, but I had little insight into a discovery model at the time that could predict potential in reserve growth nor did I have a straw-man extrapolated curve from pre-war discoveries. The extra cushion provided by a gradual modification of extraction rate makes me believe that we could keep up an undulating plateau for several years. In fact, just by increasing the extraction rate linearly to 0.035 until 2050, we could likely achieve a plateau until 2025 and a faster decline thereafter. This always boils down to the adage "pay me now or pay me later"; whatever extra production we can get now eventually comes back to bite us as a steeper decline on the backside.

Discovery/shock model superimposed on Laherrere's graph

The big if remains whether the discovery model will correctly predict the backdated reserve growth. The equivalent URR that I fit to, 3.44 trillion barrels, reflects a value significantly higher than the 2.7 often bandied about. You can see how conservative this estimate becomes when plotted against another of Laherrere's graphs of cumulative discoveries (which has a URR of only 2.0 trillion barrels).

After doing this exercise, as you can probably tell, I've become even more of a fan of the term "undulating plateau". The cushion of potential discoveries in the future provides a modicum of slack to keep on doing what we do as consumers. Enough slack in the rope, perhaps, to hang ourselves with.

Tom Paine has a look at the various US presidential candidates and their proposed energy policies. Peak Energy favourites Al Gore and Ron Paul don't rate a mention (the former because he hasn't decided to run and the second - well - he's not as strong on environment policy as he is on liberty - but at least he's anti-resource war, and probably anti-oil industry subsidies, unlike the rest of the Republican waterboard brigade).

Confronted with the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, rising gas prices and the "inconvenient truth" of global warming, Americans are looking for leadership on energy independence and the threat posed by catastrophic climate change. Even George Bush, Big Oil's pocketed president, now pays lip service to the need to end our "addiction to oil." But with his policies making us more, not less, dependent on foreign oil, energy will be at the center of the 2008 campaign. The question is whether the presidential candidates have caught up with the voters.

Energy independence now rivals health care as the top domestic concern. In an April Center for American Progress poll, 60 percent of Americans supported bold action on global warming. A staggering 79 percent believe shifting to alternative energy sources will help the economy and create, not cost, jobs. Voters think the United States is falling behind other countries, and they want government to lead.

This consensus has yet to penetrate Republican presidential campaigns. While the GOP candidates nod rhetorically to the importance of energy independence, they offer little policy vision and few proposals. Frontrunner Rudy Giuliani doesn't mention energy, climate change or the environment in the issue section of his website—a bizarre omission for someone pitching a campaign on his ability to wage a smart "war on terror." Mitt Romney echoes Dick Cheney, pitting the economy against clean energy, warning that "Republicans should never abandon pro-growth conservative principles in an effort to embrace the ideas of Al Gore."

Only Senator John McCain stands apart from the lemmings, calling for action on climate change and co-sponsoring a cap on carbon emissions. McCain couples this with strong support of nuclear power, dismissing continuing concerns about cost, waste storage, safety and proliferation.

In stark contrast, all the Democratic candidates offer bolder initiatives. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich have embraced the need for an Apollo-like program—a multilayered drive for energy independence. And Barack Obama eloquently depicts a generational challenge: "At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the country that faced down the tyranny of fascism and communism is now called to challenge the tyranny of oil."

Each major Democratic candidate offers a signature proposal. League of Conservation Voters head Gene Karpinski praises Edwards for having the "most comprehensive" plan. Edwards argues generally that dealing with global warming is more important than closing budget deficits or sustaining the Bush tax cuts. He would generate $13 billion a year from a carbon dioxide cap and a rollback of oil subsidies and use that to finance renewable energy technologies. He calls for reducing oil consumption by increasing the percentage of biofuels in the fuel supply and by giving subsidies to auto manufacturers to produce more efficient vehicles. He would mandate that 25 percent of our electricity come from renewable resources by 2025 and require that all new demand through the next decade be met through improved energy efficiency. He'd give consumers tax breaks for purchasing efficient cars and appliances and increase spending on clean-energy research and development. Edwards says this will help generate jobs and growth, estimating that 1 million jobs would be created.

Senator Chris Dodd is nearly as comprehensive, and more courageous. He scorns as ineffective the "cap and trade" program the other candidates support and bites the bullet for a carbon tax he estimates could generate $50 billion a year to be spent deploying clean energy and energy-efficient technologies. Dodd also calls for a job-training program to help workers gain experience and upward mobility in emerging clean-energy markets.

Senator Clinton makes jobs central to her argument. She alone of the leading candidates attended the January Apollo Alliance summit, where she argued that "the clean energy agenda is a jobs agenda." Her signature initiative is a Strategic Energy Fund of $50 billion over ten years, to be raised by taxing the "excess profits" and rolling back the subsidies of Big Oil. The fund would subsidize existing technologies and seed research and development. Of the candidates, Clinton is the most forceful in taking on the oil companies and challenging Bush Administration failures. ...

Governor Bill Richardson, a former Energy Secretary, joins the call for a "massive...Apollo Program." He argues that while everybody talks about these things, he's actually done them. Under his administration New Mexico has become a leader in clean energy. Richardson has established an energy standard mandating that renewables produce 20 percent of the state's energy by 2020, has provided tax credits for investment in energy-efficient buildings and created the nation's first Renewable Energy Transmission Authority, which facilitates the deployment of existing alternatives.

While his plans aren't as detailed, Representative Dennis Kucinich, a leading opponent of nuclear power for decades, offers the broadest vision, calling for a "Global Green Deal." He urges that we not only invest at home but help supply developing nations with "cheap, dependable, renewable energy technologies like wind and solar."


In sun ... No one has yet portrayed the scope and urgency of this national imperative. A bold leader would summon the nation to action. She or he would call for a crash drive for energy independence, spurring individual, business and government action. Public investment in research and development would galvanize the scientific community; investment in rebuilding our cities would create jobs and pay for itself in lower energy costs; aggressive support for renewables would secure our energy supply, lower trade deficits and free us from future resource wars. A green job corps could train workers and harness the idealism of the young. Contrast this vital investment in our future—and the economic growth it would stimulate—with the nearly $500 billion (headed toward $2 trillion) the Bush Administration has squandered on the Iraq War.

Around the globe, people are learning that we have no choice but to move rapidly to a new energy future. Corporations are getting the message. Al Gore is electrifying activists and the young. Americans will respond to a leader who inspires us to meet that challenge, unleashes our energies and imaginations, acknowledges the costs and wrenching changes required while demonstrating the benefits—new jobs and technologies, cheaper and more dependable power, cleaner air, lower trade deficits. The transition to clean energy is both an immense challenge and an immense opportunity. Under Bush, the right has failed the test, and so far the Republican candidates have punted. The public is looking for leadership. That job is still open.

The Washington Post has an article on Al Gore enjoying his freedom.

Boy, it would be fun if Al Gore changed his mind and ran for president -- fun for the voters, anyway. Imagine a candidate whose preelection book is devoted in large part to an attack on the media for waging war on reason.

Politicians, it is often said, never win by attacking the media. That's simply not true. Conservatives have been attacking the media for decades, to good effect from their point of view. Their intimidation sometimes worked -- go back to the coverage of the 2000 Florida recount if you want to see media bias. When intimidation fails, they declare inconvenient facts to be merely "liberal" opinions.

It's delightful to see the critique coming from the other side. Gore's book, "The Assault on Reason," to be released today, is about "the strangeness of our public discourse" as mediated through television. He thinks the Internet may revive the art of reasoned argument that has been lost in our obsessions with "Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole."

It's entertaining to talk to Gore these days because he's so clearly enjoying himself. ... For example, when Gore is asked if any of the Democrats running for president were changing the system he holds in such low esteem, he pulls no punches. "They're good people trapped in a bad system," he says, "and I think it's the system that needs to be changed and I don't see them changing it." ...

He ascribes the failure to have a full-throated debate on Iraq back in 2002 -- when he spoke out against the looming war, to much nasty jeering from the right -- to the administration's decision to politicize the issue before the midterm elections, but also to "meekness" and "timidity" in both "the legislative branch of government" and in "the press corps." "A lot of people were afraid of being accused of being unpatriotic," he says. "One of the symptoms of this problem -- the diminishing role for reason, fact and logic -- is that what rushes in to fill the vacuum are extreme partisanship, ideology, fundamentalism and extreme nationalism." ...

Seven years later, the mood is quite different, partly because of the rise of a new Internet political community that Gore wants to protect from the designs of big companies. Say what you will, the blogs and other online gathering places do promote a culture of engagement rather than passivity. The raucous back-and-forth they encourage looks, at least sometimes, like real, live democratic politics.

But the larger change is that the very process Gore describes -- of propaganda taken as fact, of slogans taken as arguments, of repetition substituting for logic and, yes, of lies and half-truths taken as truth -- is now well-recognized. What worked against Gore during the recount and what worked for the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war doesn't work anymore. That is an advance for democracy and for reason.

Gore, to his credit, won't talk about Florida, but I will. Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

Apparently recent theorising that a US attack on Iran has been halted may be incorrect - or the Americans are playing some mind games - its rather hard to tell. The UK parliament was treated today to a reading of the protocols of the elders of Persia, with warnings that the Iranians intend to repeat the Polish plan of 1939 and launch a sneak attack on Europe, power disparities be damned.

Iran is attempting to draw up plans to strike targets in Europe and has reconnoitered European nuclear power stations, a security analyst told a meeting at Britain's parliament.

Claude Moniquet, president of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre, a private think-tank in Brussels, said his organisation also had evidence Tehran has increased the number of its intelligence agents across Europe.

"We have serious signals that something is under preparation in Europe," Moniquet said. "Iranian intelligence is working extremely hard to prepare its people and to prepare actions."

According to ABC (US) News, Bush has also authorised further CIA covert action against Iran. While this would seem to be fairly unsurprising news, especially given the long history of such actions, apparently even mentioning such a plan is a sin in the eyes of the brownshirt legion who besieged the comments section.

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a "nonlethal presidential finding" that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.

"I can't confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime," said Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA senior official who dealt with Iran and other countries in the region. ...

Current and former intelligence officials say the approval of the covert action means the Bush administration, for the time being, has decided not to pursue a military option against Iran. "Vice President Cheney helped to lead the side favoring a military strike," said former CIA official Riedel, "but I think they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides."

And to close, the black plague outbreak afflicting Denver has claimed its first simian victim.

A capuchin monkey at Denver Zoo has died of plague and officials are trying to prevent an epidemic by isolating the primates and treating them with antibiotics.

Zoo officials learned late Friday that the eight-year-old animal that died Wednesday tested positive for the flea-borne disease, according to a zoo statement.

More than a dozen squirrels and at least one rabbit have been found dead of plague in the City Park area just east of downtown, which includes a golf course, the zoo and the Denver Museum of Nature of Science.