Huge Wind Farm For Mad Max Country  

The SMH has a report on a large proposed wind farm out near Broken Hill from Conergy - big enough to provide 5% of the state's energy needs. There is also more from the nattering nabobs of negativity at The Australian.

A GIANT $2 billion wind farm proposed for western NSW could double the number of turbines operating in Australia and provide as much electricity as a large coal-fired power plant. Epuron, a subsidiary of the German renewable energy group Conergy AG, will today announce plans to build as many as 500 turbines, generating enough electricity for 400,000 homes. They would be built on the ranges that rise around the Mundi Mundi plains, north-west of Broken Hill.

The wind farm would be 10 times bigger than the next largest wind farm approved for NSW and could reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by at least 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. It would produce up to 4.5 per cent of NSW's energy needs in a typical year.

The site - not far from the small town of Silverton, which is best known as the backdrop for films such as Max Max II and A Town Like Alice - was chosen following CSIRO research showing western NSW had some of the best wind resources in the country. The low population density was also attractive.

The announcement follows news last month that the Federal Government would set a national mandatory clean energy target of 30,000 gigawatt hours of electricity a year by 2020. There is also legislation before the NSW Parliament mandating a 15 per cent target for renewable power for the state by 2020. There is some concern the federal target would result in less renewable energy because it would replace state-based schemes projected to generate almost 41,000 gigawatt hours of energy by 2020.

Epuron was "taking a bit of a gamble" proceeding with the plan in the face of uncertainty about government regulation, the company's executive director, Andrew Durran, said. "It will rely on strong government legislation to enable us to build it but we have looked at what is going on in the power industry and at the direction governments are taking," Mr Durran said.

The CSIRO found wind speeds in the area were competitive with wind farms in better known wind regions such as Tasmania and South Australia.

It was very exciting to find such a strong wind resource in western NSW, the chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, Dominique La Fontaine, said. Ms La Fontaine said investors needed clear indications from governments about energy policy and it would be disastrous if state renewable energy schemes were put on hold because of a delay at the federal level.

Epuron has begun negotiations with four landowners in the area to lease land and has held informal talks with state government departments. It hopes construction will start in late 2009.

The SMH also has a look at some new rolling stock for the state rail network - "NSW looks to Japan for a hybrid on rails".

IT IS like a giant Prius on railway tracks. A two-car train operating in northern rural Japan is the world's first hybrid train and the NSW Government is investigating whether the green technology could work on sections of the state's rail network. The Japanese train, powered by a diesel engine and electric battery, is recharged by energy created from braking at curves and at stations and helps reduce emissions of nitrogen oxide and particulate matter by up to 60 per cent, compared with conventional trains. It cuts fuel consumption by up to 20 per cent and runs more quietly, according to East Japan Railway, the company behind the trial.

The NSW Transport Minister, John Watkins, was so impressed with Japan's green train trial that he has asked his ministry to investigate whether similar technology could be introduced to the non-electric sections of the rail network. Mr Watkins said he was keen to see environmentally friendly public transport expand beyond the buses and taxis.

"I've asked the Ministry of Transport to have a look at the hybrid train and see if it could be added to our fleet to sit alongside other clean green technologies like our compressed natural gas buses and hybrid taxis," Mr Watkins said. "If it can be found to be cost effective and at the same time reduce greenhouse gas and particulate emissions then it is certainly something we could consider on appropriate routes."

Following its success with hybrid cars, such as Toyota's best-selling Prius, Japan introduced the world's first hybrid trains in July. Mr Watkins said the most obvious areas for the hybrid trains would be in the Southern Highlands or the Hunter region, where diesel trains run. "Early advice indicates the cost of hybrid trains significantly exceeds that of their solely diesel counterparts, and like other jurisdictions around the world we should keep abreast of other technologies that give the same or better environmental outcomes," a briefing note to the ministry says.

"There may be some merit in running these trains in environmentally sensitive areas or areas where tourism is a key driver of the passenger volumes. The hybrid train itself may have some intrinsic tourist value. Of particular interest would be any opportunity to use this technology or similar on the non-electrified sections of the network, including to provide regional services."

Earth2Tech reports that GE is dimming its incandescent bulb business.

The bulb as we know it is dying a flickering death. OK, so that’s a tad dramatic but states and even entire continents are considering plans to ban the incandescent bulb. Here’s yet another sign: General Electric (GE) said late yesterday it will restructure its lighting business toward energy-efficient lighting technology, which will speed up the shrinking of its incandescent light-bulb business.

“The restructuring we are proposing, while very difficult due to the impact on employees, would be one of the most important things we’ve done in the 100-plus-year history of GE’s lighting business,” said Jim Campbell, president & CEO of GE’s consumer & industrial division, in a release.

Over the last four years, GE says it has invested more than $200 million in energy-efficient lighting. With the restructuring, the company will increase its focus on R&D in LED, organic LED and “high efficiency incandescent light bulbs.” The proposed restructuring would affect a number of GE facilities and positions globally, including some 1,400 employees, but the shift away from a business centered on inefficient incandescent lighting was inevitable.

Since lighting accounts for 22 percent of the energy usage in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy, energy-efficient lighting technology — from fluorescent to light-emitting diodes — is literally lighting the future.

“Fluorescents are so over,” Barnaby Feder of the New York Times recently declared. We agree. Advancements in the brightness and efficiency of LEDs over the past year signal that one day soon these semiconductor lights will make up a significant part of the general illumination market. Costs are still a major issue, but the whole cost equation for purchasing these lights is different because they last for years, instead of a few months like we’re used to with the typical incandescent bulb.

Renewable Energy Access has an article on Scaling Geothermal for Reliable Baseload Power.

Geothermal is the most reliable form of renewable baseload power and given the proper financial support from the private sector -- and favorable policies from government -- it will become a viable alternative to coal, natural gas and nuclear, according to speakers at the Geothermal Resource Council's annual meeting in Reno, Nevada earlier this week. The meeting, held in conjunction with the Geothermal Energy Association (GEA) trade show, drew an estimated 2,000 people and over 50 exhibitors ranging from project developers to investment bankers.

While geothermal currently makes up less than 0.5% of the nation's energy supply, speakers at the opening session were optimistic about the future of the industry. They encouraged attendees to continue working on the goal of bringing geothermal to cost parity with fossil fuels and to gain the same level of attention that other forms of renewable energy have received in recent years. But getting there will require a focused national effort to formulate policies that level the playing field for geothermal energy—and allow the industry to access critical financial resources from the government and private sectors.

"We spend a lot of time talking about the resource that beams down from space or blows over us. But we don't spend enough time looking at our very abundant terrestrial geothermal resources that will provide reliable, renewable baseload power," said Andy Karsner, Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

According to a recent report from MIT, "a cumulative capacity of more than 100,000 MW from enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) can be achieved in the United States within 50 years with a modest, multiyear federal investment for R&D in several field projects in the United States." Currently only 3,000 MW—or 3% of that potential—is installed in the U.S.

In May 2007, the GEA issued a report that identified 74 new geothermal power projects in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. According to the GEA, these projects will double U.S. geothermal power capacity to almost 6,000 MW. Another report on the international market, which the GEA released in April, identified 40 countries with geothermal power development underway-and projected a 50% growth in power production worldwide by 2010.

"We have seen dramatic new interest in the geothermal industry," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the GEA. "That is translating into many new geothermal projects in the U.S. and around the world."

The MIT report, which was authored on behalf of the DOE, also found that "EGS is one of the few renewable energy resources that can provide continuous baseload power with minimal visual and other environmental impacts." The study concluded that "geothermal systems have a small footprint and virtually no emissions, including carbon dioxide. Geothermal energy has significant baseload potential, requires no storage, and, thus, it complements other renewables-solar (CSP and PV), wind, hydropower-in a lower carbon energy future."

The Ottawa Citizen has an article noting thet Innovation is cheaper than oil.

One of the greatest failures of leadership in the modern era can be summed up with two numbers: In the United States, public funding for energy research and development came to $8 billion in 1980; in 2005, it was $3 billion.

To understand how dramatic -- and tragic -- those numbers are, they have to be read in an historical context that starts in January, 1968.

That month, British prime minister Harold Wilson, struggling to cope with another economic crisis, announced that British forces would be withdrawn from the Persian Gulf. By November, 1971, the evacuation was complete -- and the Gulf was thrown into turmoil.

For more than a century, the British military had guaranteed peace and security in the region. It had also -- not coincidentally -- safeguarded the flow of vast quantities of oil through the Strait of Hormuz to the economies of the developed world.

The United States was not happy with the British decision to withdraw.

...More than his predecessors, Jimmy Carter believed security would be compromised as long as the industrialized world remained addicted to oil. Promising the "the moral equivalent of war," Carter called for the development of nuclear, coal and other energy sources, greatly increased conservation standards, and research into alternative and renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power.

And that gets us to the first of the numbers mentioned at the top of this column: In 1980, public funding for energy research and development was $8 billion. Relative to overall spending, and what was at stake, it was a piddling amount, but it was something.

It didn't last. Ronald Reagan saw nothing wrong with the status quo and, with oil prices falling, pressure for change evaporated. And so cheap oil and booming economies returned. The world went full circle back to the 1960s.

That pleasing lull was brought to an end several years ago by soaring oil prices and the deepening quagmire in the Middle East. Today, even the oilman in the White House has said America must break its addiction to oil.

Which brings us to the second number at the beginning of this column: In 2005, public funding for energy research and development was $3 billion.

Compare that to the cost of policing the Persian Gulf. The first Gulf War alone cost at least $61 billion. Estimates for the current war in Iraq range from $500 billion to two trillion dollars.

So the U.S. has spent spectacular amounts securing oil supplies but it has given only pocket change to the development of energy alternatives. And as the U.S. goes, so goes the world.

The FT has an article on the "great awakening".

As Americans surveyed the damage wrought by hurricane Katrina in 2005, Bill Ford Jr, then Ford Motor's chief executive, made a dramatic speech declaring a national energy crisis. With much of the Gulf of Mexico's oil infrastructure knocked out, he called for a White House summit of oil and automotive bosses for a national dialogue on energy security.

Politicians and industry, in spite of graphic evidence of the costs of the US's carbon-intensive economy to human life and their own profits, did not respond, least of all to calls for a petrol tax. Two years later, gasoline remains the cheapest liquid on sale at most American filling stations, costing less per gallon than milk, coffee or mouthwash.

Zoom, an ambitious and timely book, presents an in-depth diagnosis of America's addiction to oil and oil's symbiotic partner, the petrol combustion engine. Although focused on the US, it also studies the role of rising economies such as China, now the world's second-largest source of carbon dioxide emissions and vehicle sales.

The authors, journalists for The Economist, argue that, since Katrina, public and political opinion around the world has coalesced and the widely held view is that the status quo on oil, the environment and the car industry must change. The "Axis of Oil" is poised to be replaced by the Great Awakening, which they claim "could be the most important political force of this new century".

Wired has a look at bioplastics in "Two Words: Biodegradable Plastic".

In the 1960s film The Graduate, a meddling family friend takes aimless collegiate Ben aside to proffer unwanted career advice: "plastics." More than 30 years later, the planet is choking on the stuff -- plastic packaging in particular. With green consciousness now taking root from Boston to Bangalore, the new hot career tip might be: "biodegradable plastics."

The business involves using non petroleum-based commercial wrappings that look, feel and act like traditional plastic, but break down later into organic components. One example is starch-based packaging, generally made from agricultural commodities such as corn or potatoes. These dissolve in prolonged contact with water and heat.

However, if you're hoping you can toss your disposable plastics into the shower and watch them disappear any time soon, you'll be disappointed. Most biodegradable packaging takes weeks, often months, to break down. Furthermore, eco-friendly packaging probably needs a few more years, and a few more breakthroughs, before it's ready for prime time. Nonetheless, early birds are staking out positions.

Earthshell of Santa Barbara, California, now provides biodegradable packaging to fast-food giant McDonald's, as well as selling biodegradable picnic utensils. These are all made from a proprietary mixture of limestone and potato starch. Others players -- which include Minneapolis-based Cargill Dow LLC; Novamont SpA of Novara, Italy; and the German BASF Group -- provide biodegradable packaging that is based largely on corn starch. These companies and others are being drawn to a global market now estimated at about $25 billion a year.

A key testing ground for biodegradable packaging was the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics. Thanks to pre-Games pressure from environmental groups, food vendors for the Games used only biodegradable and recyclable packaging. More than three-quarters of the 660 tons of garbage generated each day at the Games was kept out of landfill, with much of it composted instead. But that was the Olympics, the ultimate controlled environment. The challenge now is for biodegradable plastics to succeed in the chaotic real world, closing a roughly 2-to-1 price gap with traditional packaging.

The good news is that consumers and most businesses are keen on greenery. The bad news is they don't want to pay anything more for it. Without government mandates, this price differential is likely to hinder the spread of biodegradable packaging in the short-term. "I figure it will be at least five years before fully biodegradable packaging becomes really widespread," says Leo Hyde, research and development manager for DuPont Australia. "Without legislation to help it along, this packaging will just have to be price competitive."

DuPont's entry in the race is a water-soluble form of the more traditional recyclable material polyethylene terephthalate. Meanwhile, Melbourne's Plantic Technologies is commercializing a form of corn starch-based biodegradable plastic packaging, which it claims will break down into carbon dioxide and sugar in as little as an hour after contact with water, says David MacInnes, Plantic's managing director and chief executive. If the company can deliver, it really would pass the "shower" test. But it's too soon to know, and the company has no firm contracts.

Finally, Alex Steffen has a few words about "Bright Greens, Straw Dogs and the New Generation".

If you want to get noticed in the media, attack your allies. This is particularly true for the environment: claim alliance with eco-activists and then accuse them of being stodgy and out of touch, and the press will come running. Bjorn Lomborg has made a career out of declaring himself an environmentalist and then proceeding to offer poorly-documented (many would even say dishonest) "proofs" that environmentalists are wrong about, well... everything, and that they don't get it about poor people and AIDS. More recently, Stewart Brand raised a ruckus by declaring nuclear energy our last, best hope and saying that enviros don't get it about people in cities. Now Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have seized the heretic baton with a bold new theory that we really, really need clean energy, and that greens just don't get it about people wanting things.

In their "Manifesto for a New Environmentalism" (a lead-in to their new book), the duo lay out their latest reasoning on why environmental movement is supposedly failing to get action on global warming:

Increasing energy use is the primary cause of global warming, but it is also a primary cause of rising prosperity, longer life spans, better medical treatment, and greater personal and political freedom. Environmentalists can rail against consumption and counsel sacrifice all they want, but neither poor countries like China nor rich countries like the United States are going to dramatically reduce their emissions if doing so slows economic growth. Given this, the challenge we face as a species is to roughly double global energy production by mid-century while simultaneously cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half worldwide (and about 80 percent in the United States), so that we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

How could such a massive undertaking be achieved? Not, as environmental leaders insist, by limiting human power but rather by unleashing it. ...Environmentalism is not the solution to the crisis of global warming.

Distilled from its rhetoric, their argument comes down to this:

* People want things.
* Increasingly, more people want more things.
* It takes energy to make things.
* Making more things takes more energy.
* Making energy heats the planet, but new forms of clean energy don't.

Therefore, we need a massive program of U.S. government investment in clean energy, which would solve the problem, and which we could have if only those environmentalists weren't all hung up on regulating greenhouse gasses and being concerned about pollution.

One wants so much to be polite about these things, but this argument isn't so much full of holes as just full of it.

First, let's talk about energy and stuff.

One of the central breakthroughs of the last twenty years has been the idea of "decoupling." Put simply, we now understand that through efficiency and good design, it is possible to use less and less energy to make better and better things. We can decouple economic growth from growth in energy use (improving our energy intensity). In many cases, it is more profitable to reduce energy use than buy more energy.

Making more things does not need to mean using more energy. Throughput and outcome are different things. The amount of material and energy that go into a given product or service (the throughput) do not predict how useful it is (the outcome): a car made with five times as much metal as another car is not necessarily five times as enjoyable, while a computer which uses a tenth as much energy as another computer may offer comparable or better performance more cheaply (especially if cost over time is considered).

Because the major product of our industrial systems is waste -- waste in vast, staggering, difficult to imagine amounts -- we can improve the performance of nearly every product in our society while dramatically slashing its energy and material usage. This is true now, with existing technologies and emerging design approaches, and it's true even before we start to think about closing the loop at the end of those products' lifecycles through concepts like zero waste planning and producer responsibility.

Now let's talk about the things people want. Many of the systems on which we now depend do a piss-poor job of delivering the outcomes we seek. We want some milk, so we get in the car, drive through side streets to arterial highways to a big box store, park on a sea of asphalt, buy our milk and then repeat the process in reverse. The easiest and most efficient way to reduce the river of negative impacts in this process is not to wait hopefully for some miracle eco-car but to design our neighborhoods so that a store is close by, substituting access by proximity for mobility. We know how to do that, and we know how to make it profitable. We also know that rebuilding our neighborhoods into compact communities offers a lot of ancillary benefits, from improved health to fairer economies.

Lots of other examples exist -- for instance, Netflix delivers videos without the video store while other product-service systems replace private gyms, cars, power tools and art collections with better shared alternatives. Indeed, once you start looking for ways to better deliver outcomes, rather than improve delivery systems, it's easy to see that we can hack that curve a hell of a lot more than we are.

To be more accurate, we should back up even a little further, to the idea that what people want is things. Our current conception of affluence, defined entirely by GDP growth and the ownership of material goods, has very little to do with either real prosperity or actual happiness. I for one don't think it's too much to ask that when we're talking about building the future, we plan to build one that actually makes people happier. Things do not equal wealth, and most people know it.

None of which argues against a massive effort to switch over to clean energy for that energy we do use. I don't know anyone at any point on the political spectrum who thinks this is a bad idea. I certainly don't know any environmentalists who are opposed to clean energy.

In fact, most people I know understand another key point that Nordhaus and Shellenberger seem to miss: regulation defines the energy market. Currently, through everything from lack of environmental laws to tax loopholes to infrastructure give-aways to direct subsidies, regulators define the playing field entirely to the advantage of fossil fuels. Massive government investment in clean tech research will not necessarily change that. If we are serious about a massive uptake of clean energy technologies, we need to use regulation to tilt the playing field in the direction of those technologies, or each new breakthrough will be like rolling a rock up a hill. We want absolute global caps on carbon not only because we need absolute reductions, but also because such caps will spur innovation. We want serious new regulations, including real carbon pricing, because we understand how technology actually gets made.

Last, but certainly not least, Nordhaus and Shellenberger set up, in the words of ally Brandon Keim put it on his Wired blog, "a windmill-sized straw man."

Who exactly are these apocalypse-fixated environmentalists who talk about problems but don't suggest solutions? Have the authors been asleep for the last five years, during which green went mainstream? Do they think that America's energy policy is written by freegans?

Exactly. Like the argument that we should cheer small steps and not frighten people by talking about real change, the argument that greens are anti-technology, anti-business and anti-innovation might have been true in 1999. It's not now.

Now sustainable innovation is the only game in town.

There are surely still pockets of crusty old deep green people-hating bioregionally-obsessed luddite enviros grumbling out there, but they're about as far from the mainstream of the environmental movement as its possible to get. You can also certainly find plenty of hackneyed activists and jaded philanthropic bureaucrats and uninspired academics in the ranks of the environmental movement, just like you can find plenty of jaded, hackneyed and uninspired businesspeople, engineers, doctors and clergymen. But there's a sea-change rolling around us, and most of the greens I know these days -- in business, in government and in NGOs -- are smart, dedicated and innovative people. Hell, even most of the crunchy-chewy, bike-riding, hemp-wearing hippies I know have are polishing business plans, proposing legislation and eco-pimping their pads.

Everywhere I travel, I meet a new generation of bright greens who are earnestly and systemically and with great practicality working away at the task of redesigning civilization ASAP. These folks -- with their bursts of optimism and ingenuity, their networked collaborations and media savvy, their systems-level thinking and entrepreneurial zeal -- are not on the fringe of the movement. Whether or not they've ever written a check to an environmental NGO (and many don't for entirely understandable reasons), today they are the movement. The new environmentalism is already alive and kicking, blogging and lobbying, designing and seeking investors.

So, unfortunately, the people who come off as most out-of-date and out-of-touch in Nordhaus and Shellenberger's "Manifesto" are the authors themselves. That's too bad, because they're smart guys, and the new enviros need sharp-eyed critics. But Nordhaus and Shellenberger chose instead (as it's said) to nail their theses to the door of a church long ago abandoned.

Links:

* The Herald (Scotland) - Alarm bells ring about North Sea output
* AFP - Reader's Digest study: Britain near bottom of the table for energy efficiency
* Planet Ark - FPL Sees Renewables Soon Competitive With Coal
* The Green Wombat - Silicon Valley's Carbon Conundrum
* Deep Green Crystals - A biodiesel B30 car from Renault
* Deep Green Crystals - Propel yourself with Biodiesel in Northwest. I remember Rob Elam from Propel was kind enough to correct some of my many misconceptions about biodiesel a few years ago - good to see they are starting to roll out the pumps now.
* Green Car Congress - Turbo-Charged, Direct-Injection E100 Engine Shows Potential for Aggressive Engine Downsizing. Much to my surprise, Orbital Engine Company is still out there testing the limits of engine technology.
* TreeHugger - Food vs Fuel: The Debate Rumbles On
* TreeHugger - UK Utility to Install 250 Electric Vehicle Charging Points
* After Gutenberg - Eurasia-North America Multimodal Transport. A giant global rail transport project proposed by, errr, the LaRouche movement. Nice overlap with the global energy grid idea anyway.
* The Australian - Uranium OK, as a political by-product
* Wired - US Soldiers Are Sick Of It. The curse of depleted uranium.
* The Globe And Mail - It's not just Alberta, it's the whole country
* Informed Reader - What Thoreau Told Scientists About Global Warming
* Energy Bulletin - The Holiness of Stuart Staniford and Of doomers, realists, powerdowners and fantasists. Doomers versus Powerdowners. Techno-optimists don't get a look in.
* Huffington Post - The Government, Not Blackwater, Should Have the Monopoly of Force
* TreeHugger - Are You Kidding Us, Safeway?. Organic water ? In a plastic bottle ?
* Technology Review - Burma's Internet Crackdown
* Prof Goose - A Sunday Morning Thought Experiment (Or, Radiohead, I Love You...)