The Daily Katabatic  

The NZ Herald has an interesting article about a proposed Antarctic wind farm (also noting that the wind strength on the coast south of Wellington is often greater).

Wellington is a tougher proposition for a wind farm than Antarctica, says a team exploring the possibility of building turbines at Scott Base. Experts from Meridian Energy have flown to the world's windiest continent to conduct feasibility tests around Scott Base, which three years ago was hit by a storm with wind gusts that exceeded 200km/h, destroying the base's wind vane.

Iain Miller, Antarctica New Zealand's Antarctic services manager, said if the windfarm went ahead, it would help power Scott Base and also the neighbouring United States base, McMurdo Station. "Interestingly enough, because of turbulence created by the landscape, the wind at Scott Base and McMurdo isn't as brutal as parts of New Zealand where there are windfarms," he told The Press. "Meridian is planning one on the southwest coast of Wellington where the wind speed and turbulence are worse."

If approved, the Antarctic windfarm would augment the diesel generators used to power the two bases. The high cost of transporting fuel to Antarctica, including use of icebreakers to create a shipping channel for the tanker, made wind energy a more economical prospect than in New Zealand. The NSF did a feasibility study four years ago of wind power at McMurdo Station and found it could save up to 1.2 million litres of fuel each year.

Another place with plenty of wind is South Dakota, which the Seattle PI reports is about to become a "mammoth wind farm". It really is big.

Plans for the world's largest wind farm, proposed to be built in South Dakota, have become more grandiose. South Dakota is officially rated No. 4 in the nation for the potential capacity to make electricity from wind, although the ranking is more than a decade old. Many industry officials believe the Great Plains state is the windiest of all.

Clipper Windpower of Carpinteria, Calif., intends to erect enough wind turbines in several South Dakota counties to produce up to 6,000 megawatts of electricity, said Bob Gates, the firm's senior vice president of commercial operations. That would be eight times larger than the biggest wind farm in the world, a 735-megawatt FPL Energy facility with 421 turbines stretching across three Texas counties.

Clipper Chairman and Chief Executive Officer James Dehlsen told The Associated Press in 2004 the company intended to develop a $3 billion wind complex with 1,000 turbines that could produce 3,000 megawatts of juice in South Dakota. But as envisioned now, the project would be twice as large and cost $6 billion, Gates said. Taking into account that the wind doesn't always blow or is too light or strong at times to operate turbines, a 6,000-megawatt wind farm could supply enough power for an average of about 1.6 million homes, based on data from the American Wind Energy Association.

AHN reports that Singapore is to build the world's largest Solar energy plant.

The world's largest manufacturing plant for making solar energy products will be built in Singapore, it will be the first such plant in Southeast Asia. The plant is expected to start production of wafers, cells and modules used to generate solar power by 2010. It will be built by leading Norwegian solar energy firm Renewable Energy Corp (REC) in the Tuas View area with space set aside for supporting industries.

The plant will be able to produce products that can generate up to 1.5 gigawatts (Gw) of energy annually. That is enough to power several million households at any one time. The current largest plant in the world, also run by REC in Norway, has a capacity of 650 megawatts (Mw).

Renewable Energy Access has an interesting article on growing maize in the US for biofuel - "If Corn is King of Biofuels, Tropical Maize May Be Emperor". This isn't without drawbacks, but it is a lot better than corn based ethanol.

When University of Illinois crop scientist Fred Below began growing tropical maize, the form of corn grown in the tropics, he was looking for novel genes for the utilization of nitrogen fertilizer and was hoping to discover information that could be useful to American corn producers. Now, however, it appears that maize itself may prove to be the ultimate U.S. biofuels crop.

Early research results show that tropical maize, when grown in the Midwest, requires few crop inputs such as nitrogen fertilizer, chiefly because it does not produce any ears. It also is easier for farmers to integrate into their current operations than some other dedicated energy crops because it can be easily rotated with corn or soybeans, and can be planted, cultivated and harvested with the same equipment U.S. farmers already have.

Finally, tropical maize stalks are believed to require less processing than corn grain, corn stover, switchgrass, Miscanthus giganteus and the scores of other plants now being studied for biofuel production.

What it does produce, straight from the field with no processing, is 25 percent or more sugar—mostly sucrose, fructose and glucose.

"Corn is a short-day plant, so when we grow tropical maize here in the Midwest the long summer days delay flowering, which causes the plant to grow very tall and produce few or no ears," says Below. Without ears, these plants concentrate sugars in their stalks, he adds. Those sugars could have a dramatic affect on Midwestern production of ethanol and other biofuels.

According to Below, "Midwestern-grown tropical maize easily grows 14 or 15 feet tall compared to the 7-1/2 feet height that is average for conventional hybrid corn. It is all in these tall stalks," Below explains. "In our early trials, we are finding that these plants build up to a level of 25 percent or higher of sugar in their stalks.

This differs from conventional corn and other crops being grown for biofuels in that the starch found in corn grain and the cellulose in switchgrass, corn stover and other biofuel crops must be treated with enzymes to convert them into sugars that can be then fermented into alcohols such as ethanol.

Storing simple sugars also is more cost-effective for the plant, because it takes a lot of energy to make the complex starches, proteins, and oils present in corn grain. This energy savings per plant could result in more total energy per acre with topical maize, since it produces no grain.

"In terms of biofuel production, tropical maize could be considered the 'Sugarcane of the Midwest'," Below said. "The tropical maize we're growing here at the University of Illinois is very lush, very tall, and very full of sugar."

He added that his early trials also show that tropical maize requires much less nitrogen fertilizer than conventional corn, and that the stalks actually accumulate more sugar when less nitrogen is available. Nitrogen fertilizer is one of major costs of growing corn.

He explained that sugarcane used in Brazil to make ethanol is desirable for the same reason: it produces lots of sugar without a high requirement for nitrogen fertilizer, and this sugar can be fermented to alcohol without the middle steps required by high-starch and cellulosic crops. But sugarcane can't be grown in the Midwest.

The tall stalks of tropical maize are so full of sugar that producers growing it for biofuel production will be able to supply a raw material at least one step closer to being turned into fuel than are ears of corn.

"And growing tropical maize doesn't break the farmers' rotation. You can grow tropical maize for one year and then go back to conventional corn or soybeans in subsequent years," Below said. "Miscanthus, on the other hand, is thought to need a three-year growth cycle between initial planting and harvest and then your land is in Miscanthus. To return to planting corn or soybean necessitates removing the Miscanthus rhizomes."

The Australian reports that Dr Karl isn't a member of the cult of Nyos - "Clean coal a Goebbels scale lie".

SCIENCE broadcaster and New South Wales Senate candidate Karl Kruszelnicki has likened talk of clean coal to Nazi propaganda, describing it as a "complete furphy". The celebrity science commentator and Climate Change Coalition candidate today said the major political parties were lying when spruiking the benefits of clean coal technology.

Claims carbon dioxide could be removed from burning coal and stored underground or underwater were a lie, he said. Such technology would require one cubic kilometre of compressed carbon dioxide to be stored every day, something that was "physically impossible". "That is the volume of compressed carbon dioxide that we have to get rid of – not every 10 years, not every year, but every single day," he said. "It is simply a furphy, it's a porky pie to cover up the fact that there is no such thing as clean coal."

It was the kind of lie a Nazi propagandist would conceive, Mr Kruszelnicki claimed. "Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, said if you're going to tell a lie, tell a big one, and this is a beauty," he said.

Dr Kruszelnicki also said political policies such as a $20m plan for exploration of underground caverns would be a waste of taxpayer dollars. He claimed any storage facility would eventually wear down and would release the stored carbon dioxide back into the environment.

The Age has an article on a Melbourne company putting bicycles back on the roads - "Recycled Cycles".

BILL BRETHERTON is living the maxim. No matter how many times you fall off, you have to get back on the bike. Even after four months of your life have disappeared. Not that the 27-year-old remembers much of how his world came crashing down in the middle of 2000 after he landed on his head while mountain biking on Mount Buller. What he does remember is that it prompted a radical meaning-of-life analysis that has seen this big-thinking Brunswick man start a bicycle recycling business to fund his charity work.

"It was a crazy time and because I couldn't pick up the same life straight away, I had a lot of time to think about where I wanted to go. It took about 18 months before I could ride again but I was determined not to let it beat me," Bretherton says.

This mental journey he pedalled during rehabilitation has seen him arrive, seven years later, at Human Powered Cycles, a volunteer driven co-operative that pushes pedal power as the solution for a more sustainable world. Each weekend countless people visit the workshop at the bottom of his garden, wheeling in their injured bikes. "Bill the Bike Man's" reputation is far reaching. ...

George Monbiot has a review of Cormac McCaryhy's "The Road" - "Civilisation ends with a shutdown of human concern. Are we there already?".

A powerful novel's vision of a dystopian future shines a cold light on the dreadful consequences of our universal apathy.


A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy's book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, "their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl". McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.

All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do? The only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity's time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.

So when I read the UN's new report on the state of the planet over the weekend, my mind kept snagging on a handful of figures.

Links:

* Marc Gunther - Making the Dumb Grid Smarter
* The Energy Blog - Startup Plans on Establishing Grids to Sell Electricity for Recharging Electric Cars
* REA - U.S. Demand for Renewable Energy Exceeding Supply
* REA - The power of solar radiation - from a purely scientific point of view
* Technology Review - IBM says it has a greener and cheaper way to reuse silicon from making chips
* Plenty - Labor of Lovins
* Technometria - 10 part series of lectures by Amory Lovins on IT Conversations
* Business Green - Climbing gas prices make case for energy efficiency
* The Energy Blog - U.N. Rapporteur Calls for Moratorium on Building Biofuel Plants Using Food Feedstocks
* Google - UK carbon footprint project
* After Gutenberg - Mordor? No, Athabasca
* Grist - Experts agree: We should all lie. A lot. About important stuff.
* Salon - Google's Brain
* Crooked Timber - Loafing with LaRouche
* Cryptogon - Travelers: Homeland Security is Googling You
* Cryptogon - AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance