The Globe And Mail has one of the worst articles I've read on energy in the mainstream media - now wonder much of the newspaper business is going down the drain - North America: The new energy kingdom. After proclaiming US oil production had reached an all time record and declaring the US is well on the way to energy independence and becoming an LNG exporter to China, they somewhat quietly published a little correction later, noting that current US oil production is actually half that of the record reached around 40 years ago. Its all very well to be an energy optimist, but this sort of lunacy really muddies the debate for no useful purpose that I can determine.

The American Petroleum Institute reports that the United States produced more crude oil in October than it has ever produced in a single month, “peak oil” or not.

This reversal of trend helps explain why U.S. domestic production for the year will be 140,000 barrels a day higher than last year (which was 410,000 barrels a day higher than 2008). Although the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says U.S. production will decline next year, who knows?

Could these numbers reflect the beginning of the end for U.S. dependence on Mideast oil? Well, in fact, they could be. As Forbes magazine publisher Steve Forbes optimistically asserted the other day, the whole world is “awash in energy.” ...

Correction: U.S. domestic crude oil production reached 5.5 million barrels a day in October, half the production of the U.S. “peak oil” high in 1970. Incorrect information was published in this online and in the print versions of this column.

The Oil Drum announced a few changes recently - as part of this TOD ANZ has moved home - Welcome To TOD ANZ.

As part of the recent changes announced at The Oil Drum, the regional satellite sites such as TOD ANZ have been closed, bringing to an end an interesting 3 year period.

As a result, we are shifting operations from the main TOD site to a Blogger hosted environment and looking to expand the contributor base and provide a more regular stream of information than has been the case in recent months.

We'll still be accessible via the original URL (anz.theoildrum.com) as well as the new one (todanz.blogspot.com). Old content will remain available as well, with a "best of" set of links being added to the sidebar in the near future.

The initial group of contributors are :

aeldric - David Clarke has worked as a consultant analyst for almost 30 years, spending the last 15 years consulting mainly in IT. David has owned and sold an IT startup, but now prefers the pampered life of a manager in the corporate world. He has close friends in the energy industry and blames them for introducing him to Peak Oil, and bursting his happy bubble.

Big Gav - Gav studied Engineering at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Since then he has travelled widely and worked in the oil and gas, power generation, defence, technology and banking industries. He has been blogging about peak oil since 2004 at Peak Energy (Australia) and is probably the most prolific example of a techno-optimist in the peak oil world.

Phil Hart - Phil studied Materials Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne before spending five years with Shell UK Exploration and Production. He worked on two new North Sea oil and gas field development projects before joining the Brent field maintenance team as a corrosion engineer. In late 2006, Phil returned to Melbourne and is an active member of the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil. He has provided briefings to local government, fund managers and other businesses and presented on the issue at community events and local oil industry forums.

SP - SP has been a long time reader and part time contributor or commentator to Energy Bulletin and TOD-ANZ. He frequently annoys Gav by posting items of possible interest for Peak Energy. SP is an environmental scientist (of sorts) who recently completed his PhD: his ignorance now comes with qualifications. After a brief flirtation with doomer nihilism, he now tries to entertain a more hopeful and optimistic outlook - mostly. SP currently resides somewhere on the Indonesian Archipelago.

Crikey has a pair of articles on Wikileaks and Julian Assange. The first from Guy Rundle - WikiLeaks … diplomacy out the door and instead, talk of execution.

Sir Richard Dalton, one of the UK’s leading diplomats of the past 30 years, has slammed the United States government for demanding that its diplomatic representatives to the UN spy on UN diplomats and staff, and engage in criminal acts such as stealing their credit card numbers.

Dalton’s comments come on another extraordinary day in which WikiLeaks revelations put the position of Bank of England governor Mervyn King at risk, and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange condemned the issue of an Interpol alert for him as “worthy of [Stalin police chief] Lavrenty Beria”.

Speaking at a panel discussion at London’s Frontline Club, Dalton was unequivocal on the UN spying fiasco. “I think the diplomats who received those instructions should have returned them and refused them”, the former ambassador said. He added that while he believed that diplomatic secrecy should be preserved, WikiLeaks and news outlets had no choice but to publish the material once it was passed to them.

Dalton, who served as the UK’s first ambassador to Libya after the resumption of diplomatic relations, and as ambassador to Iran until last year, also rejected the charge that the cables show nothing new, arguing that there’s a difference between suspecting and knowing, and that the cables were of clear import.

Dalton was rebutting claims by former US under-secretary of state for public diplomacy Colleen Graffy, who argued that the cables should never be presented raw to the general public, who would not have the ability to understand their meaning, and should rely instead on journalists and others to contextualise them. Graffy, who was in the state department during the period that the practice of spying on the UN was first mooted, refused to deny that the US had broken international treaties and law by the practice, arguing only that “all nations spy”.

The statements came as the WikiLeaks Cablegate stories continued to set the news agenda across Europe and the US. Tonight’s release setting out in detail the belief of US and other diplomatic representatives that Russia is not merely a state with a lot of Mafias, but that the state and organised crime have simply merged, with Robert Gates, US defence secretary, quoted as saying that “Russian democracy has simply disappeared; it is an oligarchy run by the secret services”.

Again the establishment shills within journalism rushed to deride the release as “nothing we didn’t already know”, Vladimir Putin thought it worth so little attention that he held a global press conference, and did an interview with Larry King, in which he suggested that WikiLeaks was being fed misinformation as part of a bait-and-switch conspiracy.

That would suggest a complex operation, but that’s probably what your mind turns to if, as the cables suggest US diplomats believe, you regularly poison your opponents with radioactive material in London restaurants.

London was the scene of another WL-inspired showdown, when cables revealed that Bank of England governor Mervyn King strongly lobbied the incoming conservative government to impose a harsh deficit reduction program, while at the same time telling those who would listen that he thought that Cameron and Chancellor Osborne were lightweights. The intervention broke convention and King’s explicit rules for his subordinates against becoming involved in policy — rules he imposed on centre-left staff most insistently.

The continued tide of revelations, and the fact that there is no end in sight — WikiLeaks has released just 600 of the 250,000 cables spoken of, and it is unclear whether or not these are part of a much larger drop of up to three million cables — has prompted US figures to new heights of seething violence.

Bill O’Reilly, an alleged journalist/commentator on Fox, has called for the “execution” for treason of whoever leaked the files to WikiLeaks, while Sarah Palin suggested that Julian Assange should be hunted down like Osama bin Laden — which he sort of is, i.e. not — and also charged with treason, a tough thing for a US court to hang on an Australian citizen. Mike Huckabee has lined up with executors, while Assange has been slated for execution by the Canadian deputy prime minister. No, I don’t know either.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, a lot of that hostility appears to be coming from the professional journalist fraternity, judging by the other questions at the Frontline Club last night. One expected the standard line from Graffy — that this had a “chilling” effect on diplomatic discourse, etc, but the weird thing was that the bulk of the questions came from journos who seemed to have some beef with WikiLeaks.

“Is this irresponsible?” said one. “Why isn’t WikiLeaks encouraging competition?’ said another. “Is WikiLeaks displacing field journalism?’ “Is redaction an admission of earlier guilt?’ “How will people understand these cables without context?’ “Has WikiLeaks betrayed Bradley Manning?’ and on and on.

It’s not that some of these questions weren’t fair or pertinent — it’s that the whole evening was taken up with a palpable anxiety by journalists, and a hostility from those who rely on political connections and inside knowledge, that the rules of the game were changing, and that there were new players.

That takes a bit of getting used to. Halfway through the evening, someone announced that WikiLeaks had been denied access to Amazon servers, a service it was using for excess demand. Graffy crowed that the site was down. Checking it afterwards, it was clearly not (though parts were bouncing back), as was the case with the last half-dozen reports of WL being decisively hacked.

Whether they can stay up for ever remains to be seen. That question is becoming more pertinent for Assange as well, currently — according to WikiLeaks rep Kristinn Hrafnsson in an undisclosed location outside London somewhere, so probably not in the UK at all.

Interpol has a issued a “red” notice of locate and trace, in relation to the Swedish warrant compelling Assange to present himself for questioning on the r-pe accusations that go back to August, and result from complaints to police by two former s-xual partners that Assange would not consent to an STI test.

Through his lawyer, Assange reiterated that he had been given leave to exit Sweden during the investigation, had been in contact with the prosecutor’s office, and that they had refused several possible interview dates.

The red notice leaves a danger that Assange could be detained in the UK for extradition, and possibly served with charges by the US government — which can be enacted near-automatically, under the one-way UK-US extradition treaty negotiated by Tony Blair.

Should the US find a way to charge him, Assange could face decades in prison — although the murderous tone of mainstream right-wing American discourse at moment suggests they have other measures on their mind, a thuggishness that has been implicit in much of their discourse for a long while now. The times are anything but diplomatic.

And the second from Assange's lawyer, noting that all the talk about "rape" in its usual sense is complete nonsense - the issue being talked about in Sweden simply amounts to Assange not having taken a STD test after consensual s-x - Assange lawyer speaks.

Apparently having consensual s-x in Sweden without a condom is punishable by a term of imprisonment of a minimum of two years for r-pe. That is the basis for a reinstitution of r-pe charges against WikiLeaks figurehead Julian Assange that is destined to make Sweden and its justice system the laughing stock of the world and dramatically damage its reputation as a model of modernity.

Sweden’s Public Prosecutor’s Office was embarrassed in August this year when it leaked to the media that it was seeking to arrest Assange for r-pe, then on the same day withdrew the arrest warrant because in its own words there was “no evidence”. The damage to Assange’s reputation is incalculable. More than three quarters of internet references to his name refer to r-pe. Now, three months on and three prosecutors later, the Swedes seem to be clear on their basis to proceed. Consensual s-x that started out with a condom ended up without one, ergo, the s-x was not consensual.

For three months Assange had been waiting in vain to hear whether media statements by and for the two female “victims” that there was no fear or violence were going to be embellished so the charges might be carried forward due to greater seriousness. Such statements would stop a r-pe charge in any Western country dead in its tracks. R-pe is a crime of violence, duress or deception. You can r-pe someone by deluding them into thinking you are someone else or by drugging them or by reason of their young age but essentially it’s a crime of violence.

The women here are near to and over 30 and have international experience, some of it working in Swedish government embassies. There is no suggestion of drugs nor identity concealment. Far from it. Both women boasted of their celebrity connection to Assange after the events that they would now see him destroyed for.

That further evidence hasn’t been confected to make the charges less absurd does Sweden no credit because it has no choice in the matter. The phenomena of social networking through the internet and mobile phones constrains Swedish authorities from augmenting the evidence against Assange because it would look even less credible in the face of tweets by Anna Ardin and SMS texts by Sofia Wilén boasting of their respective conquests after the “crimes”.

In the case of Ardin it is clear that she has thrown a party in Assange’s honour at her flat after the “crime” and tweeted to her followers that she is with the “the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!”. Go on the internet and see for yourself. That Ardin has sought unsuccessfully to delete these exculpatory tweets from the public record should be a matter of grave concern. That she has published on the internet a guide on how to get revenge on cheating boyfriends ever graver. The exact content of Wilén’s mobile phone texts is not yet known but their bragging and exculpatory character has been confirmed by Swedish prosecutors. Niether Wilén’s nor Ardin’s texts complain of r-pe.

But then neither Arden nor Wilén complained to the police but rather “sought advice”, a technique in Sweden enabling citizens to avoid just punishment for making false complaints. They sought advice together, having collaborated and irrevocably tainted each other’s evidence beforehand. Their SMS texts to each other show a plan to contact the Swedish newspaper Expressen beforehand in order to maximise the damage to Assange. They belong to the same political group and attended a public lecture given by Assange and organised by them. You can see Wilén on the YouTube video of the event even now.

Of course, their celebrity lawyer Claes Borgström was questioned as to how the women themselves could be essentially contradicting the legal characterisation of Swedish prosecutors; a crime of non-consent by consent. Borgström’s answer is emblematic of how divorced from reality this matter is. “They (the women) are not jurists”. You need a law degree to know whether you have been r-ped or not in Sweden. In the context of such double think, the question of how the Swedish authorities propose to deal with victims who neither saw themselves as such nor acted as such is easily answered: You’re not a Swedish lawyer so you wouldn’t understand anyway. The consent of both women to s-x with Assange has been confirmed by prosecutors.

Proposed reforms of Swedish r-pe laws would introduce a test of whether the unequal power relations between the parties might void the sincerely expressed consent of one party. In this case, presumably, the politically active Ardin, with experience fielding gender equity complaints as a gender equity officer at Uppsala University, had her will suborned by Assange’s celebrity. The prosecutor coming as she does from a prosecution “Development Unit” could achieve this broadening of the law during Assange’s trial so he can be convicted of a crime that didn’t exist at the time he allegedly committed it. She would need to. There is no precedent for it. The Swedes are making it up as they go along.

A great deal more damning evidence is yet to be revealed about what passes for legal process in Sweden, such as Assange’s lawyers having not received a single official document until November 18, 2010 (and then in Swedish language contrary to European Law) and having to learn about the status of investigations through prosecution media announcements but make no mistake: it is not Julian Assange that is on trial here but Sweden and its reputation as a modern and model country with rules of law.

Science Daily has a look at the impact of biofuel production on water quality in the Mississippi river - Biofuels Production Has Unintended Consequences on Water Quality and Quantity in Mississippi.

More water is required to produce corn than to produce cotton in the Mississippi Delta requiring increased withdrawals of groundwater from the Mississippi River Valley alluvial (MRVA) aquifer for irrigation. This is contributing to already declining water levels in the aquifer. In addition, increased use of nitrogen fertilizer for corn in comparison to cotton could contribute to low dissolved oxygen conditions in the Gulf of Mexico.

These are some of the key findings from a study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to assess water quality and quantity in the Mississippi Delta, in relationship to biofuels production.

"Because corn uses 80 percent more water for irrigation than cotton, exchanging corn for cotton will decrease water-levels," according to Heather Welch, USGS Hydrologist and author of this USGS Report. Declining water levels in the MRVA aquifer are particularly significant in the Mississippi Delta, where the infiltration of rainfall to replenish the aquifer is low. "This is a low flat area. When it does rain, much of the precipitation is lost through evapotranspiration and to streamflow, so the rainwater never reaches the aquifer," explains Welch.

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Energy Biomass Program implemented the Biofuels Initiative. The initiative calls for the replacement of 30 percent of gasoline levels by ethanol by 2030 and the reduction of ethanol costs to prices competitive with gasoline by 2012. In the Mississippi Delta, implementation of this initiative resulted in a 47-percent decrease in the number of acres dedicated to producing cotton, which resulted in a corresponding 288-percent increase in corn acreage in the region from 2006 to 2007.

PhysOrg has an article linking recent recessions with declines in the EROI of major fuel sources - Declining energy quality could be root cause of current recession.

Many economists have pointed to a bursting real estate bubble as the initial trigger for the current recession, which in turn caused global investments in U.S. real estate to turn sour and drag down the global economy. King suggests the real estate bubble burst because individuals were forced to pay a higher and higher percentage of their income for energy—including electricity, gasoline and heating oil—leaving less money for their home mortgages.

In economic terms, the quality of the nation's energy supply is referred to as Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI). For example, if an oil company uses a 10th of a barrel of oil to drill, pump, transport and refine one barrel of oil, the EROI for the refined fuel is 10.

"Many economists don't think of energy as being a limiting factor to economic growth," says King, a research associate in the university's Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy. "They think continual improvements in technology and efficiency have completely decoupled the two factors. My research is part of a growing body of evidence that says that's just not true. Energy still plays a big role."

In a paper published this November in the journal Environmental Research Letters, King introduced a new way to measure energy quality, the Energy Intensity Ratio (EIR), that is easier to calculate, highly correlated to EROI and in some ways more powerful than EROI. EIR measures how much profit is obtained by energy consumers relative to energy producers. The higher the EIR, the more economic value consumers (including businesses, governments and people) get from their energy.

When King plots EIR for various fuels every year since World War II, the graphs indicate two large declines, one before the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s and the other during the 2000s, leading up to the current economic recession. There have been other recessions in the U.S. since World War II, but the longest and deepest were preceded by sustained declines in EIR for all fossil fuels.

EIR is proportional to EROI, meaning they rise and fall together, but the basic data behind the EIR calculations come out annually as opposed to every five years for EROI. EIR also gives insight into different parts of the supply chain such as at the refinery or at the gas pump, which are harder to study with EROI.

King's analysis suggests if EIR falls below a certain threshold, the economy stops growing. For example, in 1972, EIR for gasoline was 5.9 and in 2008 it was 5.5. During times of robust economic growth, such as the 1990s, EIR for gasoline was well over eight. Compare that to some estimates of EROI and EIR for corn ethanol of around one, and it's clear why corn ethanol has been widely criticized as a low quality energy source.

To get the U.S. economy growing again, King says Americans will have to produce and use energy more efficiently. That's essentially what the U.S. did after the last energy crisis by raising fuel efficiency standards for cars, increasing use of natural gas for electric power generation and developing new technologies such as Enhanced Oil Recovery to coax more oil out of the ground.

The Business Spectator has an article by Andrew Leonard looking at some of the implications of the upcoming Wikileaks dump of data from a large American bank - Can WikiLeaks tame Wall Street?.

Forbes magazine is making a very big deal of a declaration by WikiLeaks maestro Julian Assange that sometime early next year, "a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out."

"You could call it the ecosystem of corruption," he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. "But it's also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that's not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they're fulfilling their own self-interest."

Strangely, despite devoting thousands of words to a blossoming war between the technologists seeking to provide the private sector with leak-proof security systems and the information-wants-to-be-free revolutionaries personified by Assange, reporter Andy Greenberg's original story had two big holes. First, he missed Assange's assertion last year, published by ComputerWorld, that he was sitting on five gigabytes of data liberated from Bank of America, which puts that institution at the top of the list of likely exposure suspects. But more important, Greenberg doesn't devote much attention to what a world in which big corporations cannot keep the lid on their internal communications and deliberations sealed would look like.

There seems little doubt that that world is coming. Whatever you think of the ethics or legality of such involuntary disclosure, or regard Assange as a noble whistle-blower or rank terrorist, there's no getting around how easy it is to dump vast amounts of information into the public domain in the era of portable hard drives and ubiquitous Net access. From the dawn of the computer age, information has become ever harder to control, and there's no sign of that changing any time soon. Quite the contrary, as proven by the current flurry of WikiLeaks diplomatic cables released.

But what will it mean, practically speaking? Ideally, greater transparency is supposed to improve market efficiency. So if, say, a data dump on a big bank revealed the corruption at the heart of that institution's operations, it would be punished by the market, perhaps to the point of going out of business. In the interview with Forbes, Assange goes so far as to assert that "one or two" big banks may collapse as a result of WikiLeaks revelations.

Could Julian Assange achieve what a global financial meltdown failed to accomplish? Perhaps, if the information is fresh enough and reveals financial problems previously unknown. Or maybe there will be juicy material that gets plugged immediately into the proliferating investor lawsuits raking over dubious securities trade of the last decade.

But that's all after the fact. The more interesting question is to wonder whether the threat or certainty of eventual exposure has any kind of prophylactic effect on behaviour. For example, would the financial crisis have played out any differently if we could have read every e-mail or text written by Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch mortgage bond traders during the hot and heavy days of the housing boom?

The SMH has an article on plans to expand the use of cogeneration in the City of Sydney - Sydney to go it alone as power producer.

SYDNEY will become the first Australian city to start weaning itself off coal-fired electricity, with the business district and much of the inner city preparing to switch to small, gas-driven power plants in the next 20 years.

The City of Sydney master plan, to be published today by the lord mayor, Clover Moore, will identify 15 ''low carbon zones'' based on trigeneration plants that create electricity and also generate heat and cold for airconditioning.

The switch could save up to $1.5 billion in state government spending on new infrastructure for bringing power from coal-fired plants, a report commissioned by the council said.

A ''decentralised'' power network for Sydney would be driven by gas, but the Herald understands plants would be capable of being driven by forms of biogas created from plant matter and sewage, as part of the council's ultimate goal of making the city centre carbon neutral by 2050.

With work on the new network expected to start within two years, the plan will increase demand for gas extraction, and possibly require new pipelines. ''NSW has sufficient known reserves of gas to meet anticipated needs,'' a spokesman said.

The plan will call for 360 megawatts of electricity from trigeneration by 2030, which would cut the city's greenhouse gas emissions by up to 26 per cent. ...

Most of the power plants would be just a few metres wide and power a city block or a cluster of buildings.

The council commissioned the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney to look at the potential benefits of the trigeneration plan.

Its report found there was potential to save $200 million in extra costs to upgrade the current electricity network before 2020, rising to savings of $1 billion by 2030. In addition, the power generated in the city would offset $500 million worth of energy the state government proposed to generate at two new coal-fired power plants.

The WSJ has a look at tidal power news in the UK - Tidal-Power Project Ebbs in U.K..

Tidal power has been hailed by some as the wave of the future. But in the United Kingdom, the shifting tides of public policy threaten to leave it high and dry.

Puns aside, last month, the U.K. government withdrew its support for one of the world's most ambitious renewable-energy projects—a $24 billion tidal barrage across the Severn Estuary that potentially could have generated as much as 5% of the U.K.'s electricity. The British government said a two-year feasibility study determined that the project would actually cost about $54 billion, and it couldn't justify public funding of such a high-cost, high-risk project.

But there was another factor weighing against the project: its environmental impact. Though the barrage—which would stretch across the estuary and function a bit like a hydroelectric dam—was pitched as a clean technology, green groups argued it would destroy marsh and mud flats used by thousands of birds, and block the migration routes of fish. The government agreed.

"Harnessing the huge tidal power of the Severn has to be right, but it cannot be right to trash the natural environment in the process," says Martin Harper of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a U.K. charity.

While many people believe the government's decision is a death blow to the project, the private consortium behind the barrage, Corlan Hafren Ltd., has vowed to proceed without government support.

The barrage isn't the first renewable-energy project to run afoul of environmentalists. That may be why interest is growing in the U.K. in another type of marine power that draws fewer objections from green groups: tidal-stream energy. Experts have said 15% to 20% of current U.K. electricity demand could ultimately be met by wave and tidal-stream energy, where turbines are placed in fast-flowing currents or tidal steams and powered by the moving water in much the same way moving air powers windmills.

SeaGen, the world's first commercial tidal-stream generator, operates in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, an inlet chosen for its extremely fast tidal current. Marine Current Turbines Ltd., the company behind SeaGen, also is working with a unit of the German utility RWE AG on a tidal-energy farm in North Wales. By the end of the decade, they plan to have major tidal farms off Scotland's Pentland Firth—an area often described as the Saudi Arabia of marine energy—and off the northern Irish coast.

While coal seam gas operators on the east coast are finding resistance growing from farmers wanting to protect their land, The Australian reports that Woodside is hitting headwinds on the west coast as well, with labour costs for their Pluto natural gas project rising rapidly - Pluto delayed as costs soar: Woodside.

The company's new $14 billion cost estimate is $900m to $1.3bn higher than its November estimate last year of $12.7bn to $13.1bn. ...

Tapping fields containing 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, Pluto is Woodside's most important development project.

Related sales to Asian utilities stand to boost its revenue considerably and it is one of few LNG developments to come on line globally in 2011.

Construction of Pluto has been delayed by industrial action from construction workers over their accommodation arrangements and crane drivers over pay, as Australia's resource-driven economy continues its robust growth.

Woodside in November hiked its cost estimate for Pluto by 6 per cent to 10 per cent after experiencing a shortage of skilled workers.

The company today stuck to its 2010 annual production forecast of 70 million-75 million barrels of oil equivalent, adding production is expected in the middle of that range.

Production in 2011 is expected at 63 million-66 million BOE plus 5 million-9 million BOE from Pluto, creating a wide target of 68 million-75 million BOE.

Grist has a look at one minor Wikileaks revelation about US efforts to promote GMO crops in Africa - Wikileaks: State Dept. wants intel on African acceptance of GMOs.

The Wikileaks release of U.S. State Department classified diplomatic cables may be problematic, but it has been quite a trove of information on the workings of our diplomatic corps. For the most part, the dump has confirmed things that we already knew about U.S. policy -- and that seems to be the case regarding the one mention of agricultural policy in these thousands of emails and documents (no doubt there are more) to which I was alerted.

Buried deep in a document that outlines priorities for intelligence gathering in the African "Great Lakes" countries of Burundi, the Republic of Congo, and Rwanda is a list (for the most part, very reasonable) of what the State Department would like to know about the region's agricultural policy. Things like government policies on food security and food safety top the list, for example, along with information on the impact of rising food prices in these countries. Agricultural yield statistics, infrastructure improvements, data on deforestation and desertification, water issues, and invasive species are included as priorities for "reporting" as well.

But also getting its own line item on the intel priority list is this:

Government acceptance of genetically modified food and propagation of genetically modified crops.

Sigh.

Tom Philpott has reported on the State Department's biotech-loving science adviser Nina Federoff and her industry ties -- and certainly USDA Chief Tom Vilsack believes that genetically modified foods are an answer to world hunger. So this revelation hardly counts as a surprise. But it's still a shame to see that our spymasters are actively engaged in efforts to make the world safe for Monsanto. Aren't there better things for them to do?

The SMH has an article on the cost of nuclear power - Nuclear power 'failing' price test.

NUCLEAR energy will be more expensive than most forms of renewable energy by 2020 according to a paper by the University of NSW energy expert Mark Diesendorf.

The paper, to be given at a solar industry conference in Canberra today, finds the cheapest renewable energy sources – including landfill gas, onshore wind, conventional geothermal and hydro – are already cost-competitive with conventional nuclear energy power plants.

By 2020, offshore wind farms, solar thermal and solar photovoltaics are all projected to be less expensive than nuclear energy.

Dr Diesendorf, the deputy director of the Institute of Environmental Studies, said the cost of building a nuclear power plant has risen rapidly since 2002, from more than $US2000 per kw of generation capacity installed, to about $US7400 per kw.

The latest capital cost translates to about US15¢ per kwh of electricity generated, which is projected to rise to about 20¢ per kwh over the next decade, if costs continue to rise at current rates.

The figures do not count subsidies for nuclear energy such as loan guarantees, land acquired for buffer zones around reactors or decommissioning costs.

By comparison the study cites big falls in the capital cost of onshore wind power last year, from $1900 per kw to $1700 per kw, and in solar from $7000 per kw to $5120 per kw (and as low as $3000 for utility-scale projects).

None of the projections assume a carbon price.

Dr Diesendorf said the cost of nuclear energy was rising because the industry was "not expanding".

Nuclear's share of global power generation had fallen from 17 per cent in 2001 to 14 per cent last year with the main growth coming from China, Russia, India and South Korea.

Only two reactors were under construction in western countries – in Finland and France – and both were over-time and over-budget.

FastCompany has a look at a new axis of evil forming in Colorado, looking to exploit shale oil - Boogeymen Trifecta: Murdoch Allies With Oil Company, Cheney.

Rupert Murdoch is one of the world's best known media barons and may or may not be a bud to Steve Jobs. But as hype swelled around his iPad digital project, The Daily, Murdoch was also investing in an Israeli-American oil shale company with ties to Dick Cheney. Can his legendary business savvy help out an upstart oil firm?

Oil shale may be the answer to worries about peak oil, but it is highly expensive to extract and has a high ecological cost.

Lord Jacob Rothschild and Murdoch just purchased a joint 5.5% stake in Genie Oil and Gas Inc., a division of the IDT Corporation. The equity stake purchase by Murdoch and Rothschild is worth approximately $11 million. Genie is a new face in the energy market; the company just launched this summer.

Murdoch is slated to join Genie's advisory board. Other members include:

* American Shale Oil CTO Alan K. Burnham
* Former Vice President Dick Cheney
* Genie chairman and Midland, Texas mayor Wes Perry
* Former Exxon Mobil executive vice president Eugene A. Renna
* Allan Sass, former president and CEO of Occidental Oil Shale
* Hedge fund investor and philanthropist Michael Steinhardt
* Stephen M. Trauber of UBS Investment Bank
* Harold Vinegar, former chief scientist at Royal Dutch/Shell

American Shale Oil is a joint venture between IDT and French firm Total S.A.

Public statements by both Genie and their investors have stressed the firm's American and Israeli (read: non-Arab, non-Iranian, non-Venezuelan) roots. According to a statement by Murdoch, “I believe Genie Energy's technologies and vast shale oil licenses have real potential to spur a global, geo-political paradigm shift by moving a major portion of new oil production to America, Israel, and other western-oriented democracies.” Murdoch also said that “Covering and distributing news has been my life's work […] If Genie's effort to develop shale oil is successful, as I believe it will be, then the news we'll report in the coming decades will reflect a more prosperous, more democratic, and more secure world.”

Perry was even more explicit, stating that “Both America and Israel have significant shale oil reserves. It’s difficult to overstate their potential to improve our respective economies and national security. […] Genie Energy is developing the technologies America and Israel want to make rapid progress toward energy independence, while IDT Energy is poised for continued growth in the consumer market. I’m very excited to work with their management team to help meet the energy needs of the U.S. and Israel for decades to come.”

Genie is currently working on two oil shale exploration projects in the United States and Israel.

In Colorado, Genie is involved in American Shale Oil's extraction testing project in Colorado's Green River Formation. The Green River Formation is the largest oil shale deposit in the world and is believed to contain anywhere between 1.2 and 1.8 trillion barrels of oil. Much of the oil is currently inaccessible; however, even the currently accessible amount of 800 billion barrels in Green River exceeds Saudi Arabia's explored oil reserves. American Shale Oil is one of four companies that was given a tender to develop the Green River Formation; the firm's portion of Green River is believed to contain 10 billion barrels of oil.

WorldChanging has announced they are closing up after 7 interesting years. I don't think the site was ever quite the same after Jamais Cascio departed, but for years it was one of the best places to go on the internet - Thank You for Seven Years of Worldchanging.

We have some news.

Seven years ago, Alex Steffen and Jamais Cascio started Worldchanging with the intention of providing access to the tools, models and ideas for building a better future. They wanted to push the concept that solutions-based thinking could transform the debates about sustainability and social innovation. With a scrawny little blog, a brilliant crew of fellow travelers and a lot of moxie, an initial group of us set out to change how people think about (and prepare for) the future.

Since then, Worldchanging has published almost 12,000 essays, articles, blog posts and "quick changes." We've put out a bestselling book (which has been translated into French, German and other languages). We've had roughly eight million unique readers, and reached tens of millions more with our ideas through talks, interviews in the media and so on. We've had a major impact on the debate, introducing a whole bunch of new ideas and moving forward some entirely new discussions. Many Worldchanging writers have become leading voices in important planetary conversations. We've coined a number of phrases, not least the idea of bright green environmentalism. We've won awards, earned critical acclaim and, if our mail is to be believed, offered some optimism and inspiration to a number of bright, idealistic people.

But all things change, and so it happens with Worldchanging. The organization is taking steps to close its doors and dissolve as a 501c3 nonprofit organization by the end of 2010. It is our goal to see the archive of work here maintained, though the form of that archive is still uncertain.

Why is this happening? Worldchanging readers were generous over the years and an important part of our ongoing operations, but we were never able to secure major foundation support, so Worldchanging relied most heavily on income generated from Alex Steffen’s speaking engagements (Alex gave more than 400 talks over the past five years) and the Worldchanging book. The strenuous travel schedule it takes to deliver that many talks, though, was unsustainable, both personally for Alex and in terms of the impact it had on Worldchanging’s ability to develop new work. It was clear we needed a new model if we were going to stay in operation.

Early this year a new board was brought on to reshape the organization and pursue a more traditional nonprofit development model (based more on grants, gifts and major fundraising drives), with many new board members recruited in just the last few months to help us re-imagine operations and launch these new plans. Unfortunately, despite everyone’s best efforts (and a successful October event), funding ran out before such a transformation could happen. Given the financial realities we faced, the board and staff have agreed that it is time to bring Worldchanging to a close as gracefully as possible.

Grist points to an interesting bike lock concept - The most secure bike lock in the world.

Guy Rundle at Crikey has some more pontifications about the impact of Wikileaks on the modern world - The GFC, Wikileaks collide … and the world just shifted.

As the WikiLeaks cablegate (WL-CG) revelations continue to roll out, the mood of defiance grows in Ireland, with calls for “default”, for an immediate election, or for a citizens assembly coming from ever wider quarters. The euro has failed to lift on the market, suggesting that the vicious austerity package, has failed to convince. Down the road in Trafalgar Square, in the first snow of the year, the students are fighting a running battle with the cops, who are trying to kettle them around Nelson’s column. Interpol has issued a warrant for Julian Assange, based on the warrant issued by the Swedish courts on r-pe allegations.

The European Commission is investigating monopoly price fixing practices by Google, showing surprising backbone. The spotlight is on China, after WL-CG revelations that China had expressed the wish that Korea be reunified under Seoul. Now, joining revelations that the Arab world wants a strike on Iran, is confirmation that the US knows of official Saudi funding links to al-Qaeda, and that the US feels that Pakistan is a larger problem than Afghanistan in the propagation of terror.

President Karzai — dubbed inept and credulous in cables — pardoned five heroin traffickers who were caught with more than 250 kilograms of the stuff en route to the streets of the West. The US began moves to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, and the Australian government is dutifully looking for something to charge him with too.

In the House of Commons, the Lib-Dems are in chaos, preparing to abstain from a vote hiking up tuition fees after pledging to oppose it before the election, with talk of defections from the party. Revelations in the WL-CG cables that PMs Brown and Cameron unsuccessfully attempted to make a deal to avoid the extradition of Garry McKinnon, an autistic kid who hacked into unprotected US security networks, and is facing decades in jail under the one-way extradition treaty signed by Blair.

The revelation has dealt another small but visible blow to the special relationship. And the UK “put in place” measures to shield the US during the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War. According to WL-CG. And Portugal has announced, in the past 15 minutes, that its banks may fail.

Clearly something is under way, a larger shift than can be explained merely by the individual occurrences, substantial as they are. Two massive processes have come into collision — the second wave of the global financial crisis, breaking strongly in Europe, hitting WikiLeaks’ rolling wave of information storms, changing the relationship between state and power. The transformation of the relationship between four elements — states, nations, information and economy — has been categorical, and even if it recedes in the next few days (which it is unlikely to), it will not retreat back to the status quo.

Something has happened, and it is worth trying to work out what, while it is going on.

Taken at the broadest structural level, one could say this — a series of crucial shifts going back 30 years have now come together in a manner that has pitched the global power system into a potential crisis of legitimacy. In the early 1980s, global financial transactions — hitherto substantially bound within states — began to be extended internationally in real time, due to greater use of information technology as “virtual” markets, and then the only arena in which transactions took place.

The Reagan and Thatcher victories detached economy from state politically, deregulating finance. The transition from the EEC to the EC/EU detached state structures from nation, translating them into a European super-state. The spread of the internet in the late ’80s and ’90s changed the relationship of information to state, making it materially impossible to regulate information flows via old means of censorship and control.

With the global financial economy dictating terms to the superstates in the late ’90s — Glass-Steagall was repealed at the same time as the euro was launched — and using the global net as both its medium, and domain for creation of new assets, the nations, the ethni rallied around increasingly crude expressions of solidarity, increasingly with a religious charge.

The most brutal expression of this was 9/11, and the state responded by trying to regain some of the power it had since given up to information and economy. By now it was too late. The new culture, subjectivity and legitimacy of the cybersphere implicitly undermined the state. WikiLeaks is theorisation and operationalisation of that moment, which is an act of (collective) thought, and a changed material reality.

The autonomous processes of a global economy, operating at the hyperspeed — effectively light speed — of an autonomous global information system, eventually came apart, and the debris rained down on the nations. The Greeks, the Irish, the Portuguese, maintaining a sense of community separated from the state were initially powerless. The states — the EU and the US — had a relationship only to the economy, not to the nation, and promptly bailed out the former at the cost of the latter, stealing their life, to pay off debt.

At this point, with the legitimacy of state and economy at historic lows, the three major blows of WikiLeaks have decisively shifted the power relationship between information on the one hand, and state/economy on the other. From the other end, the nations are rebelling. “Peoples of Europe, rise up” the Greek Communist Party’s slogan hung from the Acropolis chimes with WikiLeaks material and categorical challenge to the very fabric of state power, as expressed in the notion of “inviolable diplomatic communication”.

In Europe, oft dismissed as the old dead world, but really the cutting edge of the world-island, it will only take one crucial challenge from the nations — a citizens challenge to state power in Ireland, for example — to join the two up, in an equally dynamic fashion. Assange’s announcement, in Forbes magazine, that WL may do a Wall Street document dump next effectively closes the circle.

You can feel the change in the air, read it in every report. The more that the fused political-media-administrative elite try to write it off as “entertaining anecdote” while at the same time mobilising state power to destroy the organisation, the more they reveal that something has happened. The old process of leaks — a document here and there — only served to reinforce the idea that the state had an unquestionable right to control information, and that there could be no other way to organise society or create law.

That legitimacy has had a fatal crack put it in. The whole question of who should know what has been put into play. There will be reversals, but we’re used to those. As I may have mentioned, something is happening.

Earth2tech has a look at some of the reasons why there has been significant resistance to smart meter rollouts - Why the Smart Meter Backlash Story Isn’t Going Away.

This story seriously won’t go away. And here’s why:

1. People don’t like PG&E. PG&E has a long and contentious relationship with California residents. The utility previously backed the losing Prop 16, which would have basically stopped local governments from getting into the power business. There was that whole gas line fire disaster in San Bruno in September, and the utility took months to initially respond with an apology for the first smart meter complaints that emerged. PG&E couldn’t have done a worse job at outreach to date. Basically anything PG&E does at this point is going to be looked at with a skeptical eye. Bummer.

2. Hard times. As the sergeant put it to the New York Times, budgets are tight everywhere right now and anything that’s giving the impression of unfairly costing consumers money is going to face anger, and apparently, a lot of it. This might not happen to such a large extent if wallets weren’t so tight.

3. Technology is confusing: People generally don’t understand how smart meters work. If you have a Wi-Fi router in your home, a cell phone in your pocket, and a GPS device in your car, yet you’re worried about health concerns of your smart meter, then you don’t understand smart meter technology.

4. Digital, networked technology can be scary. As I’ve written at length, adding a network connection and software to a device has, throughout history, tended to make people nervous. Whether it’s a backlash to computerized voting, or online and mobile banking, the digitization of the power grid will face the same uncertainty.

5. It’s getting hot in here. NASA reported that January through September were the hottest on record. The hotter it is, the more air conditioning people use in their homes, and the more they spend on their monthly utility bills. So as the first wave of smart meters is being installed (partly to help fight climate change), the climate has delivered record hot temperatures that are likely boosting a lot of bills.

6. Little innovation, little change. The power industry has seen little innovation over the past century, which is why greentech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are so eager to build companies in this industry. As a result, utility consumers are used to a routine, never-changing relationship with the utility, and aren’t used to any type of change, period.

7. What do I get? Compare a smart meter installation to the installation of your new cable connection. Working with the cable company is really annoying; they seem to take forever; their customer service lines are abysmal; yet at the end of the irritating journey, you have an Internet connection that brings you all your favorite web content. After you get your smart meter, what do you get? Oh, the ability to cut down on your energy consumption. Not so fun.

The New York Times has an article on some examples of the backlash - ‘Smart’ Meters Draw Complaints of Inaccuracy.

Over the last year, as utilities around the country have installed an estimated two million of the new digital meters, power companies have received plenty of complaints — and in some states have been hit by class-action lawsuits — most of them from consumers saying the smart meters are overstating their electrical usage.

This is not the smooth rollout envisioned last year, when the Obama administration included money for utilities to install smart meters as part of a $3.4 billion injection of federal stimulus spending to modernize the nation’s power grid. By 2020, there could be as many as 65 million smart meters, by various makers, installed in this country, according to one estimate.

Using digital technology and computer networking, smart meters can transmit real-time data that is supposed to enable utilities to conserve electricity and better allocate power during parts of the day when overall demand is high. Utilities can also then vary the price for power, by time of day or time of year, based on when it is being used; some are already offering this option to customers.

Meanwhile, for customers with the right training and additional equipment, the meters can give households a much more detailed picture of the amount of electricity they are using, down to individual appliances. That, in theory, can help people reduce their electric bills and become greener citizens.

But because of faulty technology in some cases, and more often through general shortcomings in consumer education and customer-service support by many utilities, smart meters are leaving many customers dumbfounded.

In Maryland earlier this year, state regulators, aware of the discontent around the country, temporarily blocked a utility’s smart-meter proposal, citing inadequate planning and the potential cost to consumers.

In California, Michael Kelly, a lawyer handling a class-action suit against the state’s dominant utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, over billing disputes, said the problems probably had less to do with faulty devices and more to do with a hasty rollout. Old billing systems were merged with the new smart-meter technology, he said, too frequently resulting in erroneous charges.

“We’re just saying we want an evaluation done and that we want anyone who was overcharged to get their money back,” Mr. Kelly said.

A state-ordered analysis by the independent research firm Structure Consulting Group, released in September, agreed with the utility’s assertion that its new meters were accurate for the most part. The study also supported its conclusion that most of the complaints could be traced to a heat wave, changes in personal behavior or old meters that were actually malfunctioning and undercharging before the new ones were installed.

But the Structure report also said the utility had done a poor job of educating consumers and addressing their concerns. In basic terms, the smart digital meters are simply replacing the old analog meters, with their inscrutable dials and counters, found on the sides of homes all over America. But unlike those “dumb” devices, which are often read once a month by utility employees going house to house on foot, the digital meters can provide utilities with remote, real-time measurements of kilowatt-hours being used.

A recent analysis by the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-financed research organization based in Palo Alto, Calif., estimated that creating an intelligent electricity grid of this sort in the United States could reduce electricity use by more than 4 percent annually by 2030. Nationally, that could mean annual savings of roughly $20.4 billion for utilities and their customers, according to the institute.

Grist has some commentary on the Earth2Tech and New York Times articles - Understanding the smart meter backlash.

David's been writing lately about the intersection of technology and human habits and culture, arguing that energy is a behavioral challenge as much as a technological one. There's a prime of example of how these things collide -- and why climate hawks should pay attention -- in the backlash against smart meters in California.

The New York Times is the latest to cover the trend of residents responding in outrage when utilities install smart meters -- home-energy computers that provide detailed information on what appliances you're using, and when. They're a necessary element in building a clean-energy grid that relies on wind and solar power, feeds electric cars, and supports greener dishwashers and other appliances (here's a good backgrounder).

California utility PG&E has been a national leader in rolling out the devices. It's also faced the strongest revolt. ...

Behavioral researcher Doug McKenzie-Mohr suggests there's no silver bullet to getting people to adopt new sustainable behaviors. It requires patience, careful communication, carefully designed pilot programs, and research into what mental associations new concepts may trigger (that's why we get home-energy "reviews" or "check-ups" instead of "audits").

Mailing out brochures isn't going to put everyone's concerns to rest, because their worries are less about information than about adjusting to change.

There's reason to think that privacy fears about the smart grid aren't going to be "solved" any quicker than the question of internet privacy will be resolved (the grid is often called the internet for energy). The question will persist, just as the question of internet privacy has.

Fehrenbacher's whole story at Earth2Tech, "Why the Smart Meter Backlash Story Isn't Going Away," runs through a list of ominous reasons why the dilemma will stick around. It's worth reading.

There are two ways to think about the PR challenge of smart meter going forward, one cheery and one gloomy. Global warming speech-givers are fond of saying that our choice is not between sustainability and the status quo; it's between sustainability and Detroit/Mogadishu/Pakistani floods (pick your social-collapse metaphor). In the same vein, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers says our choice is between a wired clean-energy network and utility rates that will rise 20 to 40 percent in the coming decades to replace aging power plants. The status quo isn't an option -- that's the gloomy conclusion.

For the other perspective, I'm cribbing from David's recent post comparing China's massive top-down energy planning and a decentralized American alternative:

Among other infantilizing features of modern American life is the fact that we are passive, thoughtless consumers of energy, forever suckling at a far-away teat, whether it's foreign oil producers or politically connected corporate behemoths. We send money out of our communities; someone sends power in. We are as dependent as sheep.

One step toward regaining our sense of civic engagement and self-determination would be to widely distribute the means of making and managing energy, to empower bottom-up rather than top-down innovation. Our communities can never truly govern themselves if they have no control over their own power. Let China have the Three Gorges Dam. Let's show the world, again, that democracy can work.

Smart meters can help Americans become not just consumers but energy managers and producers (through, say, rooftop solar panels). If you buy this perspective, adding info-tech to your home's energy system isn't disempowering at all. It's an expression of democracy. That's a bit more hopeful.

The SMH has an article on ASPO President Kjell Aleklett's Australian tour, looking at global warming scenarios considering peak oil and quoting ASPO Australia and TOD ANZ's Phil Hart - Emissions scenarios are based on flawed assumptions, says energy expert.

The concept of a peak - maximum production - does not mean a date after which the world soon runs out of fossil fuels. It's about flow rates. ''We are not running out,'' says Aleklett. ''But we have a limit to supply. What we're running out of is the possibility of increased usage.''

Aleklett, a long-time critic of the International Energy Agency's forecasts, is looking increasingly on the money as demand figures have been wound back in the IEA's 2010 World Energy Outlook, released this month.

The IEA stopped short of calling a peak in oil production but did lower its consumption forecasts.

In 2009, the IEA stressed the importance of oil for economic growth and concluded that 106 million barrels a day (mb/d) would be required by 2030, about 20mb/d higher than today. In 2010, the IEA only predicts 99mb/d by 2035 and avoids any discussion of economic growth.

''We can interpret this as meaning desired economic growth is not possible,'' says Aleklett. He means it.

Aleklett believes high oil prices - they peaked at $US147 in 2008 - helped trigger the global financial crisis, when oil-dependent home owners in the outer suburbs of America's cities began defaulting on their loans.

Peak oil will limit economic growth: the IEA now sees OECD oil consumption falling 15 per cent by 2035. OECD nations, including Australia, will have to revise down their consumption estimates. The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics has yet to bring its forecasts into line with the IEA. But Australia's oil production is declining rapidly - by the end of the decade we could be reliant on imports for 80 per cent of consumption, says former Shell Australia and Australian Coal Association executive Ian Dunlop.

Where will that oil come from? Can we outbid the likes of China and India?

''The government's assumption there will always be oil available on the market is nonsense, unless we're willing to pay a fortune,'' says Dunlop.

BHP Billiton's latest quarterly crude oil production figures showed drops across the board, year-on-year, propped up only by the new Pyrenees field in Western Australia.

ABARE's Energy Resource Assessment last year listed just two other new Australian oil projects, including Thai operator PTTEP's Montara/Skua field - site of last year's disastrous spill, which the government finally responded to this week.

Local ASPO spokesman Phil Hart says ABARE is in ''economic fairyland'', believing demand will always lead to supply. The same problem underpins the IPCC's scenarios, which are modelled by economists who ''assume business as usual is possible''.

Ultimately it is irrelevant whether we have enough fossil fuels to hit 6 degrees of warming. Global temperatures are already too high at 0.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels, and climate change is already dangerous. Recent Potsdam Institute analysis concluded 75 per cent of the world's fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground if we are to keep warming to 2 degrees.

''There's more than enough coal, oil and gas to get us into trouble,'' says Hart. We need to stop burning fossil fuels now (and, the implication is, avoid wasting billions on carbon capture and storage, which uses extra energy and will only accelerate resource depletion) in favour of renewables.

The ramifications are profound, particularly for infrastructure spending: we need to electrify transport, and shift from private to public transport. Aviation may be a sunset industry. No more toll roads with wildly optimistic demand projections. No more hideously expensive airports.

Aleklett says politicians should welcome the concept of peak oil. ''Peak oil should be politicians' best friend,'' he says. ''It is something they cannot fix.''

Cleantechnica has a look at the long term performance of solar panels - Carter Era Solar Panel Performance Amazes Owner.

A story in Green building advisor sheds some light on how long the solar panels on your roof just might keep on pumping out power.

While most appliances only use energy, rather than make energy, and are not subject to the rigorous second-guessing of solar arrays (when was the last time you demanded a payback analysis on your car, your fridge or your giant plasma TV?) a solar array is just an appliance that supplies a personal power supply, after all. Like a car, a fridge, or a plasma TV, it provides you with a service.

So, will it outlast your car, fridge and plasma TV? Apparently: yes.

Green Building Advisor’s Green Building’s Martin Holladay tested the 30 year old solar panel that he originally purchased and installed in 1980. To mark the 30th anniversary, Holladay climbed on his roof and brought one of his panels down for testing. He was curious to see exactly how well it was working, compared with its original rating.

He connected it directly (with no intervening battery) to two different 12-volt loads to test it: a 35-watt incandescent light bulb, and a blower rated at 4.5 amps (about 54 watts). Result? “The old PV module passed with flying colors. It easily powered up the light bulb; my Fluke multimeter showed that under a full load of 2.015 amps, the module’s voltage was an impressive 14.93 volts” said Holladay.

The panel tested at an even better performance than when the panel was new..

BusinessWeek has a look at a key agricultural input commodity, phosphate - Phosphate: Morocco's White Gold.

Miners have been working in Khouribga for almost a century, but only now is the area poised to become central to the global economy. Back in the 1920s pioneers started tunneling through the earth here, digging through layers of sediment formed under an ancient sea, looking for phosphate-rich rock and occasionally plucking out the tooth of a 30-million-year-old shark. The phosphate extracted from the rock, used in fertilizer, detergent, food additives, and more recently lithium-ion batteries, sold for decades in its raw state for less than $40 per metric ton. Those days are gone. It's currently trading at about $130.

This is good news for King Mohammed VI, 47, who owns more than half the world's phosphate reserves. James Prokopanko, chief executive officer of Plymouth (Minn.)-based fertilizer giant Mosaic (MOS), has called Morocco the Saudi Arabia of phosphate, with all that implies about the King's power to influence prices and economies. Mohammed's strategy, by most accounts, is to drive the commodity's price higher yet—which means the cost of making everything from corn syrup to iPads will be going up as well. ...

Phosphate, when used as fertilizer, is the irreplaceable engine powering modern agriculture, and its reserves are in decline almost everywhere except Morocco. Most phosphate mines, including those in the U.S., which produces 17 percent of the global supply, have been in a downward spiral for the last decade, running out of quality rock and hindered by environmental regulation. That has forced companies to look farther afield for additional supplies. Earlier this year, Mosaic spent $385 million for a 35 percent stake in a Peruvian mine to supply rock to its phosphate operations in the U.S. and South America. Meanwhile, Australia's mining giant BHP Billiton (BHP) has been threatening to take over Canada's PotashCorp (POT), a major supplier of both potash and phosphate.

Even a temporary phosphate shortage could affect a range of U.S. industries. Phosphate fertilizer is used on just about every crop, though most in the U.S. goes to the 13 billion bushels of corn grown each year to make everything from corn syrup to cattle feed to ethanol. When prices climbed tenfold in 2007 and 2008, retailers and farmers scrambled to build local fertilizer warehouses as a buffer. Now, according to Dirk Lohry, owner of Nutra-Flo, a crop and animal nutrient manufacturer in Sioux City, Iowa, many of those warehouses stand empty as supplies are being used too quickly to build inventory. The prospect of a shortage has become serious enough that the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Energy Dept. recently assigned an analyst to study the issue; she was not permitted to speak publicly because of "geopolitical sensitivities."

One could look at the 2007-08 food crisis for clues to how a shortage might play out. At that time, rising food prices led to riots across Africa and Asia—the Pakistani Army even stepped in to defend warehouses and farms. Before the crisis was over, China had levied a 135 percent export tariff on its phosphate to protect its domestic food supply; phosphate there is still taxed at 110 percent at the height of the buying season.

The scale of Morocco's phosphate wealth was officially verified in September, when the International Fertilizer Development Center released its long-awaited update on global phosphate resources. Morocco's portion went from the 5.7 billion metric tons still cited in U.S. Geologic Survey reports, to 50 billion metric tons—85 percent of the world's total. Even with 170 million metric tons of concentrated phosphate changing hands each year, the Moroccans likely have at least 300 to 400 years of rock available. Talal Zouaoui, OCP's director of communications, won't agree or disagree with estimates, but says in an e-mail that Morocco has "significant reserves," and notes that reserves denote only those quantities that countries have discovered and deem economically viable to extract.

With a growing world population consuming more grain, more meat, and more biofuels, demand is expected to rise at a rate of 2 to 3 percent per year, according to the International Fertilizer Assn. Some experts, like Dana Cordell, co-founder of the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative, predict that phosphate production will "peak" within the next 50 years.

Not all phosphate becomes fertilizer: About 15 percent is turned into detergents or food additives, such as the tangy phosphoric acid in Coca-Cola (KO), or the moisture-retaining salts in salami. (As U.S. states try to control the use of phosphates, which promote algae blooms in water bodies, Procter & Gamble (PG) and other detergent makers have been experimenting with phosphate-free products, with mixed results.)

OCP controls 30 percent of global phosphate exports, and plans to increase annual production from 30 million metric tons to 54 million metric tons by 2015, investing $5 billion in the process. By that time, Prayon, a Belgian phosphate processor in which OCP owns a 50 percent stake, believes demand for phosphate as a component of the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles could exceed demand for it in detergent.

The Climate Spectator has an article on the transition from the old model of "baseload" power generation to a new, more flexible system - Is baseload power necessary ?.

For years, David Mills, the eminent solar energy technology developer, has dreamed of creating a new model for an energy system that does away with the conventional design of massive baseload infrastructure.

Next week the newly-retired founder of solar thermal technology company Ausra (now owned by French nuclear giant Areva), and a former leading researcher at UNSW, will present that model.

Using hourly data for energy use of the entire United States economy in 2006, Mills will demonstrate how it could have been powered almost exclusively by wind and solar (with storage and the help of biofuels for aircraft and some biomass capacity for certain smelting operations).

The details of his findings, including capacity and costing estimations, will be released when he addresses the Australian Solar Energy Society's annual conference in Canberra next week. But in an exclusive interview with Climate Spectator, Mills gave a broad outline of his conclusions and suggested there was a surprisingly small difference in costs.

“Everyone says that you need flatline baseload capacity (such as coal or nuclear, or in some countries hydro) and build on that platform, and use load-following gas turbines,” Mills said.

“They assume that being baseload makes it cheaper, and all other things are more expensive.”

“What we are suggesting is a new paradigm. The traditional paradigm of flatline baseload does not exist in this scenario, but you need to understand that the replacement for baseload power is not another baseload, it’s a system of flexible and inflexible energy mechanisms based around wind and solar and other sources.”

The study is an extension of an idea that Mills has held dear for some time. In 2005 he presented a talk in Canberra suggesting that solar plans with a “primitive” storage model could run the electricity grid in eastern Australia.

Two years later, he did a similar study for California concluding that, based on hourly data for energy usage in 2006, solar could have carried well over 90 per cent of the electricity load.

The latest study – completed with a former R&D specialist at Ausra, Wei Li Cheng, and a US Department of Energy analyst Phil Larochelle – looks at how solar and wind could handle the entire electricity needs for the US in the same year, and also looks at whether it could handle the entire energy needs for the country, including transport.

Interestingly, wind and solar account for around 50 per cent each of the electricity supplies to handle summer demand and peaks, while more wind was used in winter. Such a system would require a capacity redundancy above peak demand, but would in fact be less than current systems.

Mills says the study looked to test a number of different premises. The first premise was that there was enough solar and wind that, in combination, could run the US economy. There was.

The second was that solar and wind would be connected with a new electricity transmission system, using high voltage direct current lines for the spine of the network, which will allow more flows and result in considerably reduced transmission losses.

These are the sort of networks being contemplated by the Desertec consortium founded by a group of large European industrial giants that are looking to source solar power from north Africa to provide some of Europe’s energy needs.

Mills says China is installing more HVDC lines than any other country in the world – looking to link coal plants with the Three Gorges dam and wind and solar from the north and west of the country. “It very clear to see what they are doing and that it is a very good thing to do,” he said.

Mills says the data used for his study came from 2006, and was based around technology that might be used in 2050, but exists now – even though its lack of scale makes current deployment expensive. "Its not technology that we don’t have now. I didn't want people saying that it's future technology." ...

Mills notes the work of the Beyond Zero Emissions group, which outlined a highly contentious study into how Australia could go 100 per cent renewable by 2020 – not so much to suggest it should be done, but that it could be done.

The German industrial giant Siemens has also produced a report entitled “Picture the Future”, which suggested renewable energy could, by 2030, provide 70 per cent of Australia’s electricity needs, with half coming from solar – augmented by storage and a suite of installation across different time zones – and the rest made up of an equal share of wind and geothermal.