The SMH reports that Woodside have discovered more natural gas on Australia's north west shelf - Woodside gas find may spur Pluto plan.

Many analysts had expected Woodside would miss its target timeline of sanctioning the second-train expansion of the Pluto liquefied natural gas (LNG) project by the end of 2010, as mixed exploration success raised doubts it would find the required gas reserves to underpin the expansion.

The latest gas discovery could put Pluto's swift expansion plans back on the table and Woodside shares rose as much as 2 per cent in early trade, outperforming a broader market that was down 1.1 percent.

"Initial analysis of drilling fluids suggests the gas could be comparatively liquids rich, but this requires confirmation by further analysis," Woodside said of its Alaric-1 well, which intersected about 185 metres of gas.

It will proceed to conduct further testing to confirm the full depth of the gas column and the quality of the gas.

Woodside, which is due to report first-half earnings on Wednesday, is rushing to complete Pluto's first train, which is expected to cost A13 billion and scheduled to start LNG production of 4.3 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) in late 2010.

The addition of a second train, which will have an output of about 4 mtpa, would greatly improve Pluto's economics and allow Woodside to roll over its current workforce, which is expected to be in shortage over the coming years amid a raft of other LNG projects.

The SMH has a report on foreign interest in Australian agricultural companies as the wheat price soars - Big wheat bickies to be made in our backyard.

That other resources boom, the one that is sustainable, appears to have caught most Australians by surprise, if indeed they know about it at all.

We've all been too busy backslapping each other and toasting our good fortune about the enormous quarry in the backyard to notice that a looming global food shortage has placed the nation on international investment radar screens and the world is ready to pounce.

The signs have been there for more than a year.

Canadian group Viterra last year took control of grains group ABB, the old Australian Barley Board. Then late last year China's Bright Foods tried to lure CSR's sugar operations to its fold, a bid that failed when a Singaporean group won control a few months back.

Before that, the British private equity group Terra Firma bought the Packer family's extensive cattle operations in the Top End, while the IIFCO group in Dubai took a 20 per cent stake in Australian Agricultural Co when Elders decided to sell down.

Yesterday, the trend took a new and far more serious twist. AWB, once considered the country's peak body when it came to agribusiness and Australia's place in the global trade arena, came under attack from yet another Canadian rural firm, Agrium Inc.

The FT reports that efforts to develop the UK's first geothermal power plant are underway in Cornwall- UK's first geothermal plant given go-ahead. Geothermal Engineering, the company behind the project, plans to drill 4.5km into the ground to access rocks at temperatures of about 200°C.

Crikey's Bernard Keane has some comments on the low profile of global warming policy in the Australian election campaign - At least Abbott's honest about willful refusal to buy into global warming.

No person who seriously maintains that “the various measuring organisations” show that the planet is cooling is fit to occupy a position of leadership in public life. Such a capacity to let ideology filter out basic facts on anything, but most especially a critical area of public policy; such a willingness to balance, say Christopher Monckton and the world’s scientific community and prefer the former, is genuinely dangerous in anyone with proximity to power.

Tony Abbott maintains that his own views don’t matter because his policy is to reduce Australia’s emissions. Putting aside that therefore Abbott appears to want to accelerate global cooling, his policy – that relies on the supernatural powers of “soil carbon”, which at this point is little more than the climate change equivalent of biodynamic farming -- will oversee a substantial increase in our emissions and, better yet, spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to achieve it.

Then again, at least Abbott is being honest – he is open about his willful refusal to accept basic scientific fact and prefer global conspiracy theories and rigid ideology. What is Julia Gillard’s excuse? The Prime Minister occupies an even worse position – she claims to believe in human-caused global warming, and accepts the need to address it, but proposes delay and half-baked measures drawn up to protect the interests of those responsible for pollution. Like Abbott, Gillard’s policies will oversee a rise in Australia’s emissions. Like Abbott, she’ll waste taxpayers’ money to achieve it.

The parties insist there are vast differences between them on climate change. The Liberals charge that Labor wants to introduce a big new tax. Labor charges that the Liberals don’t believe in climate change. The rhetoric hides a bipartisan policy of protecting the economic interests of polluters, which is why climate change has been almost entirely absent from the major parties’ campaigns.

Perhaps we should take the parties at their word and demand that the next debate should be held on climate change and the reform process of ending our addiction to carbon, not a debate about the economy that will merely provide the forum for repetition of the mantras of “risk to our $1.3 triliion economy” and “waste and mismanagement”.

When our kids and our grandkids demand to know why we did nothing while their planet cooked, even when we knew a relatively minor economic reform could have started the process of decarbonising our own economy and encouraged other, bigger polluters to do likewise, we can point to the 2010 election and say “because we let people like Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard run the country."

AFP has a report on continuing suspicion about the death of David Kelly, who criticised the British government's role in starting the Iraq war - Experts urge full inquest into David Kelly death.

A group of prominent experts on Friday called for a full inquest into the death of government weapons inspector David Kelly, whose apparent suicide in July 2003 plunged then prime minister Tony Blair into crisis.

The eight senior figures said in a letter to The Times newspaper that the official cause of death in the Kelly case, haemorrhage, was "extremely unlikely" in the light of evidence since made public.

The signatories included a former coroner, Michael Powers, a former deputy coroner, Margaret Bloom, and Julian Bion, a professor of intensive care medicine.

Kelly was found dead in woods near his home in Oxfordshire, in 2003 after he was exposed as the source for a BBC story that alleged that Blair's government had "sexed up" intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The then Lord Chancellor, the government's chief law officer, Charles Falconer, suspended an inquest into the death before an inquiry began, and the inquest was never resumed.

The SMH has a look at prospects for the coal seam gas industry being talked up in NSW - It's a gas as NSW industry comes of age.

DAVID Casey says the New South wales coal seam gas sector has long been regarded as the ''poor cousin'' of its northern neighbours. While it is a fair and frank assessment by the Eastern Star Gas managing director, it is interesting to note that it was NSW that is viewed as the birth place of the unconventional gas in Australia.

In the 1980s BHP tried to extract gas from its coalfields at Appin near Wollongong. The big Australian installed some gas turbines there, but its efforts floundered when it discovered carbon dioxide seeping into the gas stream. From there most of the hard yards were carried out in Queensland's Bowen Basin. Twenty years on and the Queensland coal seam gas sector is a $50 billion market darling, attracting interest from international oil and gas giants like BG, ConocoPhillips and Shell.

But what happened along the way to NSW?

Some blame a lack of government support, others point to the immaturity of the resources industry in NSW at the time and the different techniques needed to extract the gas.

Mr Casey says the NSW sector is overcoming historical impediments and forging its own path. He believes Eastern Star could be converting coal seam gas into liquefied natural gas for exporting out of Newcastle by 2014 - the same time as its more fancied rivals in Queensland. ...

A look at coal seam gas reserves in Australia shows the head start NSW has given Queensland. The May EnergyQuarterly by consultants Energy Quest rates Queensland's proved, probable and possible reserves (3P) at 47,383 petajoules, or about 89 per cent of the Australian coal seam gas industry. NSW has about 11 per cent of the market, or 5836 petajoules. Even accounting for Queensland's 22,634 petajoules of contingent supply and NSW's comparative 4692 petajoules, the gap is only slightly bridged.

While the Surat and Bowen basins in Queensland house the richest coal seam gas prospects in the state, in NSW it is split among four; the Gunnedah Basin in central NSW, the Gloucester Basin near Newcastle, the Clarence-Moreton Basin in the north-east corner of NSW and the Sydney Basin located around the NSW capital.

Graeme Bethune, chief executive of independent adviser Energy Quest, says unlike the crowded Queensland market where the four major proponents will reside in the Gladstone postcode, the NSW players have some breathing space between each other.

''AGL is in the Sydney and Gloucester basins, there is the Gunnedah Basin where Eastern Star and Santos are and Metgasco is in the Clarence-Moreton,'' he says. ''The NSW producers would say they are a fair way behind Queensland producers in terms of development and understanding.

''In fact, there is basically no production in NSW except by AGL at Camden. There have been some encouraging well flows but none have been able to get into commercial production and they have been working on it for some time.''

Mr Casey believes Eastern Star is ''a good 2½ years ahead'' of other rivals in NSW.

''Camden is the most mature coal seam gas field in NSW. It is the most mature coal seam gas field in NSW but it is limited in size and scope - I don't think even AGL would dispute that. AGL would be more focused on their Hunter Valley assets and for them to get to where we are up there they have a lot of work to do,'' he said. ''We are genuine in our pursuit of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) hub at Newcastle.

''We have the resource base and soon we will have reserves that will underpin major infrastructure development. The time differential compared to Queensland is not as different as everyone thinks. It is not an insignificant task, but we believe we could be delivering LNG out of Newcastle by 2014, which is the same time as Queensland.''

At that point, Eastern Star is looking to start exporting a million tonnes of LNG a year, increasing to 4 million tonnes a year. By then it is expecting to have also started supplying 20 petajoules over 20 years to the ERM Power generator at Wellington, NSW.

Crikey's Bernard Keane has a jaundiced look at sequesting soil in carbon (using techniques like biochar) - Farming profits in the rich soils of carbon sequestration.

On Saturday, Labor’s announcement of a “carbon farming initiative” received a cautious reception. “A welcome boost for regional Australians,” the Climate Institute called it, but warned that a carbon price was still necessary. The ACF similarly said the benefits of better land management wouldn’t be realised unless there was a carbon price. The NFF “acknowledged” the announcement, which “recognises that carbon abatement through the agricultural sector is an opportunity that should not be ignored.”

The initiative would be facilitatory – establishing a framework (including a new, unspecified, “independent regulator”) for accrediting carbon sequestration activities such as reafforestation, fertiliser reduction and soil carbon so the permits could be sold domestically or internationally to those who wanted to buy them.

Plainly that assumes that even in the absence of an emissions trading scheme there’ll be companies that want to buy permits. The Government estimates a possible market of $500 million.

It compares to the Coalition’s “direct action” plan, which will primarily depend on paying farmers $8-10 a tonne of CO2-equivalent emissions sequestered through soil carbon activities. The actual cost per tonne, according to independent experts, will be at least 3 times that, meaning the Coalition scheme relies on farmers being willing to spend $12-30 a tonne of their own money.

Soil carbon is the Coalition’s equivalent of Labor’s fixation with CCS. Labor loves CCS because it holds out the illusory promise that we -- and a lot of union members in coal mining communities -- can continue to be dependent on coal, with its consequences for climate change wished away to the bowels of the earth. Like CCS, soil carbon is a promising but unproven suite of technologies that is being treated as a magic cure by politicians too scared to tell voters that addressing climate change will have costs and require behavioural changes. Now Labor wants in on it, too.

There are significant unresolved questions about soil carbon -- whether simpler forms like no-till farming or more complex processes like the production and distribution of biochar. Just how stable carbon is in different types of soil under different conditions is not yet clear. There are problems about measurement, although the CSIRO is working on them. There are OH&S and efficiency issues about distributing biochar, finer varieties of which are susceptible to blowing away. Most problematic of all is that soil carbon isn’t counted under the Kyoto Protocol as a tradeable an emissions offset.

Indeed, Penny Wong was quick to point that out when Malcolm Turnbull first allowed Greg Hunt to base Liberal Party climate policy on it in January 2009. Now she has been spruiking it as a great means of taking action on climate change. Ain’t hypocrisy grand.

If there was an emissions trading scheme, there’d be real demand for agricultural offsets, driving the price up and encouraging farmers to explore sequestration options. But no one has proposed to include agriculture, which in 2008 accounted for 15% of Australia’s emissions, in any trading scheme. This means that any agricultural offsets would not be net of emissions produced by the same farm. That would not even be the case for emissions produced during the creation of the offset. For example, the process of pyrolysis, which produces biochar, would produce significant emissions unless it was powered by renewable energy. A tonne of sequestered emissions might therefore require tens or hundreds of kilos of carbon-equivalent emissions, but they won’t be counted.

Labor’s policy, which doesn’t go far beyond what it agreed with Malcolm Turnbull in negotiations over the CPRS, isn’t as egregious as the Coalition’s, but we’d be wise to be sceptical about both.

The push for the inclusion of agricultural offsets under the Kyoto Protocol has come from developed countries anxious to source offsets from developing countries that they can purchase in order to continue business-as-usual levels of carbon emissions at home. Of course, economic theory says this is the most efficient way to meet a global emissions target – if the cost of offsetting emissions in this manner becomes greater than the cost of decarbonising developed economies, it will drive genuine emissions reductions in developed economies.

But the behaviour of Australian politicians suggests this is less about economic efficiency than finding plausible excuses to delay action to reduce our heavy dependence on coal as long as possible, which is why they put their faith in magic solutions like soil carbon and CCS, when renewable energy technologies are much closer to commercial viability.

The NZ Herald has an article looking at progress building a smarter grid in New Zealand - Efficiency at the flick of a switch.

Smart grids are electricity's buzzword, but, with the odd cold shower, we've felt their effects in our homes for decades.

The forerunner of energy's big hope was pioneered in New Zealand 60 years ago when ripple control was introduced to give power suppliers the ability to cut hot water heating when demand stretched generation and transmission. This relatively crude, but "sensible grid" way of avoiding blackouts or brownouts, having to build more power stations and sling more lines to meet peak demand is still around today.

Though smart grid innovators and enthusiasts are bursting with ways to refine and expand the principle, a one-way pulse that turns off your hot water will remain the mainstay of controlling demand for a while yet.

It may be decades before most New Zealanders' appliances are having a two-way conversation through smart grids, whose definitions are almost as numerous as potential applications.

At its most basic it involves better communication between utility operators and components of the grid, including transformers, power lines, meters and even home appliances. Your fridge could turn itself on and off to take advantage of cheap power rates, or your solar panel or micro-windmill could feed surplus electricity back into the national grid - and the homeowner gets paid for it. On top of those alluring prospects, New Zealand's 1.7 million residential electricity consumers could adjust their use to prevent and ease peak power loads. Trials by Mercury Energy show householders who use up-to-the-minute data can cut their use by 10 per cent.

Across the country such savings could at least delay the need to build power stations and the associated infrastructure. Allowing for future spending on power stations is inflicting growing pain - by Contact Energy's reckoning it will push the energy component of bills from around 7c to between 10c and 12c a unit for all consumers over coming years.

Reliability of networks will also improve. Transmission lines and cables will be constantly monitored for signs of distress; already the health of critical lines is monitored as regularly as every half a metre.

Around the world tens of billions of dollars is being poured into building smart grids. In the United States - where networks are in worse shape than here - about $2.1 trillion must be spent on interstate grids.

The Obama administration is investing $4.5 billion in 100 smart grid projects, to be matched dollar for dollar by private funding by utilities.

Last month General Electric launched a 10-week contest to speed global power-grid upgrades, promising investment and marketing help for the best submissions from a $260 million fund.

The company estimates there is a $260 billion market for smart-grid technologies in the next decade. GE is spending about $10 billion on environmentally friendly products by 2015.

China is also at the forefront of the smart grid push and is now drafting a five-year energy plan to include smart grid technology as one of the key industries for research and development.

Its government will provide funding to build several research centres this year to develop transmission technology connecting wind and solar power to the grid.

State Grid Corp will invest the equivalent of $50 billion this year to build a smart grid network in China, Xinhua news agency reports. The company aims to install 75 electric car-charging stations and 6209 recharging towers across 27 cities this year, according to previous reports.

In Europe, an EU directive requires that 80 per cent of member state households be equipped with smart meters by the year 2020.

In Australia, Newcastle, will become the first Australian city to move towards being on a smart grid after a $120 million initial investment by the federal government announced in June. Parts of Sydney are also included in the trial project.

So what about New Zealand? The phrase "smart grid" barely rates a mention in the draft energy strategy released last month.

Giles Parkinson at The Climate Spectator has a look at Lend Lease's interest in rolling out large scale solar PV power generation across the rooftops of commercial buildings - New Lease of life for solar.

The push by construction and property giant Lend Lease into the solar energy business could be one of the most significant interventions to date in Australia’s nascent renewable energy market.

The move is based on a couple of simple premises. The most important of these is the belief that, within a few years, solar photovoltaic technology will match, and then displace, wind energy as the most cost-effective and efficient renewable energy source in Australia.

If that comes to pass, it could turn most forecasts for the build-out of renewable technology in this country on their head, and Lend Lease will be in a position to become a dominant player in what will rapidly become a multi-billion dollar a year solar PV market.

Lend Lease has been quietly working on its plans for the past 12 months, ever since it signed a deal with the world’s biggest solar PV maker, the US-based First Solar, to install 10MW of its panels on the roof-tops of its commercial building portfolio.

The two companies found that there was a meeting of minds, culture and ambition, and Lend Lease has now signed a deal to become the local partner for the distribution and installation of First Solar’s thin-film solar panels, whose modules are scalable from roof-top solar to commercial and industrial scale installations, and to large scale utilities.

Lend Lease, of course, has capabilities across all three markets; from its Delfin home business, to its large commercial and industrial property portfolio, and its construction business, where it has already been involved in two large-scale utility proposals that have been shortlisted for the federal government’s Solar Flagships program – one with AGL and First Solar and the other with TruEnergy and First Solar.

For good measure, Lend Lease has decided to take a completely new business approach to the solar PV market and, rather than focus on direct selling like the current incumbents, it has signed an alliance with a yet-to-be-named major bank and an energy utility (one would presume AGL or TruEnergy) to tap into their multi-million customer bases to market and distribute the product. It has also struck an alliance with the Norwegian firm REC, which will provide silicon-based solar panels.

Lend Lease notes that, even with the rapid boost in the solar PV market in the last 18 months aided by the proliferation of state-based feed-in tariffs, less than 3 per cent of Australian householders will have rooftop solar by the end of the year. The market is ripe for the picking.

“This will be a step change in the domestic market,” says Chris Carolan, the head of Lend Lease Solar, who was the project director for Australia’s first 5 star CBD building, The Bond, the company’s headquarters. “No one saw Bond coming, no one knew what green star was,” he says. “We want to make the same impact with solar PV.”

Carolan expects the “tipping point” of the solar PV market in Australia will occur at around 2014. That will follow three years of anticipated and consecutive 20 per cent rises in local energy costs (mostly to fund grid upgrades) and declining costs in solar. First Solar is already the market leader in costs, has forecast a 20 per cent reduction in costs per year for the foreseeable future and has achieved a 6 per cent fall in the last quarter alone.

The economics of the venture will be boosted by the Brumby government’s large-scale solar target of 5 per cent by 2020, and the country’s first large-scale feed-in-tariff, an initiative Carolan expects will soon be followed by other state governments.

The 5 per cent Victorian target alone equates to around 2000MW of solar by 2020. Given that it will take a few years to roll out the first projects, that equates to a billion-dollar industry in Victoria alone.

TreeHugger has a post on predictions about smart meter rollouts worldwide - Progress ? 302.5 Million Smart Meters Installed by 2015.

According to Berg Insight, the worldwide installed base of smart electricity meters will hit over 300 million by 2015. The research firm states that over the next five years, smart meter technology is projected to move from 15-20% market penetration to almost 50% in Europe and North America, while Asia-Pacific will go from less than 1% to as much as 25%. But considering how many homes are hooked up to an electrical grid across the globe, and that smart meters are essential to get a smart grid up and running, can this be considered quick enough progress?

Perhaps it does mark progress, considering how cumbersome it has been for the smart grid community to create standards so all the pieces of the technological pie -- from meters to utilities to power generation facilities -- can talk to one another. And considering how reluctant some communities have been in receiving smart meter installations, due to concerns over security risks and accurate billing.

Still, progress is indeed slow enough that other companies are already making leapfrog moves that could change the direction of the smart grid -- or at least provide energy-savvy consumers with options for monitoring and minimizing their consumption. For example, Google has created an easy-to-follow dashboard, PowerMeter, for users to follow their energy use, and partnered up with The Energy Detective (TED) to make tracking energy easy. They're also making moves to partner with utilities to provide usage information and feedback to consumers. Microsoft is not too far behind with their Hohm dashboard and Blue Line device.

But while these are great solutions for now, the smart grid is a much more complicated beast that will connect everything about our power supplies, enabling more intelligent use of energy and more renewable energy sources. That's why it is important that meters get installed, standards are agreed upon, and technology put in place from start to finish, and fast. Hitting just 302.5 million smart meters worldwide by 2015 doesn't sound very speedy.

The Berg Insight report outlines issues areas around the world face with developing the smart grid, including, "increasing efficiency demands on the electricity sector to the implementation of energy policies related to power conservation, renewable generation and the security of supply. National governments play a key role in the adoption of smart meters through new future-oriented energy policies, addressing these issues."

Smart meters are a tiny fraction of the puzzle, and if they're rolling out this slowly, we are a little concerned about the speed at which governments will move with necessary policies and regulations.

Technology Review has an article on "a new mechanism for converting both sunlight and heat into electricity" - A New Way to Use the Sun's Energy.

A new type of device that uses both heat and light from the sun should be more efficient than conventional solar cells, which convert only the light into electricity.

The device relies on a physical principle discovered and demonstrated by researchers at Stanford University. In their prototype, the energy in sunlight excites electrons in an electrode, and heat from the sun coaxes the excited electrons to jump across a vacuum into another electrode, generating an electrical current. The device could be designed to send waste heat to a steam engine and convert 50 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity--a huge improvement over conventional solar cells.

The most common silicon solar cells convert about 15 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity. More than half of the incoming solar energy is lost as heat. That's because the active materials in solar cells can interact with only a particular band of the solar spectrum; photons below a certain energy level simply heat up the cell.

One way to overcome this is to stack active materials on top of one another in a multijunction cell that can use a broader spectrum of light, turning more of it into electrical current instead of heat, for efficiencies up to about 40 percent. But such cells are complex and expensive to make.

Looking for a better way to take advantage of the sun's heat, Stanford's Nicholas Melosh was inspired by highly efficient cogeneration systems that use the expansion of burning gas to drive a turbine and the heat from the combustion to power a steam engine. But thermal energy converters don't pair well with conventional solar devices. The hotter it is, the more efficient thermal energy conversion becomes. Solar cells, by contrast, get less efficient as they heat up. At about 100 °C, a silicon cell won't work well; above 200 °C, it won't work at all.

The breakthrough came when the Stanford researchers realized that the light in solar radiation could enhance energy conversion in a different type of device, called a thermionic energy converter, that's conventionally driven solely by heat. Thermionic converters consist of two electrodes separated by a small space. When the positive electrode, or cathode, is heated, electrons in the cathode get excited and jump across to the negative electrode, or anode, driving a current through an external circuit. These devices have been used to power Russian satellites but haven't found any applications on the ground because they must get very hot, about 1,500 °C, to operate efficiently. The cathode in these devices is typically made of metals such as cesium.

Forbes has an article on Iceland's potential to switch to electric vehicles - Iceland: The Next Electric Car Capital.

What country will be the first to make electric cars the default national transportation? It would probably be the tiny green country of Iceland.

Some 75% of Iceland's population lives within 37 miles of Reykjavik, Iceland's capital, and the rural areas (connected by an 840-mile ring road) could probably be wired with just 15 fast-charging stations. That, coupled with the fact that 80% of Iceland's energy is cheaply produced renewable (from geothermal and hydro) should give you a good idea why this is the ideal test bed for electric vehicles. ...

Only 3% of Iceland's energy comes from coal, which should silence electric vehicle critics who say that U.S. cars operating on electricity from dirty coal plants are just moving the pollution around. Iceland has the actual potential to get close to zero emissions. ...

Iceland has a 2008 memorandum of understanding with Mitsubishi, which is already a partner in the country's aluminum smelting operations, to deliver i-MiEV electric cars. The plan was to have several dozen i-MiEVs (imported tax-free) on the road in 2009, and greatly expanded availability this year, but only a few of the battery vehicles are on the island now.

An Icelandic entrepreneur named Gisli Gislayson is also planning to import electric vehicles into Iceland, starting with Indian-made Revas. It would be useful if the world's electrification gurus had Iceland on their radar screens, because no other country could plug in so quickly.

Green Building of the week from Inhabitat is this design from Taiwan - BIG Unveils Gigantic Cube Building with a Rooftop Park.

We've admired some oddly-shaped buildings in our day, but there is something about this simple cube building by BIG Architects that is refreshing and elegant. Called TED, the 57m x 57m x 57m building resembles a gigantic sugar cube, and is meant to serve as a mixed use area for Taiwan. But there's more to the seemingly straightforward structure than meets the eye - a series of strategic hollows that have been tunneled out of the block add interest to the space and a green park that spans the entire rooftop will surely be a new favorite hangout spot for locals.

The main cutout in TED’s facade acts almost as a street, allowing visitors to walk right through the building. To make the smartest use of the space, the large tunnel coils upwards in an ascending spiral that leads from the ground floor all the way up to the verdant roof garden. The rooftop park will serve as a performance area, and restaurants on the penthouse level will open up onto the space, making it an ideal place to meet.

The building will house hotels, shops, showrooms, galleries, offices, and restaurants, welcoming in a mixed group of visitors. Composed of concrete lamellas that provide solar shading, the structure only appears to be a solid block from afar – the spaces between the ribs actually allow for ventilation and increased airflow.

The Guardian has an article arguing governments could use peak oil awareness to achieve climate change mitigation more easily than overcoming the climate skeptic brigade, saying "Using the threat of a high oil prices is a sell the public will buy into – unlike intangible arguments over climate change" - Peak oil is the villain governments need.

Could peak oil lever politicians out from between the rock of the electorate and the hard place that is climate change mitigation? As Daniel Gros wrote in the Guardian: "the climate-change bill, for which President Barack Obama had pushed so hard, will not even be presented to the US Senate, because it stands no chance of passage". His analysis ends with a fatalistic statement: "Determined action at the global level will become possible only when climate change is no longer some scientific prediction, but a reality that people feel … A world incapable of preventing climate change will have to live with it."

Isn't that the trouble? Climate change is a stealthy foe, hard to feel, see or identify. Unlike peak oil. So here's another question: did western administrations know that the International Energy Agency (IEA) had been consistently concealing the imminence of peak oil? One might hope our leaders would know about something as serious as this. But if they did, why is it that renewable energy replacements haven't been far higher on the agenda, for much longer and addressed with rather more conviction? This is the question George Monbiot put in a freedom of information request sent to the Department for Business in February 2008, asking for details of the government's peak oil contingency planning.

"The answer I received astonished me," he wrote in the Guardian. Hardly surprising, considering the answer: "The government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans specifically for the eventuality of crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020." Eighteen months later, the Guardian published the IEA whistleblower story and the 2020 cover was blown. Were the government really taken in by the duplicity of the IEA? Or were they in on the act, making it difficult to appear sanguine about an imminent and permanent disruption to energy supplies?

Outside of the fossil fuel industry, it is hard to know to what extent commerce is aware of the impending crisis or the speed at which it would envelop us. Either way, industries appear to have woken up with a start, at least if the white paper, Sustainable energy security: strategic risks and opportunities for business, is a guide. Produced by Lloyd's of London and Chatham House, their assessment is sobering. They identify opportunities for the quick witted, as well as risks to the somnambulant. One statement by professor Paul Stevens in particular caught my eye: "A supply crunch appears likely around 2013 … given recent price experience, a spike in excess of $200 per barrel is not infeasible".

Scientific American has a report from a local climate change conference - Australia can easily cut CO2 and keep growing: business.

Australia, one of the world's top carbon polluters, can cut carbon emissions by at least 15 percent by 2020 without hurting its economy, business leaders at a climate conference said on Thursday.

By espousing the right policies, the country could cut its emissions by 25 percent by 2020, the conference heard. A price on carbon was a key component, but by no means the only one.

"Australia has very large scope for reducing emissions through energy efficiency," said Jonathan Jutsen, executive director of energy and climate change consultancy Energetics.

"The Australian economy is only about 10 percent efficient -- this means that 90 percent of the energy in the fuel we dig up is lost in the supply chain and end uses," Jutsen told business leaders in a message just nine days from a national election.

Climate change has been a major issue and the government has been pressed by power generators to put a price on carbon to give certainty to long-term investment plans.

Wealthy inner-city voters have also urged tougher climate policies in a nation that faces major costs from rising seas, the impacts of more extreme weather on crops and hotter bushfires.

Heavily reliant on cheap coal for power generation, the country ranks among the developed world's top per-capita emitters of carbon.

Energy efficiency programs, wind, solar and other green power, as well as greener buildings and cars can all cut emissions with the right policy incentives, the delegates heard. ...

A survey of 82 conference participants, from mining to manufacturing representatives from Australia and New Zealand, showed 20 percent favored government incentives as the way to cut emissions, while 19 percent chose regulations. Seventeen percent backed a price on carbon via a cap-and-trade scheme.

Jutsen said a number of firms were already on track to achieve reductions of up to half, such as retail giant Woolworths Ltd, with energy efficiency programs being the primary source as well as switching to renewable energy sources. "What they (Woolworths) are saying is they will have a zero increase in their emissions footprint while they will double the physical footprint of their organization," said Jutsen.

"The carbon price is seen by the supply-side as essential to make rational investment choices but from the demand side it is quite clear that a much more complex set of measures is needed to achieve reduction," he added.

Climate change organization ClimateWorks Australia analyzed 54 emission reduction opportunities across 10 sectors in a report on www.climateworksaustralia.org.

"With the right policy mix Australia could achieve a 25 percent reduction in emissions from 2000," John Thwaites, chairman of ClimateWorks Australia told the conference.

The SMH has a look at Thursday's launch of Zero Carbon Australia's plan - How to be fully renewable in 10 years.

AUSTRALIA could switch completely to renewable energy within a decade by building a dozen vast, new solar power stations and about 6500 wind turbines, according to a major new study.

The Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan - a collaboration between Melbourne University's Energy Research Institute, the environment group Beyond Zero Emissions and engineers Sinclair Knight Merz, puts the cost at $37 billion in private funding and public investment every year for the next decade.

The price tag may make it sound like a pipedream but the scheme earned the endorsement of the federal Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull who added his support at a forum at Sydney Town Hall last night. ''The work they have done is important,'' Mr Turnbull said. ''It provides the most comprehensive technical blueprint yet for what our engineers, our scientists, can begin to do tomorrow.''

Mr Turnbull contrasted the Coalition's ''direct action'' plan with Labor's policy, which he claimed would lead to longer delays in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. ''I believe our long-term global goal is to very substantially reduce our emissions, a goal that will require almost all of our stationary energy to be produced from zero or near-zero emission sources,'' Mr Turnbull said. ''This report demonstrates we could already be technologically ready to do that.''

The plan has also been endorsed by Australia's former chief scientist Robin Batterham, and a senior official at the International Energy Agency's renewable energy division, Cedric Philibert.

However, the National Generators Forum, which represents power station owners, and the office of the federal Energy Minister, Martin Ferguson, were decidedly lukewarm about the plan when asked about the findings last month. Under the plan, 60 per cent of the nation's electricity would be sourced from 12 huge solar thermal power plants, which use Australian-developed technology to store heat in molten salt, allowing them to operate for long periods when there is no sunshine.

The remaining 40 per cent of the power grid would be filled by about 6500 wind turbines at 23 large-scale wind farms dotted mainly around the coast.

The plan would generate 325 terawatt hours of electricity a year, meeting the nation's entire power demands in the year 2020, if a comprehensive energy efficiency plan is also factored in. Any shortfalls could be made up by biomass energy generation, using a portion of the stubble from the nation's wheatfields.

To properly harness all the renewable energy, the report calls for the unification of Australia's three separate electricity grids and some new transmission lines to link the new power stations to capital cities, at a total cost of $92 billion.

If the cost of completely transforming the energy sector was passed directly on to households, it would add 30 per cent to the average utility bill.

The BBC has a report on a massive new tidal power turbine destined for a Scottish test site - Largest tidal power device unveiled.

A device thought to be the largest tidal energy turbine to be built in the world has been described by its developer as "simple and robust". Atlantis Resources unveiled its AK-1000 at Invergordon ahead of it being shipped to a European Marine Energy Centre test site off Eday, Orkney.

Chief executive Tim Cornelius said it was designed to survive in a harsh marine environment. The device stands 22.5m (73ft) tall and weighs 130 tonnes. It has two sets of blades to harness ebb and flood tides and could provide electricity for about 1,000 homes.

Mr Cornelius told BBC Scotland that the focus of the marine industry at the moment was making the Pentland Firth a huge success in terms of generating electricity from renewable energy devices. Mr Cornelius said: "It is one of the harshest environments on the planet. In order to get a robust turbine we have had to make what we call ultimately the dumbest, simple but most robust turbine you could possibly put in such a harsh environment."

The AK-1000's two sets of blades have also been designed to move slowly underwater and Atlantis said they would not pose a threat to sea life.

Mr Cornelius said: "The turbines turn at six to eight revolutions per minute so are incredibly slow turning and will have zero impact on the surrounding environment."

Giles Parkinson at The Climate Spectator has a look at wind farm developments in Australia - The wind farm that ate the RET

In Australia’s renewable energy market, fortune favours the quick and the big. The $1 billion Macarthur wind farm to be built in south-western Victoria is being touted as the most significant renewable energy project in Australia since the Snowy Hydro. But don’t expect another project of similar ambition to follow anytime soon, even though there are a couple on the drawing board – there’s simply no room left in the market.

Macarthur has been a long time in the planning for AGL, it’s just been waiting for the opportunity provided by the passage of the Renewable Energy Target.

Just over a year ago, AGL suggested Macarthur would be around 330MW-360MW, but improving technology and the opportunity provided by the passage of the RET means it has been able to upgrade the size of the facility by a quarter over its original estimates.

Instead of using 2.1MW turbines it has used elsewhere, AGL announced on Thursday that it will use new model 3MW turbines manufactured by Vestas, enabling it to boost the size of the plant [to] 420MW and reduce the number of turbines to 140 from 174, providing a significant saving in operating costs.

That’s terrific news for AGL and its joint partner in the project, Meridian Energy, and for its suppliers and contractors Vestas and Leighton; but not so good for others, particularly the independent developers who are finding it difficult to get long-term power purchase agreements to satisfy their financiers.

In a single bound, the Macarthur wind farm takes the size of the committed wind farm pipeline to more than 1000MW. Wilson HTM analyst Jenny Cosgrove says the size of this pipeline – another 150MW from two projects due to be completed this year, another 382MW from five projects in 2011, and the 203MW Collgar wind farm in WA in 2012 – means that the price of renewable energy certificates could remain at current levels of $40/MWh for longer than expected. That’s not enough to get most projects off the ground.

Cosgrove says the wind farm pipeline means that LRET is rapidly approaching a balance of supply and demand in 2011-2013, and this is before the excess current banked supply of small-scale RECs, which she estimates to be more than 21 million by end 2010, is transferred into the large-scale RET.

“It will take a number of years before this excess supply is absorbed,” says Cosgrove. Which means that many other wind farms currently in the planning stage may struggle for a window of opportunity, of even financing, for a few years yet. ...

The real test of that estimation will come in years 2016 and beyond, when the RET target will scale up dramatically towards it 2020 target of 41 million MWh. By then, wind might have some serious competition from solar thermal, if Lend Lease is right about the pricing of solar PV, as well as some geothermal projects.

CNet has an article on funding for Beacon Power's energy storage technology - Flywheel power grid storage project gets DOE loan.

Beacon Power on Monday said it has closed a $43 million loan guarantee with the Department of Energy for a project to use flywheels to buffer 20 megawatts of power on the grid.

The loan covers 62.5 percent of the estimated $69 million needed to construct the flywheel storage plant in Stephentown, N.Y. The New York Energy Research and Development Authority is also providing $2 million in funding for the plant which is now under construction.

Once done, Beacon Power said that the plant will be the only one of its kind in the world. Rather than use a large battery, it will use a network of 200 flywheels to store electricity from the grid as kinetic energy and disperse it in quick bursts of up to 15 minutes.

Right now, grid operators typically use natural gas power plants to maintain a balance between supply and demand and keep a steady frequency of 60 cycles per second. The Stephentown project, expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter next year, will be able to provide 10 percent of the frequency regulation services in New York needed on a typical day.

The project is significant step up for the technology, which so far has been used in smaller-scale installation of about one megawatt of power.

The New York storage installation paves the way for higher penetration of solar and wind power generation. Since they are variable sources of power, utilities are looking at different forms of grid storage to smooth out the delivery of power from renewable sources.

AFP has an article on the continuing fallout from the Chernobyl disaster - 'Radioactive boars' on loose in Germany.

Radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is still poisoning Germany's boars nearly 25 years on, with authorities fighting to keep toxic meat off the market as the wild boar population rockets.

The boars feed off mushrooms, truffles and wild berries which still contain high levels of caesium-137, carried in the radioactive cloud that spread across Europe following the 1986 accident at the Ukrainian nuclear plant.

"In some regions, especially in the south, the radioactivity found in boars is 10 times higher than normal," Florian Emrich, spokesman for the Federal Agency for the Protection Against Radioactivity, said on Saturday.

A sharp increase in wild boar numbers has meant more boar meat -- prized as a delicacy in Germany on a par with venison -- is ending up on diners' plates, raising concerns for human health. ...

Wild mushrooms are especially prone to accumulating radioactivity because the toxic substances are recycled over and over in the forest humus, unlike on farmland where they are broken down by labouring and minerals in the soil.