Stanford's "Global Climate and Energy project" has a great chart showing the energy sources available to us and how much we are currently using - Global Exergy Resource Chart.

The SMH has a report on Australia's increasing dependence on imported oil, following the release of a report into Australia's energy resources by Geoscience Australia and ABARE (the Australian Energy Resource Assessment) - Australia's oil reserves 'dwindling'.

Australia's oil reserves are dwindling and the nation is becoming increasingly reliant on imports for transport fuels, a new report shows.

The Australian Energy Resource Assessment (AERA) report has been released by Resources Minister Martin Ferguson.

The peak industry body for oil and gas producers says the report into Australia's energy resources has debunked the myth the nation won't have enough energy resources into the future.

But the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA) says the report also shows the nation will need to import more oil to run its transport network.

That reliance is likely to increase unless there are new significant discoveries of crude oil or alternatives are made using the development of condensate resources using the offshore gas reserves.

APPEA chief executive Belinda Robinson said in general the report painted a bright picture for the future of the energy industry, citing over $200 million in projects on the drawing board.

BusinessWeek reports that in the short term, production of both oil and natural gas is on the rise - Australian Oil, LNG Production to Increase Next Year.

Australian oil output may rise 6 percent next fiscal year and liquefied natural gas exports may climb 4 percent, boosted by new projects led by BHP Billiton Ltd. and Woodside Petroleum Ltd., a government forecaster said.

Oil production is expected to jump to 29.5 billion liters, or about 508,000 barrels a day, in the year ending June 30, 2011, on projected increases from BHP’s Pyrenees project and Apache Corp.’s Van Gogh development, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics said in a report today. LNG exports may rise to 18 million metric tons, buoyed by Perth- based Woodside’s Pluto venture in Western Australia, it said.

Australia’s total energy exports may increase 20 percent to A$66 billion next fiscal year as a global economic recovery drives oil prices higher, the report said. The average price for the West Texas Intermediate benchmark will gain 25 percent to $77 a barrel in 2010, the Canberra-based bureau forecasts.

“Energy demand is closely linked with economic growth, and in 2010-2011 we are expecting things to rebound,” Alan Copeland, an analyst at ABARE, said by phone today. “When you talk about exports, the numbers paint a fairly positive story.”

Oil production is set to gain 4 percent in 2011-2012, then gradually fall to 25 billion liters three years later, it said. LNG exports may rise at an average annual rate of 9 percent over the following four years and could “increase significantly” after 2014-2015 with first production at Chevron Corp.’s A$43 billion Gorgon venture, ABARE said. Coal-seam gas-to-LNG projects in Queensland state also could add to Australian exports, according to the bureau.

The SMH is continuing their series on peak oil and the oil price - When oils ain't oils.

In this article, we examined why, for investors at least, ''peak oil'' theory was inconsequential. What really matters is the cost of getting the stuff out - or the ''marginal cost of production'', as the economists call it.

Here we're going to explain how, contrary to economic theory, the oil price can rise while supply is increasing.

Deep below the Santos basin off the coast of Brazil, several massive new oilfields were recently discovered. And deep is the operative word.

The Sugarloaf, Jupiter and Tupi fields are four kilometres beneath the seabed under a further two kilometres of thick salt layers.

Whilst salt is easier to penetrate than your typical rock, it's weaker. Even when cased in cement drilling wells through salt increases the risk of collapse. If this weren't demanding enough, the oil pumped back to the surface from these wells can be hot enough to melt drilling equipment.

Solving these problems will be expensive, which underlines a key point about oil production over recent decades: Oil supply can and may continue to increase but the costs of extraction are increasing, too.

The latest finds offshore Brazil illustrate the trend, as does a look at the global marginal cost of production for 2008 - one of the most successful in terms of exploration in the past 20 years.

In Saudi Arabia, home of the world's cheapest oil, producers face a full life cycle (that is, including amortisation and cash costs) marginal cost of US$20 per barrel. In Russia, it's about US$25.

North Sea fields have a marginal cost of about US$60 while the new deepwater discoveries off the Brazilian coast are expected to cost US$70 per barrel.

Deepwater production from Angola and Nigeria, considered (along with offshore Brazil) to be exciting new frontiers, operate with marginal costs of about US$90 per barrel. And at US$100 per barrel and more, Canadian tar sands and unconventional sources come into play.

Phil Hart has a post at TOD ANZ noting that neither the government nor the major opposition party seem all that interested in peak oil - Australian Senate: Peak Oil motion defeated 31:6.

The Government and Opposition today voted against a Greens motion in the Senate calling on the Government to plan for peak oil.

The Motion was defeated 31:6 with the five Greens Senators supporting the motion and presumably South Australian independent Senator Nick Xenophon as the sixth supporting vote.

The major parties are not just ignorant of 'peak oil'. They are, with clarity of purpose, voting against any attempt to respond or even investigate further.

The Australian reports that one sector of the energy industry that continues to generate attention and activity is coal seam gas - Gunnedah rents soar on coal seam gas boom.

NSW'S coal seam gas boom has been credited for the north-western wheat belt town of Gunnedah becoming one of Australia's major residential rental hot spots.

Property researcher RP Data has found that Gunnedah recorded NSW's third-largest increase in residential rents over the past 12 months on the back of the record mining activity in the area.

Rents in the town of less than 10,000 people have increased by almost 28 per cent, or $50 per week, as miners snapped up nearly all available rental accommodation.

The Business Spectator notes that wind power is doing well too - Wind farms 20% of Aust new power projects.

Wind farms account for about a quarter of Australian electricity generating developments now under construction or planned as the country moves to increase its reliance on renewable energy, a government report said.

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics said renewable energy sources accounted for only 3 per cent of Australia's electricity generating capacity in 2007/08, according to the latest figures available.

But the country's new renewable energy laws, passed in August, were encouraging the development of new projects. Under those laws, Australia increased its target for renewable energy to 45,000 gigawatt hours by 2020 from a previous target of 9,500 gigawatt hours in 2010.

And Bloomberg reports that there may be some merger activity coming up for the swarm of small geothermal energy companies that have emerged recently - Australian Geothermal Projects May Seek Partnerships.

Australian geothermal energy companies may seek merger partners during the next year because of funding needs, said Geodynamics Ltd. and Petratherm Ltd., two businesses seeking to produce power from underground heat.

“The competition is not for acreage -- it’s for capital,” Gerry Grove-White, managing director of Brisbane-based Geodynamics, said by phone Nov. 13. “It’s going to be challenging for many of these companies to find the funding they require. That’s not to say they can’t.” He said to expect “consolidation in the next 12 to 18 months.”

The number of proposed geothermal ventures has expanded as Australia pursues a target of deriving 20 percent of its power from clean energy by 2020. Australia has awarded A$235 million ($220 million) to four companies, including Geodynamics and Petratherm, to spur development of renewable technologies, Energy Minister Martin Ferguson said Nov. 6.

The Australian reports that AGL is ready to expand further in the local energy sector, and notes their strong position in renewable generation already - AGL is ready to go on acquisition trail.

AGL chief executive Michael Fraser is not holding his breath for the long-debated privatisation of the NSW Government's energy assets.

But if Nathan Rees' Government does announce the timetable for the sale of the retail arms of its electricity distribution network, which could come as early as this month, AGL, Australia's largest energy company, is there ready, and able to borrow as much as $2 billion if needs be -- if the deal is right. ...

In December, the company announced it had raised another $1.127 billion from the sale of its oil and gas interests in Papua New Guinea.

That month provided another boost for the company, with the Rudd Government's confirmation of its mandatory renewable energy target -- that 20 per cent of Australia's energy supplies will have to come from renewable energy by 2020.

AGL is already Australia's largest owner of renewable energy, with about 27 per cent of its total generation capacity in clean energy investments such as wind farms and hydro-electric plants.

Fraser has big plans to boost the company's renewable energy assets to ride the expected long-term growth in the sector, with plans to expand in wind farms, hydro-power and coal seam gas as well as less proven technologies such as geothermal (hot rocks).

"We can see, in the long term, between 40 to 50 per cent of our generation capacity will come from renewables," he says, "We are the only Australian energy company generating from a full suite of proven renewable technologies. We are already the largest private owner and operator of renewable energy assets in Australia, with nearly 1000MW of renewable generation capacity. "We can see the potential for a fourfold increase in our renewable generation capacity over the longer term."

In October this year, AGL will commission its $234 million, 140MW Bogong hydro-power plant, in the mountains near the skifields of Victoria.

The largest hydro electric generating plant built in Australia in more than 20 years, the Bogong plant will provide electricity into the Victorian electricity grid for peak periods. It represents a major expansion of the company's Kiewa hydro-scheme, which AGL bought from Southern Hydro in 2005.

Fraser took a group of analysts to see the project -- which involve building a 6.9km tunnel through the rock that will allow "ultra fast" electricity generation when it flows down inside the mountain towards the generator -- in December to highlight the company's renewable energy commitment.

He says the federal Government's renewable energy targets will require the equivalent of 45,000GW hours of renewable energy or 10 Snowy Mountain hydro electricity schemes, which he predicts will prompt a new generation of investment in the renewable energy sector in Australia.

Jeremy Leggett has an article in The Guardian on how to make the UK energy independent - Independence from the street up.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is warning of an oil crunch by 2012, so we have to act immediately if we aren't to add peak oil to our credit-crunch woes. There is also a grave risk of major shortfalls in gas supply in the next few years. North Sea oil and gas production is plunging 7.5% a year at the same time as liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects are being cancelled around the world. Meanwhile, Moscow dangles the prospect of sending most of its gas exports east to China, rather than west to Europe.

Without government help, the global economic crisis may deter investors in climate technology. The UK government talks about building new gas pipes of different kinds – in an expanded national grid, and in import pipelines and regasification plants – but it cannot rely on having gas to put in them. It talks of allowing an expansion of coal burning, knowing carbon capture and storage is more than a decade from proving economic, or even workable. As for nuclear, we don't get one of those new reactors that are so far behind schedule and so over budget in Finland until 2018 at the earliest. Provided, that is, anyone can be found foolish enough to finance it.

We need to make ourselves energy independent from the street up – in transport, electricity and heating – starting today. The good news is that with today's technologies and the right kind of financing and workforce mobilisation, we could surprise ourselves about what we could achieve.

Everything must spring from energy efficiency. We have an ocean of electricity and heating profligacy to mine in this country. British Gas ran an interesting experiment recently. Eight British streets were asked to compete in cutting their fuel bills, using only the easiest of efficiency measures. In no time at all, they cut their CO2 by an average 20% and fuel bills by a third. The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), which monitored the exercise (pdf) for BG, suggests that 10,000 advisers be appointed nationwide, one per 20 streets. The cost would be £500m annually against national energy savings of £4.6bn. The IPPR gives a telling example of what householders, energy-services companies, and government could do could if they worked together. A £524 loan package for cavity wall and lost insulation would give annual savings of £395 per household. A quick payback indeed.

Then there are the new means of energy generation. Silicon Valley is not pouring billions of dollars into 50 families of clean technology (cleantech) for nothing. We were already entering a green industrial revolution as the credit crunch hit panic phase. True, there will be a race against time to create mass markets in cleantech. But these are highly disruptive technologies: they can displace fossil fuels far faster than most people appreciate. Once they really get going, the prize is huge. Consider this example. Modern solar electric and heating tiles, fitted to a maximally energy-efficient home, can take that property's emissions to zero. The whole thing can be put up in a matter of days using modern offsite methods of construction. More than half the UK's greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings; the majority from homes. We can cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero, we can get rid of the need for energy bills of any kind once the capital cost is paid, and we can dump gas, coal and nuclear alike.

Then there is transport. Car manufacturers are aligning behind electricity as the fuel of the future. They are already well into systemic change, even at $100-barrel oil. Renewable energy can charge the plug-in super-efficient vehicles of the near future, even as massive new public transport infrastructure is built by the carbon army.

Long term, we save much more money than we invest making this happen. It is all doable, if we just have the imagination and the will.

Also in the Guardian, an article on bioplastic from the CEO of NatureWorks, contesting some of columnist John Vidal's reservations about the technology - Bioplastics offer a more sustainable future.

As the world's largest producer of plastics made from plants, we wish to clarify John Vidal's claims about bioplastics (Sustainable bioplastic can damage the environment, April 26). While bioplastics are still on a journey to full sustainability, we believe they are the greenest alternative to conventional oil-based plastics.

The advantages of bioplastic start in the manufacturing process. Peer-reviewed studies have found that making Ingeo - known generically as polylactic acid or PLA - generates less than half the greenhouse emissions of making oil-based plastics. New innovations in the manufacturing process mean Ingeo production will soon produce 75% less greenhouse emissions than making petro-plastics.

The environmental benefits continue through the life of the plastic. Unlike conventional plastics, PLA is infinitely recyclable: a PLA bottle can be made into another bottle again and again, whereas oil-based competitors are typically "down-cycled" into products of diminishing value and ultimately destined for landfill. Ingeo is also certified as fully compostable in specific conditions. The Association for Organics Recycling (formerly the UK Composting Association) supports the increased use of biodegradable material as a means of reducing the 4.6m tonnes of packaging disposed of annually in the UK.

Rising food prices are a serious concern today. At full capacity, we would use less than 0.1% of 2007 US corn production (all grown within 50 miles of our Nebraska plant). By contrast, about 30% of that crop went to make ethanol - a 300-fold difference.

Affordable food, reliable energy and a healthy environment are global problems that cannot be solved without fundamental changes in the way we treat limited natural resources. We believe that plants, rather than fossil fuels, are a good place to start.

Energy Bulletin points to a debate starting at The Economist on whether or not "breakthrough innovations" are required to solve the energy crisis. My view is that we don't really need any "breakthroughs" - just incremental advances on todays technology and wide scale deployment.

Starting tomorrow The Economist Online Debate Series is starting a two-week long online, Oxford-style debate on solving the world’s energy crisis. Since this topic is highly relevant to you and readers of Energy Bulletin, we wanted to give you and your readers an early invite to participate and be heard alongside notable experts and debaters in this intellectually stimulating, global conversation.

Would you be interested in supporting the discourse on this topic by posting about this debate and your response to our proposition on your blog? To help out, we’ve included a preview of tomorrow’s opening statement by moderator and Economist correspondent, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran.

The proposition is:

“This house believes that we can solve our energy problems with existing technologies today, without the need for breakthrough innovations.” What do you think? Will the reduction of global energy consumption be enough to sustain current fossil fuel reserves? Or should all efforts be directed toward discovering new technologies that broaden the world’s energy portfolio?

In his opening statement, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran details both the Pro and Con arguments. Joseph Romm, Pro expert and Senior Fellow at the Centre for American Progress argues that “the world must deploy staggering amounts of low-carbon energy technology as rapidly as possible.” The Con argument made by Peter Meisen, President of Global Energy Network Institute argues that a “design science revolution is required.” Do you agree? Is it more important to support conservation or innovation? Given that both efforts are currently being explored in parallel, where should the center of gravity lie?

Joseph Romm and Peter Meisen will dispute the topic tomorrow in opening posts followed by rebuttals (August 22) and closing statements (August 27). A winner will be determined by popular vote and announced on August 29.

Additionally, the following guest participants are scheduled to post their one-time statements:

• August 20 – Michael Eckhart, President, American Council on Renewable Energy
• August 21– Katie Fehrenbacher, Founding Editor, GigaOM’s Earth2Tech
• August 25 – Makito Takami, Chief representative of Washington DC Office, New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO)
• TBD – Mujid Kazimi, Director, MIT’s Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES)

It seems strange to me that the GENI representative is arguing the "con" case, given that Bucky identified most of the solution decades ago - and the parts that aren't quite there yet (electric cars, smart grids, home scale energy storage) are good things to have, but not absolutely mandatory to solve our energy problems.

Buckminster Fuller, visionary engineer of the 20th century, would challenge his audiences: “There’s no energy shortage; there’s no energy crisis; there’s a crisis of ignorance.”

With oil at more than $100 a barrel, carbon dioxide at 383 parts per million (ppm) and rising, China adding a coal-fired plant every week, and continuing Middle East tensions, Bucky’s statement seems almost flippant. We will argue that he was right.

A bit of history frames the discussion. Mankind has had access to electricity for only 130 years. In just over a century, we have extended transmission lines, providing refrigeration and lighting to 5 billion people around the world. This extraordinary feat elevated three-quarters of humanity out of the daily toil experienced by pre-Edison generations. NASA’s “Earth at Night” map highlights this world of prosperity, yet 24% of humanity still lives in the dark. More than one and a half billion people spend their days in repetitive labour and subsistence farming, fetching water and wood every day simply to survive. There are two worlds—the fortunate who have electrical energy, and the poor who do not.

Ironically, the choices we made to achieve our unprecedented prosperity may bring about our downfall. In 1950, there were 2.5 billion people and a global economy of $7 trillion. In just 6 decades, we are now 6.7 billion with a $66 trillion gross world product. The burning of fossil fuels in the first half of the 20th century had a relatively small ecological footprint. Today, the consequences of energy use are felt in every wallet, on each continent, coastline and in our shared atmosphere.

We are addicted to fossil fuels. Coal and natural gas fire two-thirds of all power production and nearly all transportation uses petroleum. Nature isn’t making any more oil, gas or coal, while the IEA forecasts energy demand will increase 50% by 2030. Business-as-usual is a recipe for disaster—for the global economy and our environment.

When asked about solving difficult societal problems, Bucky Fuller would seek new tools that make the old problem obsolete. Regarding energy issues, he posed a more expansive question: How can we provide the quality-of-life needs for everyone in a manner that is environmentally sustainable for our planet? The premier strategy from this investigation: clean electricity for all. Sounds good, but is it possible?

Scarcity of energy is a myth that persists in society, because our fixation remains on fossil fuels. Yet the resource potentials of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass and ocean energies are abundant far beyond our needs. The winds of the American plains are sufficient to power all the electrical demand of the United States, and solar radiation from just 3% of the world’s deserts could power all global demand. There is no shortage of renewable energy on our planet! While annual growth rates of 20-40% for geothermal, wind and solar are promising, their share of the energy pie remains less than 3%.

Critics state that renewable energies are intermittent—the sun isn’t always shining and the winds don’t always blow—and we need reliable electricity every second. The critical infrastructure that solves this is high-voltage transmission. The interconnected grid acts as the freeway for electricity from generator to user, and it is already built throughout the developed world. Today, bulk transmission can deliver power far beyond political boundaries, with over 100 nations trading electricity for mutual benefit. Interconnected grids enable load levelling, economic exchange of power, system reliability and emergency back-up options. Long-distance transmission allows us to tap remote renewable energy resources, sometimes located in neighbouring nations, and to feed clean electricity throughout the network.

Michael Klare is promoting his new book "Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy", with an article at TomDispatch that uses the phrase "new world order" enough times to send your average tinfoiler into orbit - "The End of the World as You Know It … and the Rise of the New Energy World Order".

I like Tom Engelhardt's intro "It's strange that the business and geopolitics of energy takes up so little space on American front pages -- or that we could conduct an oil war in Iraq with hardly a mention of the words "oil" and "war" in the same paragraph in those same papers over the years".

Oil at $110 a barrel. Gasoline at $3.35 (or more) per gallon. Diesel fuel at $4 per gallon. Independent truckers forced off the road. Home heating oil rising to unconscionable price levels. Jet fuel so expensive that three low-cost airlines stopped flying in the past few weeks. This is just a taste of the latest energy news, signaling a profound change in how all of us, in this country and around the world, are going to live -- trends that, so far as anyone can predict, will only become more pronounced as energy supplies dwindle and the global struggle over their allocation intensifies.

Energy of all sorts was once hugely abundant, making possible the worldwide economic expansion of the past six decades. This expansion benefited the United States above all -- along with its "First World" allies in Europe and the Pacific. Recently, however, a select group of former "Third World" countries -- China and India in particular -- have sought to participate in this energy bonanza by industrializing their economies and selling a wide range of goods to international markets. This, in turn, has led to an unprecedented spurt in global energy consumption -- a 47% rise in the past 20 years alone, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE).

An increase of this sort would not be a matter of deep anxiety if the world's primary energy suppliers were capable of producing the needed additional fuels. Instead, we face a frightening reality: a marked slowdown in the expansion of global energy supplies just as demand rises precipitously. These supplies are not exactly disappearing -- though that will occur sooner or later -- but they are not growing fast enough to satisfy soaring global demand.

The combination of rising demand, the emergence of powerful new energy consumers, and the contraction of the global energy supply is demolishing the energy-abundant world we are familiar with and creating in its place a new world order. Think of it as: rising powers/shrinking planet.

This new world order will be characterized by fierce international competition for dwindling stocks of oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium, as well as by a tidal shift in power and wealth from energy-deficit states like China, Japan, and the United States to energy-surplus states like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. In the process, the lives of everyone will be affected in one way or another -- with poor and middle-class consumers in the energy-deficit states experiencing the harshest effects. That's most of us and our children, in case you hadn't quite taken it in.

Here, in a nutshell, are five key forces in this new world order which will change our planet ...

The danger, of course, is that such endeavors, multiplied over time, will provoke regional arms races, exacerbate regional tensions, and increase the danger of great-power involvement in any local conflicts that erupt. History has all too many examples of such miscalculations leading to wars that spiral out of control. Think of the years leading up to World War I. In fact, Central Asia and the Caspian today, with their multiple ethnic disorders and great-power rivalries, bear more than a glancing resemblance to the Balkans in the years leading up to 1914.

What this adds up to is simple and sobering: the end of the world as you've known it. In the new, energy-centric world we have all now entered, the price of oil will dominate our lives and power will reside in the hands of those who control its global distribution.

In this new world order, energy will govern our lives in new ways and on a daily basis. It will determine when, and for what purposes, we use our cars; how high (or low) we turn our thermostats; when, where, or even if, we travel; increasingly, what foods we eat (given that the price of producing and distributing many meats and vegetables is profoundly affected by the cost of oil or the allure of growing corn for ethanol); for some of us, where to live; for others, what businesses we engage in; for all of us, when and under what circumstances we go to war or avoid foreign entanglements that could end in war.

This leads to a final observation: The most pressing decision facing the next president and Congress may be how best to accelerate the transition from a fossil-fuel-based energy system to a system based on climate-friendly energy alternatives.

Energy Bulletin also has an interview with Klare.

The Australian has a report on Chile's supply difficulties with energy and the impact these are having on global copper prices.

THE copper price is predicted to continue rising after breaking through the $US4/lb mark for the first time as the Chile power crisis deepens. Chile's domestic users are bracing for possible cuts to their supply because a drought has caused dams feeding hydro-electric generators to run critically low and Argentina continues to deny the country gas supplies. Chile produces about 40 per cent of the world's copper and the power crisis is threatening production of the base metal at a time of insatiable demand, from China in particular.

Newsweek's "Min Matters" column has an interesting article on mental overload and the "physiological toll of multitasking and why we may not be making rational decisions even when we think we are". The story notes the importance of keeping the flow of energy to the brain going if you want to make rational decisions (which is probably a lesson that holds true for nations as well as individuals), but I found the example used a little odd - is a larger apartment really worth a longer commute ? How do you weigh up the choice, and why does he consider the choice so cut and dried ?

You've just moved to town and need a place to live. You've narrowed your choices to three apartments that seem suitable. The first is spacious, 800 square feet, but it's a good 15 miles from your new job. That's a long daily commute. The second is much closer, only about seven miles away, but at 450 square feet the space is a bit cramped. The third is 350 square feet and 10 miles from work. You're running out of time and need to get yourself settled. Which do you choose?

Well, if you're like most people, you will choose the second apartment. That may be a perfectly fine choice, and chances are you'll be happy there. But it's not a rational choice, and here's why: Eliminating the third apartment is a no-brainer; it's both smaller and more remote than the second apartment. So that should leave you with a tossup between two decent places, and you should be just as likely to choose one as the other. But you're not. Instead you are irrationally swayed by the similarity between the second and the third apartments. You pick the second not because it is better than the spacious apartment, No. 1, but because you're still comparing it to the loser apartment, even though you ruled that one out.

Cognitive psychologists call that third apartment a mental "decoy." It is so clearly inferior to the other two, neither spacious nor well-located, it really shouldn't even be in the mix, but dinging it does not make it go away entirely. It lingers in your mind, tugging you toward apartment No. 2.

This is not a good thing. We make choices like this every day. We decide where to go to college, what to eat for dinner, who to date. And a lot of our choices are irrational, influenced by irrelevant information. We are of course capable of making deliberate, logical choices as well; recent science suggests that the brain is like a hybrid engine, constantly switching back and forth between reasoned calculation and rapid intuition. But what determines how we will handle a particular problem in life? How do we know what part of our cognitive repertoire will be in play today?

A couple of Florida State University psychologists may have part of the answer to that. If the brain truly is like a hybrid engine, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister reasoned, then why not look at the fuel system? All of that cognitive crunching doesn't come cheap, and effortful deliberation is especially greedy for energy. This is not just a metaphor: they wanted to see if the brain's supply of fuel--blood glucose--might determine whether we make logical choices or irrational ones. They decided to explore this in the laboratory. ...

The purpose here was to mentally "exhaust" the subjects, much like doing wind sprints would deplete their muscles and lungs. Once they had all of them in this depleted condition, they re-energized only some of them with sugar. They actually had all of the subjects drink some lemonade, but only some were getting real sugar; the others were drinking lemonade artificially sweetened with Splenda. The idea was that the Splenda drinkers would remain cognitively drained while the sugar drinkers would be restored to normal intellectual functioning.

Finally, the psychologists confronted the subjects with the apartment dilemma described before. In theory, the depleted subjects should at this point have been mentally "weaker" and therefore less capable of making effortful, deliberate decisions. And that is precisely what they found. As reported in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, the subjects who were running on empty were much more likely to be swayed by the decoy apartment--and thus to make a poor judgment. Those who had recently been re-energized didn't waste any time or energy on the inferior decoy, and didn't allow it to sway them in their real choice: they chose the spacious apartment and the better-located apartment about equally.

This is obviously not about lemonade and apartment hunting. But it is about the intricate interplay of mind and body in so many of life's dilemmas. Imagine that you are trying to simultaneously quit smoking, hold your temper with your foolish boss, plan a wedding and finish a complex deadline project while helping your kid with his algebra. Many of us pride ourselves on our ability to multitask. But if willpower and mentally strenuous work both require the same fuel, and that fuel comes in limited supply, something along the way probably has to give. It's just a matter of what.

Of course, if fuel does come in limited supply, you are better off choosing the smaller, closer apartment. But maybe being sugared up doesn't help rational decision making.

Metaefficient has a post on Costa Rica's efforts to generate 100% of its electricity from renewable sources.

Costa Rica is a country rich with renewable energy. In fact, it gets about 99% of all its electrical energy from clean sources, and it’s aiming to be the first country to become carbon neutral. Some of Costa Rica’s energy sources include geothermal energy, the burning of sugarcane waste and other biomass, solar and wind energy. However, the largest source of energy is hydroelectricity — its hydroelectric dams provide more than 82% of the country’s electricity.

But the electric needs of Costa Rica are increasing, and the government now wants to build new dams that would displace indigenous villages and flood valuable habitats. Local environmental groups are opposing the construction of new hydroelectric dams.

Also, Costa Rica’s efforts to minimize its own contributions to global warming have made it especially vulnerable to climate changes caused by other countries. The reason is rain. Even a tiny shift in rainfall patterns could leave the country without enough water to meet its growing demand for electricity. And scientists say climate change is likely to have a significant effect on rainfall.

But Costa Rica is working to become the world’s first carbon-neutral country (other countries vying to be first are Monaco, Norway, New Zealand and Iceland). Costa Rica wants to become carbon neutral in time to celebrate 200 years of independence in 2021, says environment and energy minister Roberto Dobles.

Wind power might come to forefront in Costa Rica — a large wind farm with 22 turbines has been working in Tilarán, Guanacaste since 2002 and more are scheduled to be installed in the mountains of Escazú and Santa Ana. A new geothermal plant, using naturally-existing superheated water to power steam turbines, is also scheduled to be producing electricity in 2010 near Rincón de la Vieja Volcano, in the province of Guanacaste.

In some ways, Iceland couldn't be more different to Costa Rica - but it too is on the way to 100% renewables. Newsweek reports that Iceland Has Power to Burn.

Iceland's economy, which until recently relied largely on fishing, has diversified in recent years, with rapid growth in tourism, manufacturing and financial services. And like the Blue Lagoon, much of the growth has been a happy byproduct of Iceland's decades-long strategy of tapping sources of renewable energy. Mindful of climate change and the need to limit emissions, many U.S. states have set goals of obtaining 10 or 15 percent of their energy from renewables at some point in the distant future, and the European Union has pledged to reach 20 percent by 2020. But Iceland is already at about 80 percent. All electricity on the island is generated through geothermal or hydroelectric sources—low-emissions sources that don't use fossil fuels. Most homes are heated by water pumped from geothermal hot spots. "We are blessed with a lot of clean and renewable energy," Prime Minster Geir H. Haarde told NEWSWEEK. "The only uses of fossil fuels in Iceland are people using cars and the fishing fleet." And increasingly, Iceland, whose most prominent exports have been haddock and Björk, is devising ways to export what has been a stranded resource.

Iceland is a small island with a tiny, ethnically homogenous population: only 300,000, with more than half living in the capital, Reykjavik. It lacks coal reserves, and is endowed with massive glaciers, which produce huge volumes of water that can be harnessed to generate electricity. It also happens to sit atop a rift in the earth's crust that keeps significant reservoirs of heat bubbling near the surface. To a large degree, it is the polar opposite of the United States. Yet we—and other developed nations—can learn some valuable lessons from Iceland about what happens when a society commits to the systematic development of renewable energy.

From the cobblestone streets of downtown Reykjavik, the storybook-cute capital, to the stark fjords of the east, positive collateral benefits—many of them unintended—are evident. None looms larger than the new $1.5 billion Alcoa Fjardaal plant, which represents the largest single private-sector investment in Iceland's epic history.

... the American aluminum giant decided to build its first new smelter in 20 years near the town of Reydarfjordur, largely because of the promise of abundant clean power. Smelters require an immense amount of energy. Power-intensive companies like Alcoa are concerned both with their images and with the potential for initiatives that imposes costs on burning fossil fuels—from emission caps to carbon taxes. So when Landsvirkjun, the national utility, said it would build a 690-megawatt hydroelectric power plant 30 miles away, Alcoa took the plunge. Construction began in 2004, and today the massive plant—its 336 pots cover an expanse of nearly three quarters of a mile, the largest such line in the world—produces massive quantities of aluminum bars, coil and sheets. "It's almost the ideal place to invest, because of the combination of a highly skilled work force, an open and transparent democracy and the endless supplies of renewable energy," says Jake Siewert, vice president for environment, health and safety at Alcoa.

The Independent has a look at the latest news in British ocean power generation. Meanwhile Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy are wasting time and money talking about building expensive and unpopular nuclear power plants (see here for more on ocean energy).

Britain is set this week to enter a new age, generating energy directly from the seas that surge around its shores. On Saturday a strange, 122ft- long contraption – looking like an upside-down windmill – will set off from the Belfast dock that built the Titanic to produce the first electricity ever brought ashore from British tides.

The device – the first of its kind anywhere in the world – is expected to start a revolution which could lead to our island nation getting a fifth of its power from its surrounding waters, and to the far north of Scotland becoming "the Saudi Arabia of marine energy".

Remarkably, the pioneering device, which will start producing power from predictable and clean tidal energy, is the fruit of the vision and persistence of a single campaigning engineer, and has been developed by a small West Country firm. Though it has recently had some Government support, ministers have traditionally preferred to pour resources into much bigger projects, such as nuclear power stations. Indeed, the installation of the new device – near the mouth of Northern Ireland's Strangford Lough – is scheduled to take place only days after the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, are expected to sign a deal to jointly construct a new generation of reactors and to sell the technology around the world.

Yet the inauguration of a tidal turbine, dubbed SeaGen – which will generate enough electricity to power 1,140 homes by being placed directly in the tide race that rushes in and out of the lough – may unexpectedly prove to be the more significant event. While the much-vaunted Severn Barrage has only just begun to undergo a two-year feasibility study, experts are hailing the new turbine as the start of a giant leap in exploiting marine energy, where Britain, for once, is now leading the world.

Later this year, in another global first, a wave energy power station developed by an Edinburgh firm is to be installed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal. Next year, an even bigger one, off Cornwall, is expected to start feeding electricity into the national grid, and yet another is planned for the Orkneys. And Marine Current Turbines, the firm behind SeaGen, has joined with the utility company npower to develop a tidal power station off Anglesey.

Britain has the best tide and wave energy resources in the world – the official Carbon Trust estimates that they could together provide a fifth of our electricity. Yet, until recently, successive governments have set their face against developing them.

In the 1980s the then Department of Energy killed off promising proposals for exploiting the waves amid evidence that it did so because they threatened its (never realised) plans to expand nuclear power. In 1992 an official report concluded that it "did not see any justification for significant public expenditure" on offshore energy, and as recently as 2003 a Government White Paper ruled out the development of a Severn Barrage.

The tide only turned decisively about a year ago when, as The Independent on Sunday exclusively reported, ministers began backing plans for the £14bn, 10-mile barrage. Gordon Brown officially announced a feasibility study at the last Labour Party conference, and this got under way in January.

Launching the study, which will continue until 2010, the Secretary of State for Business, John Hutton, described the barrage's potential as "breathtaking". But though it could alone provide 5 per cent of the country's electricity from a completely dependable, renewable resource it could not be in operation until at least 2020.

And the Government's official environmental advisers – the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Countryside Council for Wales – have warned that the barrage would "cause irreversible impacts" to the estuary's "internationally important habitats" for wildlife and to its "unique ecology".

The scheme in Northern Ireland avoids these drawbacks by using a radically different technology. While the barrage impounds the rising tide behind a dam – letting it out, as it falls, through some 200 turbines in the structure – SeaGen sits in the tidal currents like an inverted windmill, capturing some of the energy by letting the water, rather than air, turn its sails as it flows.

While the barrage is a mammoth and expensive structure, which takes many years to build and then cannot be moved, the turbines can be constructed and sited relatively quickly, cheaply and flexibly. And while damming the Severn estuary inevitably fundamentally alters its ecology, SeaGen is expected to have far less impact on wildlife and the environment. But its technology's potential is no smaller. A report by the Sustainable Development Commission last year estimated that exploiting Britain's tidal currents could generate at least 5 per cent of the nation's electricity. Other authorities put it even higher.

Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, one of Britain's leading marine energy experts, estimates that the Pentland Firth alone could generate up to a quarter of Britain's electricity – more than is now being provided by all the country's nuclear power stations – making the channel between Orkney and the north Scottish mainland "the Saudi Arabia of marine energy."

Martin Wright, managing director of Marine Current Turbines, calls the firth, the "Mount Everest" of the industry, and describes its tidal currents as "the equivalent of an underwater hurricane". Every second, about 2.5 million cubic metres of water – enough to fill 1,000 Olympic swimming pools – passes at a speed of up to 12 knots across a line traced across the Firth.

This is just the biggest of a host of potential sites, usually where the tides are speeded up by being squeezed through narrow channels, forming one of the most intense resources provided by any form of renewable energy. In all, the Government estimates, Britain has about half of all Europe's such "tidal stream" potential and between 10 and 15 per cent of what has been identified worldwide, making it uniquely blessed.

Some 24 technologies, at various stages of research and development, have been put forward for exploiting tidal currents, but SeaGen – invented by Peter Fraenkel – a renewable energy pioneer who is now Marine Current Turbines' technical director (see right) is well in the lead.

In 2003 a smaller prototype, called Seaflow, was installed off Lynmouth in Devon becoming the first renewable energy device, powered by the sea, to be installed in the open ocean anywhere in the world. It operated through three winters, with regular force 8 gales, without any important technical failures – with an overall performance that exceeded expectations. Dr Fraenkel says it "proved the feasibility" of the technology.

He adds that SeaGen – four times as powerful, with a capacity of 1.2 megawatts – "is the world's first commercial scale system for generating electricity from marine currents" – and is "needed to prove economic and commercial feasibility".

Originally designed to be installed in 2006, it was held up by a series of events including the commercial takeover of the company due to install it, and an accident to a vessel due to carry it.

Hmmm - sounds like there is some good tinfoil potential in that story !

The Independent also says that "Sea levels are rising too fast for the Thames Barrier".

A fear that sea levels will rise far faster than predicted this century has led to a revision of the plan to protect London from a devastating flood caused by the sort of storm surge in the North Sea that resulted in the closure of the Thames Barrier yesterday.

It was the 108th time that the barrier had to be closed since it became operational in 1982 but scientists are concerned that rapidly rising sea levels could significantly shorten the expected lifespan of one of the world's biggest anti-flood structures.

When the Thames Barrier was being designed in the 1970s, global average sea levels were rising at about 1.8 millimetres a year and global warming was not seen as a threat, but in the past 15 years the rate has nearly doubled to about 3.1mm a year and many scientists expect it to accelerate still further.

Sea levels are rising even faster in south-east England because of local effects, such as land sinking, but officials for the Environment Agency said that the barrier is designed to cope with an 8mm-per-year rate of sea level increase yet still meet its design specifications – such as coping with a one-in-a-thousand-year storm surge by 2030. ...

The Thames Barrier protects about £80bn worth of buildings and capital infrastructure in London. Some 1.25 million people live or work in the at-risk area.

The ABC reports that the new Federal Minister for Energy has announced a national energy security assessment is to be done - sounds like someone is concerned about peak oil, even if the phrase isn't used.

From Global energy crunch 'the new Cold War':

Federal Minister for Resources and Energy Martin Ferguson has described the challenge of securing global energy supplies as "the new Cold War". Mr Ferguson has told the second annual Energy State of the Nation forum that the worldwide supply and demand balance for energy has tightened. He says concerns about energy security have risen in line with energy prices.

Mr Ferguson says his Department will develop a national energy security assessment through consultation with industry over the next three months. "This is about providing timely and focussed information in the energy sector," he said. "This security assessment will provide an integral picture of the outlook for electricity, gas and liquid fuel supplies and demand over the next five, 10 and 15 years."

The Age reports that the coal fired power industry is seeking government handouts to "compensate" it for any future action to levy a charge on them to pay for the cost of dealing with their emissions. Hmmm. From Big polluters demand billion-dollar 'ransom':

AUSTRALIA'S electricity generation industry is demanding massive compensation from the Federal Government in return for its co-operation in efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In a challenge to the Government's climate adviser, Ross Garnaut, the power generators have warned of soaring costs to consumers and disruptions to supplies unless they are compensated for the costs of complying with anti-greenhouse laws. With most of Australia's electricity coming coal-fired generators, the industry is the nation's largest producer of greenhouse emissions, and the main focus of efforts to curb them. A planned carbon trading system will force the industry to pay to emit greenhouse gas.

Climate Institute policy director Erwin Jackson has rejected the suggestion that refusing compensation to power generators would hurt the environment, arguing a strong emissions cap would force the market to invest in cleaner forms of energy. "We shouldn't be giving (compensation) to industries that have failed to respond to what the market has been telling them was on the way for a long time," he said. The debate coincides with worsening predictions about the pace of climate change, including a UN report that found glaciers melted nearly twice as fast in 2006 as in 2005.

The SMH has a demoralising report about the sad state of government energy policy - fossil fuels receive 28 times as much in subsidies as the renewable energy industry does - which is a long way from what we should have - carbon taxes and no subsidies for fossil fuel industries at all - Funds Shun Renewable Energy

AUSTRALIAN Government investment funds are putting nearly 50 times more money into the fossil fuel and uranium industries than into renewable energy, a new report has found.

Large Government-owned investors, including the Federal Government's Future Fund and state bodies such as the Workcover Authority, are investing in direct conflict with their governments' plans to reduce greenhouse emissions, according to the report, to be released today by the Australian Conservation Foundation.

The report came as a Newspoll commissioned by Greenpeace found 78 per cent of Australians remain unaware that the fossil fuel industry receives taxpayer subsidies of just over $800 per person each year, about 28 times the amount given in subsidies to the renewable industry.

Adam Siegel at Energy Smart has a post on hydro-kinetic power generation (putting turbines directly into a river, in similar fashion to tidal and ocean current generation) - "A quick fix to up hydro power globally?".

In the United States, traditional hydropower (dams) provides roughly 10% of the electricity. Traditional hydro plants, in many cases, are century+ old with embedded technology that is far from 21st century in terms of productivity for every gallon that passes by. Thus, opportunities exist for taking existing hydropower facilities and making them more productive with the existing water resources. And, there are literally 1000s of dams and spillways across the country that do not have existing electricity production. But, modernization operations can cost millions and take years to go through regulatory processes to seek to minimize environmental impacts (or, in the case of old facilities, perhaps to reduce environmental impact). The hydro industry often comments that the hydro regulatory process is more difficult than nuclear power’s.

Is there, however, an opportunity for getting a quick 3-7% increase at existing hydropower facilities and to put electricity production at some non-power producing dam sites with a far easier regulatory process, low per kilowatt installation costs (with, then, near free fuel), and do so quickly? Until yesterday, at WIREC, the options didn’t really seem apparent. Now, however, my head is whirling with the possibilities.

Hyrdo Green Energy has developed a hydro-kinetic power system that can be placed in-stream for generating power, for example, along rivers without the massive installation requirements of a dam and, thus, minimal implications on the river’s natural flow. Their approach got some attention a couple years ago and seemed quite Energy COOL at the time. They mount their system on a barge, lowering the turbine into the water, rather than building from the river bottom (or damning the river), and generate power from the river’s current. The barge enables moving the system (as it makes sense or is required) and also provides a platform for any required maintenance. Hmm. This looked of real interest as a way to quickly establish power generation on rivers around the world at relatively low cost and in a distributed fashion.

A specific application of their technology, one that they are actively pursuing for a test program in Minnesota, seems potentially quite valuable as some Silver Dust to help change the energy equation. Rather than putting the system somewhere on a river, for example, independent of existing infrastructure, Hydro Green will be putting one of their systems in the spillway of an existing dam. What are some of the benefits of this approach?

* It is reusing a resource, gaining more power from the water that has already generated power. This is a quick ‘boost’ to the plant’s energy efficiency.

* The dam has existing infrastructure (such as transformers, power lines) that can be used to move the power ‘to market’.

* Permitting processes are, as mentioned above, a real nightmare for hydro projects. As this is within a spillway, the licensing process is different, within the existing plant’s “capacity”, and thus lowering the cost/time for getting permitted. [Note: fast permitting isn’t necessarily “good”, but work through the negatives here. The only serious one (and it does matter) seems likely to be the potential impact on fish survivability for fish that have gone through the dam and are disoriented coming through the turbine. Thus, this merits better understanding and evaluation before this technology is deployed on a massive scale.]

* If it works (as promised), this is a quite fast way to increase clean power production from existing facilities with (it seems on the first blush) minimal (if any) environmental impact.

They will be testing the system at an existing 4.4 mw plant and expect to see about 200 kilowatts of addition production. This is a 5.7% increase in the dam’s productivity.

Hmmm …. Multiple 5.7% by 95,000 megawatts and we’re talking some real power generation. Could Hydro Green (or similar) technology provide a path for 5+ gigawatts of additional green power over, let’s say, the next decade. (And, by the way, in a ‘mind spinning’ fasion, there is the consideration of what the implications for this technology would be for pumped hydro storage, which is generally discussed at 80-90% efficiency. Adding 5.7% more to that efficiency potentially helps make the wind/pumped hydro storage combination even more effective for displacing coal-fired electricity.) This isn’t a Silver Bullet to solve Global Warming and keep coal in the ground, but it is some nice Silver Dust to add to the pile for holistic solutions.

Last year I came across the story of Dutch company Kema and their energy island idea - basically a variant on the usual pumped hydro energy storage concept where water is pumped out of a space below sea level then allowed to flow back in, generating power as it does. The "island" uses wind power to pump water out of the enclosed area. An obvious extension to this idea would be to harness ocean energy as well - letting wave and/or tidal power supplement the output of the wind turbines. An attraction of this concept is that it potentially allows a large amount of new energy storage to be brought online - and this storage would be along the world's coastlines, where most of the population lives.

Another form of energy island has been in the news recently, this one a substantially more ambitious proposal which envisions artificial islands to collect wind, wave, ocean current and solar power in the tropics, along with a more unusual energy source - harnessing the difference in water temperatures between the warm surface and the cold depths using a technique called OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion). These islands are being proposed by architects Dominic Michaelis and his son Alex Michaelin as a response to Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge, which offers $25 million in prizes for innovative solutions for combating global warming.



While the practicality of these particular proposals has yet to be put to the test, the various forms of ocean power are probably the most overlooked of the big 6 renewable energy sources (along with solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and hydro).

Other forms of renewable energy are sometimes criticised for being more intermittent and less predictable than traditional power generation, however ocean energy is much more reliable - steady ocean currents could provide good baseload power, as could OTEC, tidal power is diurnal and highly predictable and waves are predictable days in advance.

In this post I'll have a look at the amount of energy that could potentially be harvested from these sources and the various projects underway to try and make this a reality.

Tidal and Ocean Current Power

Tidal power stations usually take the form of a dam (or barrage) built across a narrow bay or river mouth. As the tide flows in or out, it creates uneven water levels on either side of the barrier. The water flows through the barrier, turning turbines to generate electricity.

Benefits of tidal barrage power generation include :

* Predictable source of clean energy
* No dependence on foreign fuel sources
* Flood protection
* Transport links for road and/or rail
* Better shipping and boating conditions behind the barrier

Disadvantages include :

* The timing of the tides doesn't often correlate with peak demand times (less of a problem if there are good energy storage options available)
* Existing ecosystems behind the barrage tend to be heavily altered
* Likely to stimulate silting in some areas and coastal erosion in others
* Enhance flood risk on the seaward side
* Shipping would have to navigate locks
* Industrial discharges behind the barrage are less likely to be dispersed out to sea

Variations on this theme include offshore tidal lagoons, which use a water impoundment structure and low-head hydroelectric generating equipment on shallow tidal flats, and tidal fences, which are composed of a number of individual vertical axis turbines mounted within the fence structure, known as a caisson.

Underwater turbines can also be used to harness both tidal power and ocean current power. The turbines (sometimes called aquanators) are similar to wind turbines. In water moving between 6 and 9 km per hour, a 15 m diameter water turbine could generate as much energy as a 60 m diameter wind turbine. Given the smaller amount of infrastructure required and the larger range of possible sites that this technology could be deployed to, it seems likely that underwater turbines will become much more widespread than tidal barrage style generation.



World tidal energy resources have been estimated at around 3000 GW, however less than 3% of this is located in areas considered suitable for power generation (these figures probably don't include ocean current power, which doesn't seem to be well studied).

A 240 MW tidal-barrage power plant has been operating at La Rance in Brittany since 1966. Other operational barrage sites are at Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia (18 MW), the Bay of Kislaya near Murmansk and at Jangxia Creek in the East China Sea.

The largest tides in the world are found in Canada's Bay of Fundy, which has been earmarked to become a 4-berth test site for tidal power generation next year.

On the west coast of Canada, Marine Current Turbine and BC Tidal Energy Corporation plan to install at least three 1.2 MW tidal energy turbines in Vancouver Island's Campbell River by 2009. This the first step in a plan to develop larger tidal farms off British Columbia's coast, which the company says have a tidal energy potential of up to 4,000 MW.

In the United States, at the southern end of the Bay of Fundy, lies Passamaquoddy Bay, which has long been a target for a tidal power development - first initiated in 1935 by the Public Works Administration under the Roosevelt administration, then halted by Congress a year later. John F Kennedy revived the 550 MW project in 1963, however the plan died with him (spawning one of the stranger JFK assassination conspiracy theories I have come across).

Further south, in the Martha's Vineyard area, two underwater turbine projects are trying to get started - one a 300 MW proposal from Oceana Energy Company and the other from Natural Currents Energy Services. Other projects are being considered in the Cape Cod and New Bedford areas - part of a "gold rush" for good tidal power sites (the most desirable ones usually have hourglass figures, to get maximum force in the incoming tide) which has seen the FERC issue 47 preliminary permits for ocean energy projects (and generated mainstream news coverage on the NBC network).

New York's East River is the location of one of the more high profile tidal power experiments currently underway, with Verdant Power experimenting with underwater turbines there. The first attempt eventually ended in failure, with the strong tides breaking the devices.

The Gulf Stream has also caught the eye of hopeful ocean energy companies, particularly in Florida, with the 30 mile wide current pushing 8.5 billion gallons of water along per second and prompting some observers to consider the prospect of "Infinite Underwater Energy".

Californian utility PG&E is also investigating tapping tidal power in San Francsico Bay, with some observers talking about a plant of up to 400 MW in size.

Another bay famous for its tides is the Severn river estuary in Britain, with a tidal range of 14 metres. Plans for damming the Severn estuary or Bristol channel have existed since the 19th century (with tidal power generation being just one proposed application). The UK government recently proposed a new barrage design, which could produce 5% of the UK's electricity requirements, with a peak rate of 8.6 GW. A feasibility study is expected to be complete by 2010. An alternative proposal, by Tidal Electric, involves a series of lagoons, the first of which would be built in Swansea Bay. Some observers have noted underwater turbines may be more appropriate than a barrage.

Pentland Firth in Scotland is another UK location that is considered to have a large amount of tidal power potential - a DTI study in 1993 indicated that if all potential sites were developed, the total UK tidal stream resource could be about 60 TWh. Of this, almost half (28 TWh) could come from the Pentland Firth. The water depth is 60m or more, making potential energy capture huge but technically difficult - 63% of the tidal stream resource is estimated to be in waters deeper than 40m.

Marine Current Turbines launched the world's first underwater turbine project off north Devon in 2003. MCT also began installing a 1.2 MW "SeaGen" tidal current turbine in Northern Ireland's Strangford Lough in 2007, with the company planning to scale up to build a 10MW tidal power farm off Anglesey in North Wales, and to have 500MW of tidal capacity by 2015. Also in Wales, Lunar Energy and Eon are hoping to build an underwater tidal project off Pembrokeshire.

Another UK tidal power proposal is part of a plan by Metrotidal to build a tunnel under the Thames, currently under fire from environmental groups. There is also talk about regions like the Isle Of Wight and the Humber estuary harnessing tidal power as part of initiatives to become energy self-sufficient (like other "Transition Towns").

Norway has also begun investigating the use of tidal power, with an experimental facility opening in Hammerfest in 2003. The company that developed that technology, Hammerfest Strøm, is working with Scottish Power to develop a project near the Orkney Islands (the islands have also been a test site for another venture by Lunar Energy and Rotech).

There has been no tidal power development in Australia thus far, though the Kimberly region has long been a target for would be developers of tidal power projects, due to its enormous potential (a tidal range of 11 metres). Thus far all of the proposed projects have been stymied by the remoteness of the location from the Western Australian and national electricity grids and by environmental concerns. A number of possible sites have been identified, including Secure Bay, Walcott Inlet, George Water and St. George's Basin.

Liberal backbencher Wilson "Ironbar" Tuckey has been the most vocal supporter of a Kimberly tidal project, pointing out if a link was built to the eastern states grid it would obviate the need for any consideration of nuclear power. Some Kimberly tidal power advocates have also tried to base the idea of a "hydrogen economy" on the resource, though this seems a lot more far-fetched than a grid link (the grid link could also potentially include large scale CSP solar in the western australian deserts, which are one of the best solar resources in the world) .

The Bass Strait area is also considered to have significant potential for tidal / ocean current power generation (one estimate claiming there is potential for 3000 MW of generation in the channel between King Island and Cape Otway).



New Zealand is another country with large tidal resources but without any existing tidal energy generation. According to TVNZ, there are at least 24 wave and tidal power projects currently under development. Trying to get a handle on who might be behind these projects isn't easy - there is an NZ wave and tidal power association, but it doesn't list members or projects - according to their latest newsletter they have 59 members. Crest Energy seems to be the most prominent local company, with a plan for a 200 MW plant in Kaipara Harbour using underwater turbines. Other potential locations include Manukau and Hokianga Harbours, and Tory Strait and French Pass in the Marlborough Sounds. The harbours produce 5 to 6-knot currents and tidal flows of 100,000 cu m a second from the flood and ebb tides, with tidal volumes 12 times greater than the flow in the largest local rivers.

The Phillipines is another potential location for tidal power, with a 2.2GW tidal fence proposed for the Dalupiri Passage using the Davis turbine, from the Blue Energy company and an estimated cost of $US 2.8 Billion is unfortunately on hold due to political instability.



South Korea also has ambitions to generate power from ocean currents, with pilot underwater turbines being installed at Uldolmok, in the country's south-west. Researchers at the Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute (KORDI) chose the site because it has flows up to 12 knots, believed to be among the fastest in Asia. The strong currents have resulted in a number of accidents, hampering progress. KORDI is also trying to improve the efficiency of more conventional barrage-type tidal power plants. The primary project involves building a power plant with a capacity of 250 MW at Lake Sihwa, with another plant up to 520 MW being considered for Garolim Bay.



Taiwan is another Asian nation considering the the possibility of large-scale ocean current power generation. There have been discussions about using the strong Kuroshio current off the east coast of Taiwan to generate up to 1.68 trillion kilowatt-hours per year (compared to Taiwan's current annual demand of electricity of around 98 billion kilowatt-hours).

Wave Power

Surface waves and pressure variations below the ocean's surface can be used by floating buoys or submerged platforms to generate intermittent power. Wave energy sources are widely available, are relatively consistent and predictable and (According to analysts Frost and Sullivan) have the highest energy density among all renewable energy sources. The best resource is found between 40-60 degrees of latitude where the available resource is 30 to 70 kW/m, with peaks of 100 kW/m. The potential global wave power potential has been estimated to be around 8,000-80,000TWh/y (1-10TW), which is the same order of magnitude as world electrical energy consumption.

The UK, for example, is estimated to possess the capacity to generate approximately 87 TWh of wave power per year - equivalent to almost 25 per cent of current UK demand. There are two main research centres in Europe focusing on the development and commercialisation of ocean energy technologies. The first is the European Marine Energy Centre located in Orkney, Scotland, which provides developers with sites to test their prototypes. The other is the Wave Energy Centre in Portugal.

Wave energy ideas are plentiful but real world examples are still rare - there are around 1000 patents for wave energy converters currently on the market and no consensus has emerged yet on which technologies will succeed.

Australian company Oceanlinx (previously known as Energetech) has had a 450 kilowatt wave power unit running at Port Kembla in NSW for a number of years, and plans to connect to the commercial power grid in early 2008. Oceanlinx is also at the advanced permitting stage for a project in Portland, Victoria which would deploy eighteen 1.5MW units for a total capacity of 27MW, which the company claims will be the largest wave energy project in the world.

The company has other projects planned in Rhode Island, Hawaii and Namibia, and intends to participate in the South West of England Regional Development Agency's "Cornwall Wave Hub" in the UK.

The Cornwall Wave Hub aims to create the world's first large scale wave energy farm by constructing a wave hub, or "socket", on the seabed. Oceanlinx is participating along with Ocean Power Technologies, Fred Olsen Renewables and WestWave. Ireland is looking to build a similar grid connected test facility on the Mullet Peninsula in Ireland's County Mayo. While the marine renewables industry in the UK seems to be quite vibrant, government programs to fund the sector have been criticised for not spending the money they have been allocated.

Another Australian company, Carnegie Corp has installed a small array of its CETO II units off Fremantle in WA, and is looking to set up a 50 MW facility in South Australia to desalinate seawater for the Adelaide market and the mining industry. The CETO technology was devised in the 1970s by Carnegie's chairman Alan Burns, a well-known Perth oil man who also founded Hardman Resources. It operates mostly underwater rather than on the surface like many buoy based alternatives, which the company believes will result in a much lower likelihood of damage from storms and rough conditions.

Another Australian company exploring wave (and tidal) power is Sydney based BioPowerSystems, which is trying to is commercialise "biomimetic ocean energy conversion technologies" (an example of "biomimicry", which I'll be doing a post on at a later date). BioPower has been awarded a $5 million grant under the Australian Government's AusIndustry Renewable Energy Development Initiative to test prototypes of the wave energy device (most likely at King Island) and the tidal energy device (at Flinders Island), with each generating around 250 kW.

Pelamis Wave power is a Scottish company that is constructing a 3 MW wave farm off the coast of the Orkney Islands. The company is also involved in the construction of a 2.25 MW plant in Portugal at Aguçadoura, which will soon be expanded to 20 MW, and is providing the technology for the WestWave project in Cornwall. The Pelamis design is a distinctive device resembling a 150m long red snake.

The Scottish government is considering building a connection linking the north and west coasts of Scotland with England, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands by 2020 which could be connected to the proposed European Supergrid, with the aim of harvesting up to 10 GW of wind and wave power.



Spain is also dipping a toe into the waters of wave generation, with a 300 kW "breakwater wave energy plant" being constructed on the north coast, using Wavegen (now owned by Siemens) equipment.

In the US, the wave energy company getting the most attention has been Finavera, which has received preliminary approval to build a 100 MW facility off northern California (and has signed a power purchase agreement with PG&E for part of this). At hasn't all been plain sailing for Finavera however, with a test AquaBuoy device sinking off Oregon late last year.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) estimated that waves off the Washington, Oregon and California coasts could produce from 250 to 500 terawatt-hours per year - around 12% of US energy demand. Finavera also has approval for a project in Washington state, along with others in South Africa and Canada.

Another US based company is Ocean Power Technologies, which is looking at developing projects in Hawaii, New Jersey and Spain.



OTEC

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion is not a new idea, it has been around for more than a century. OTEC uses the temperature difference between warm surface water and cold deep water to drive a power-producing cycle. For this to be practical, the temperature difference needs to be at least 20 degrees C, which tends to limit potential application to the tropics. The potential of this energy source has been estimated to be about 10 TW, according to some experts.

The economics of energy production today have delayed the financing of a permanent, continuously operating OTEC plant. However, OTEC is promising as an alternative energy resource for tropical island communities that rely heavily on imported fuel. OTEC plants in these markets could provide islands with power and desalinated water. Other applications that have been considered are aquaculture and mineral extraction.

OTEC plants have been trialled in Nauru and India (along with extensive research in Hawaii). There are also plans to build plants for the US military base on Diego Garcia, and in the Marianas Islands.

One unusual apparent application of this energy source that I came across recently is a robotic "thermal glider" which, at the least, seems like a very interesting tool for environmental monitoring.

Regular news updates on OTEC can be found at OTEC News.

Energy Island Ideas

The thinking behind harnessing ocean power has traditionally focussed on systems built on or near the shoreline. The amount of power available is large, however we are still at the very early stages of learning to harness it, and it is unlikely that ocean power will provide a significant proportion of our energy needs in the next decade or two.

The Energy Island concepts that I began the post with show that people are now beginning to consider harnessing ocean power out at sea as well, which vastly increases the amount of energy that could be tapped.

(The term "energy island" is an overloaded one unfortunately - the Danish island of Samso, for example, calls itself Energy Island as it is completely self-sufficient. There is also a "solar island" being developed off Dubai known as Ras Al Khaima.)

Dominic Michaelis' energy islands are by far the most ambitious plan I've seen for harnessing ocean power in the open seas. These hexagonal islands, are designed to generate electricity using wave, ocean current, OTEC, wind and solar sources. The group estimates that each island complex could produce around 250 MW of power. 50,000 energy islands could meet the world’s energy requirements - ands provide two tons of fresh water per person per day for the entire world population as a byproduct of the OTEC process.

The island design also supports farming seafood in small pens below deck and growing vegetables in shaded areas on the platform. The group is planning to conduct a pilot in the waters off the British Virgin Islands or in the Indian Ocean over the coming year.

Most observers consider the likelihood of energy islands appearing in the near term as remote, however the ideas are thought provoking and put into context just how much energy could be obtained out at sea.

One of the main issues with generating power offshore is how to store or transfer the energy (assuming that the islands don't simply become mobile aquatic arcologies of the sort science fiction writers used to dream about). One possible way of storing the energy would be to produce hydrogen, and to use the islands as refuelling stations for ships that use hydrogen fuel cells. Alternatively, the energy could be used to process raw materials, or to produce materials like ammonia.

MetaEfficient reports that Sandia Laboratories has achieved a new efficiency record at their Solar Thermal Test Facility for solar to grid efficiency, using a concentrating dish with 82 mirrors combined with a stirling engine filled with hydrogen.

On a perfect New Mexico winter day — with the sky almost 10 percent brighter than usual — Sandia National Laboratories and Stirling Energy Systems (SES) set a new solar-to-grid system conversion efficiency record by achieving a 31.25 percent net efficiency rate. The old 1984 record of 29.4 percent was toppled Jan. 31 on SES’s “Serial #3” solar dish Stirling system at Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility.

The conversion efficiency is calculated by measuring the net energy delivered to the grid and dividing it by the solar energy hitting the dish mirrors. Auxiliary loads, such as water pumps, computers and tracking motors, are accounted for in the net power measurement.

“Gaining two whole points of conversion efficiency in this type of system is phenomenal,” says Bruce Osborn, SES president and CEO. “This is a significant advancement that takes our dish engine systems well beyond the capacities of any other solar dish collectors and one step closer to commercializing an affordable system.”

Jospeh Romm at grist has a look at the bleak future for some of our legacy (sunset) energy industries which he calls the "finite four".

It has not been a good year so far for King Coal, Big Oil, and whatever nickname we give to the nuclear energy industry.

Two weeks ago, TIME reported that nuclear plants in the southeastern U.S. may be forced to cut power production or temporarily shut down later this year because the year-long drought has left too little water to cool the reactors.

There already has been one drought-related shutdown in Alabama. And while officials aren't yet predicting brownouts, utilities will be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other places, leading to "shockingly high electric bills for millions of southerners."

Unfortunately, the Southeast is precisely where the nuclear energy industry has been looking as the best location for new power plants, in part because they believe there is less public resistance there. We'll see how the public feels when those "shockingly high electric bills" arrive in the mail.

The South's problems are not unique. The Associated Press reports that 24 of the nation's 104 nukes are in areas experiencing the most severe drought.

Then came an email from the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell to his staff, predicting that the production of conventional oil supplies won't be able to keep pace with world demand after 2015 -- a mere seven years from now.

That's very bad news for oil-dependent economies, including ours. Five of the last seven recessions in the U.S. economy have been preceded by big increases in the price of oil (PDF), and today's oil prices are one of the factors being blamed for the economic slowdown and possible recession we're experiencing now. The email from Shell's Jeroen van der Veer suggests that unless we figure out how to replace conventional oil or how to stop economic development and population growth around the world, high oil prices are here to stay. It's the old law of supply and demand.

Next came word from the U.S. Department of Energy that it has cancelled plans to build the country's first clean-coal plant in Illinois. The DOE cited economics -- the cost to taxpayers has gone from $800 million when the project was announced five years ago to $1.33 billion today -- and said it wasn't ready to find the plant environmentally acceptable.

To make matters worse, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that three of the nation's biggest investment banks are going to make it harder to build coal-fired power plants in the United States. Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley anticipate that the federal government will cap greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants before long. Investors don't want to loan money to a new power plant whose debt could go bad under the additional expense of carbon allowances.

What does all this bad news mean? For those who have the courage to look, the end of the era of finite fuels is in sight. The end always was inevitable, of course. That's what finite is all about. But I believe that oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy -- let's call them the Finite Four -- are entering their end game.

Like prisoners on the way to the gallows, they're bargaining desperately for a reprieve. Van der Veer recommends more effort to harvest unconventional oil from tar sands and more environmentally sensitive and harder-to-reach places. But tar sands, oil shale, liquid fuels from coal, and other unconventional fossil fuels promise nothing but more problems. They are filthy. They accelerate global warming. They use a lot of energy and water.

And water may be their biggest problem of all. Water already is considered a global crisis by some experts, and it seems to be reaching that status in the United States. A new study shows that the water crisis already underway in the far West is due to global warming. Snow pack is the source for 75 percent of the West's water -- and snow pack is declining. ...

Declining supplies, rising prices, worsening water problems ... it is time for the big, entrenched, troubled Finite Four to recognize that the end is near. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the well-known expert on dying, identified five stages through which patients pass when they discover they have a terminal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

The Finite Four have entered Stage 3. Perhaps when they progress to State 5 -- acceptance -- they will grasp the new reality the world faces today: If they want life, they must end their own addiction to finite resources and join in a transition to sustainable, renewable energy.

Grist also has an interview with Google's "green energy czar", Bill Weihl about his RE<C initiative.

Question What exactly are your responsibilities?

Answer Narrowly speaking, my job is to make Google's energy supplies much cleaner, particularly focused on our data centers, which make up the bulk of our energy consumption.

But my boss and the founders have made clear that the goal isn't just to make Google green. We could green our operations completely tomorrow, but if we just did that, the world wouldn't care, the climate certainly wouldn't care -- we're not that big.

The real goal is to do this in a way that has a much broader impact. So it really gets into how we might invest in both renewable energy companies and internal R&D to help advance the state of technology and renewable markets -- to make renewable energy truly mainstream, not just a tiny fraction of the energy supply.

Question Your mandate, specifically, is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity more cheaply than coal-generated energy within years, not decades. That's an immense challenge. What's your plan of action?

Answer We're going to invest tens of millions of dollars each year over the next few years in our own people, lab space, building prototypes, and investing in start-up companies. All of this will be aimed at developing technologies that are proved at least at a pilot scale, and then ready to be manufactured and deployed at gigawatt-and-beyond scales in, say, five years.

There are lots of companies and research groups doing work on technologies that have a reasonable chance of getting to the price point we're talking about in 15 or 20 years, but we feel that there's both an urgent problem as well as an opportunity that demands getting there much faster, if at all possible. From a climate point of view, we can't afford to wait 15 or 20 years to really start to curb global emissions in a big way.

Question What renewable technologies are you focusing on -- far-out concepts, or proven technologies like solar panels and wind turbines?

Answer We are not at the moment focused on solar panels and traditional wind turbines. We are looking quite generally at solar, wind, and geothermal because those are pretty large resources that could potentially, any one of them, supply a very large fraction of the world's energy needs.

But there are technology problems that need to be solved, including cost and the fact that solar and wind are intermittent resources, they're not there all the time, which means if you want to have them be a large fraction of your electricity supply, you need to figure out how to store that kind of energy on a very large scale. There's also the issue of transmission, because the best solar and wind resources are in regions of the country where there aren't a lot of people and a lot of demand. So we need better high-voltage lines to allow you to move more power long distances.

Question What's an example of something you are working on?

answer In the realm of solar, we're concentrating on solar thermal technologies that capture the sun's energy as heat and use that to make steam, which then drives a steam turbine -- just as a coal plant might burn coal and use steam. (Photovoltaic panels, by contrast, convert the sun's light directly into electricity.) It's actually relatively cheap and easy to store the heat for a few hours, which makes this thermal plant one of most promising options for making solar a constant, base-load power source.

Question Many argue that coal's price advantage over renewables is an illusion, that the real costs of coal are not represented in its market price. So effectively you're fighting on a tilted playing field. Would Google lobby for regulatory measures that would level the playing field, like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system?

Answer We might. We've been talking about that. I think generally we are supportive of internalizing those externalities.

At the same time, if you realistically look at the price differential between renewables and nonrenewables today, even with, say, a $30-per-ton price on carbon -- which is pretty high compared to what's been seen in the European trading system so far, or what's been proposed as a likely target of a carbon cap or tax in this country -- that might still not quite narrow the gap between renewables and coal. So we need the technology side, too.

At Google, our focus for the moment is on driving the cost of renewables down as much as possible. And if society manages to raise the cost of coal, then that will help renewables compete.

But remember, this is a global problem, it's not just a U.S. problem. China and India are rapidly increasing their use of coal. It strikes me as unlikely that they will put a substantial price on carbon anytime soon. So even if we make renewables competitive with coal in the U.S. with a carbon price, that still won't be cheap enough to really matter in China and India -- in which case the climate is still in deep trouble. ...

Question You are also charged with the task of making Google carbon neutral. What strategies are you implementing to this end?

Answer There are three pieces. The first is energy efficiency, and that really should be the first on anybody's list. For a number of years, we've been designing our own servers and data centers. Our computing facilities use less than half the energy of a typical industry facility for the same amount of useful computing. That is a huge competitive advantage for us.

Second thing is to deploy renewables as widely as you can, and the major step we've taken to date on that is the 1.6-megawatt photovoltaic array here on our Mountain View campus. We committed in June to deploy a minimum of 50 megawatts of renewables by 2012; I would expect that we'll do more than that.

Third, once we've done everything we can around energy efficiency and renewables to reduce our emissions, we're investing in offset projects that, for example, eliminate methane emissions from landfills, coal mines, or agricultural waste.

Grist notes that a move to clean energy will create jobs, jobs, jobs.

Right on the heels of Tappergate, The New York Times comes out with a couple of articles exploring the economic benefits of fighting global warming. As is evident to anyone but a Taphole, the energy business is the largest business there ever is or was or will be, and therein lies not only enormous money-making opportunities but jobs, jobs, jobs. These things, we hear, are good for the economy.

So, take California, which decided to get serious about developing a solar industry. The state committed $3 billion in declining incentives over a 10-year period, and in return leveraged a lot more than that in private equity. Venture capitalists have put $625 million into California solar companies in 2007 alone. Manufacturers are feverishly commercializing new technologies, and if you can spell solar you can get a job out here.

So, how does an enterprising young state get a piece of that action? I'm glad you asked. Last Wednesday, in Denver, with Governor Ritter on hand, we released a report that we developed with the Center for American Progress titled "Developing State Photovoltaic Markets" (PDF). It's a blueprint for making a solar market work. The premise here is that the key to lowering solar's costs -- and generating good jobs while you are at it -- is creating markets. The folks at NREL have done a great job in developing the technology; photovoltaics work great. Government R&D efforts should be redoubled, but using policy to open markets will leverage orders of magnitude more in private equity and further accelerate solar's entry into the mainstream.

Continuing on the theme, one more from Grist, this time from Jon Rynn on "converting the permanent military economy to a green economy".

The way I see it, we need to understand three things: the nature of the military budget, the needs of the current infrastructure, and how infrastructure renewal could be used to create a green economy.

First, how much of the military budget could theoretically be transferred to civilian work? According to Chalmers Johnson, quoting other experts, in fiscal year 2009 the Department of Defense wants to spend $766.5 billion for "salaries, operations ... and equipment" ($481.4 billion), as well as to fight "the two on-going wars" in Iraq and Afganistan ($141.7 billion), "hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007" ($93.4 billion), and an "allowance" ($50 billion).

Then there's the "$23.4 billion for the Department of Energy [that] goes toward developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3 billion in the Department of State budget" for "foreign military assistance." There's a couple of extra billions for various expenses (why count those?), and another $7.6 billion "for the military-related activities of NASA."

Thus, there is about $825 billion in direct expenses, and also another $230-billion-plus that is used to repay interest on past military expenditures and payments to veterans, and also the $46 billion for Homeland Security; but let's use the $825 billion as the available pot of money.

The second area to understand is the current needs of the infrastructure. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we need to spend $1.6 trillion in the next five years in order to bring the infrastructure up to an adequate level. So that's $320 billion a year for five years, or about 39 percent of the available military budget.

Now, Johnson quotes Thomas Woods, to the effect that between 1947 and 1987, the U.S. military had spent enough money that the entire network of factories and infrastructure could have been rebuilt instead. Woods is a libertarian economist who once contacted me concerning the work of the late Professor Seymour Melman, a friend of mine.

Melman was, according to Johnson, "The pioneer in analyzing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism," that is, the use of military spending to try to keep the economy moving; Melman wrote several books and many articles backing up his assertions with in-depth research and analysis, and published several op-ed pieces in The New York Times showing the trade-offs between expensive military programs and critical infrastructure needs in the U.S., such as education and housing.

At the rate we're going, then, the military budgets will preempt the building of a green infrastructure and economy. Unless the military budget is reined in, it will be very difficult to find the resources to create the "green engine," to quote Barack Obama, that "can drive growth for many years to come."

As Miriam Pemberton showed in a recent report for the Institute for Policy Studies, there is an enormous gulf between spending for the military and spending to reverse global warming.

The third major consideration I proposed was greening the economy. Including the $320 billion that the ASCE advocates spending on infrastructure, what could the $825 billion military budget be used to for? Here are a few ideas, which I will grandly call the National Program of Economic Reconstruction and Environmental Restoration:

1. A high-speed rail network among all of the bigger cities;
2. Light rail networks within most cities
3. Bus rapid transit between cities and near suburbs
4. Bike lanes with physical barriers along most city streets
5. A program to put solar panels on most rooftops
6. A program to put geothermal exchange units under most buildings (for heating and cooling)
7. A federally owned, or at least regulated, national high-voltage DC electrical grid, hooking up to:
* Environmentally sensitive wind farms
* Environmentally sensitive solar thermal farms, and
* Environmentally sensitive deep geothermal plants
8. A policy of encouraging organic, permaculture-like farm belts around most cities;
9. A policy of encouraging the building of walkable communities in cities and near suburbs
10. A national policy of no more than 15 students per classroom, with:
* Universal pre-kindergarten, starting with one-year-olds, and
* Universal health insurance, of course
11. Contribution to Lester R. Brown's global plan for alleviating poverty and environmental destruction, as laid out in his book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civiliation

In other news :

Reuters also reports on Google's clean energy investment plans, announced at the Cleantech investor summit.

Triple Pundit has a post looking at the question "has world oil supply peaked" ?



The Wall Street Journal has a post on ASPO USA's offer of a wager on the peak date to CERA.

The Wall Street Journal is also wondering Siberia will be Solar Power's Next Heartland, looking at Russian company nitol solar's plans to join Wacker Chemie and Hemlock Semiconductor in producing high purity silicon for solar panel manufacturers.

Cleantech.com has an article on China-based Yingli Green Energy Holding which says it has trimmed the thickness of its solar wafers by 10 percent, cutting the amount of polysilicon needed and reducing the cost of production. The company plans to expand its capacity to 400 MW by the end of 2008 and to 600 MW by the end of 2009.

Cleantech.com also reports that iceland's Glitnir Bank looking to invest in geothermal projects in India.

Cleantech.com also has an article on the Earth-1 tire from Yokohama, which they claim reduces rolling resistance by 21 percent (and thus is more fuel efficient) by using a proprietary compound they call Super Nanopower Rubber made from orange oil and natural rubber.

Renewable Energy Access reports that the Ontario government has had a change of policy and the Great Lakes May Soon be Home to Offshore Wind.

Grist reports that wind power technicians are in high demand.

The Energy Blog notes that the National Geographic Special on Global Warming, "Six Degrees Could Change the World", starts on Sunday.

The Energy Blog also reports that MIT and TI have teamed up to develop a chip that is up to 10 times more energy-efficient than current chips.

After Gutenberg notes Google isn't the only tech giant going green - Intel is purchasing 1.3 Billion kWh of Renewable Energy.

Popular Science has a look at wireless electricity transmission - also known as "WiTricity" (one of Nicola Tesla's old ideas).

Tom at EE/RE Investing has a post on another reason to drive a hybrid - you never need to replace your brake pads (thanks to regenerative braking).

Technology Review has a post on generative-braking power system that converts energy expended while a person is walking into electricity, without adding any extra drag.

Inhabitat also has a couple of posts on human power, looking at a "Energy-Generating Green Microgym in Seattle" and an energy generating revolving door from Fluxxlab, seeking to help us all empathise with hamsters.



There is plenty more at Inhabitat including a Tesla Motors have announced a hybrid car as well as their pure electric vehicle and some guerilla gardening strategies.

One final image from Inhabitat, this one from a post noting the plans for Norman Foster’s Masdar carbon neutral city have made their debut.



I'll close with Tyler Hamilton from Clean Break, looking at "Harnessing Back EMF to create "free" energy?". Yes - this is the first time Tyler has made it to the tinfoil slot - but its worth a read - the free energy memeworld has endless energy and refuses to admit defeat...

The story, published in the Toronto Star today, takes a look at an Ottawa-area inventor who stumbled upon a way of making electric induction motors work, at the very least, more efficiently. At most, he believes he's figured out a way to manipulate magnetic fields so that instead of slowing down a generator (according to Lenz's law in physics) it speeds it up. In fact, it gets caught in a positive feedback loop, resulting in a dramatic acceleration without any change to power input.

The story is divided into two links. The first is more about the inventor's journey, the second is a closer look at what he has found.

Normally I would shy away from covering such stories, but three things convinced me it was worth telling: 1) The University of Ottawa has opened its doors and is currently putting the invention through tests; 2) A respected MIT electromagnetics engineer/professor who recently saw a demonstration admitted to me afterwards that he was stumped, and while he didn't admit (or deny) it broke any laws of physics his reaction was telling: "It's an unusual phenomenon... But I saw it. It's real. I'm just now trying to figure it out."; 3) The inventor, Thane Heins, has conviction and understands that what he has found seems, on the surface, ludicrous. He wants to find out what's going on as much as the next guy. He is no scammer, in my judgement.

As a reporter who isn't an engineer or physicist, I'm in no position to say I believe Heins claims. I'll leave that debate up to people smarter than, but hopefully as open-minded as myself. I will say I believe that Heins believes, and that several well-trained, highly respected academics he has demonstrated it to can't seem to explain it. At least not yet.