Greentech Media reports that Bloom Energy is expanding its production capacity - Bloom to Open Factory in Delaware in Geographic Expansion.

Fuel cell maker Bloom Energy will open a factory on the site of a mothballed auto plant in Delaware and begin to sell fuel cells in that state.

Delaware has a portfolio standard that seeks to get 25 percent of the state's capacity from renewable sources by 2025. Governor Jack Markell is pushing to get fuel cells added to the definition of "renewable." It's not impossible. President Obama in his State of the Union speech argued for a "clean" energy standard that includes nuclear, clean coal and gas, instead of a "renewable" standard. Bloom's fuel cells convert gas to electricity onsite and are more efficient in most cases than converting gas at a central power plant and delivering the power through the grid.

Local utility Delmarva Power has signed a contract to buy 30 megawatts worth of Bloom boxes. Thirty megawatts will mean 100 Bloom Energy Servers. Bloom has been selling the servers for around $700,000 to $800,000 each. …

The 200,000-square-foot plant is an old Chrysler plant. Delaware has two old auto plants. Fisker Automotive took over the other. Hence the nickname "The Old Factory State" you see on those new license plates. It's also probably not a coincidence that both Bloom and Fisker come out of the portfolio of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. Once a VC firm links one deal with a state, others follow. Three Khosla Ventures portfolio companies have inked manufacturing deals laced with incentives with Mississippi.

The San Jose Mercury has a report on Adobe's installation of a number of cogeneration devices from Bloom Energy - 'Bloom Boxes' help power Adobe headquarters in San Jose.

Sunnyvale startup Bloom Energy has maintained a low profile since it first raised the curtain on its fuel cell technology at a highly orchestrated news conference earlier this year. But Adobe Systems was set to announce late Monday that it has chosen Bloom Energy's technology to help power its corporate headquarters in downtown San Jose, making it Bloom's largest single-site installation to date.

Adobe installed 20 vertically shaped wind turbines, made by Windspire Energy of Reno, at its headquarters in January. But with 2,500 employees and about a million square feet of office space, Adobe is eager to do even more to reduce its energy footprint. ...

Twelve of the Bloom devices -- commonly known as "Bloom Boxes" -- were installed in late August and are now generating electricity from Adobe's roof. Each Bloom Box provides 100 kilowatts, enough power for about 100 U.S. homes. The 12 together generate about 1.2 megawatts, enough for about 30 percent of the Adobe Towers' electricity needs.

The fuel cell technology is not cheap: The commercial-scale boxes cost $700,000 to $800,000 each and come with a 10-year warranty on performance that includes any maintenance and replacement parts.

Adobe declined to discuss how much they paid Bloom, but Knox said Adobe expects the boxes to generate enough electricity for it to recoup its investment in four to six years.

CBS's "Sixty Minutes" program has a look at cogeneration / fuel cell company Bloom Energy this weekend - The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?.

For the past year and a half, several large California corporations have been secretly using the “Bloom Box,” a potentially revolutionary fuel-cell system. Confirming this for the first time, several of the companies report this system is a more efficient, clean, and cost effective way to get electricity than off the power grid. Lesley Stahl and 60 MINUTES cameras get the first look inside the secretive California company, just days before the Bloom Energy official launch, scheduled for this Wednesday (24). Stahl’s report will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES, Sunday Feb. 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

John Donahoe, CEO of E-bay, confirms Bloom Boxes were installed at his corporate campus nine months ago. The company says the boxes already saved them over $100,000 in electricity bills. “It’s been very successful thus far. [The Bloom Boxes] have done what they said they would do,” says Donahoe. The five boxes are able to produce five times as much electricity as the 3,248 solar panels that E-bay installed on its campus roofs, says the CEO. “The footprint for Bloom is much more efficient,” he tells Stahl. Google, FedEx, Staples and Wal-Mart are among the first 20clients Bloom is confirming.

Stahl is the first journalist to be allowed into the Bloom Energy lab and factory where they currently make one box a day. The boxes create electricity by a chemical process that utilizes oxygen and fuel, but involves no combustion. Bloom’s founder and CEO, K.R. Sridhar, insists all the materials in the box are cheap and available in abundance. Bloom says each large Box – which can power about 100 homes – currently sells for $700-800,000. They hope within five to 10 years to roll out a smaller home version for about $3,000 a unit.

Bloom Energy was the first clean energy start-up Kleiner-Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in. They currently invest in about 50 clean tech companies. Sridhar confirms the company has received over $400 million, making it one of the most expensive startups in history. The majority of that comes from Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins partner who invested in Bloom, has high hopes. “The Bloom Box is intended to replace the [electric power] grid for its customer,” says Doerr. He thinks existing utility companies should not be threatened or have a problem with Bloom Energy. “The utility companies will see this as a solution. All they need to do is buy Bloom Boxes, put them in the substation for the neighborhood and sell that electricity,” he says.

But there is another hurdle says Michael Kanellos, editor in chief of the Web site GreenTech Media. Even if Sridhar can mass produce his boxes and sell them cheaply enough, “The problem is then G.E. and Siemens and other conglomerates that can probably do the same thing. They have fuel cell patents,” he tells Stahl.

Tonic reports that cogeneration / fuel cell company Bloom Energy is installing a 500KW configuration at eBay - eBay First To Demonstrate Bloom Fuel cells.

Following hard on Tonic's story on EEStor and a the wave of clean energy technologies about to break on the shores of global warming comes word that eBay is to get the largest installation to date of Bloom Energy's new fuel cell.

And we're not talking about a tiny demonstration project, of the sort we often read about; this is a gang of five commercial-grade cells turning out an impressive 500KW. That's a lot of output. It's no power station, but it's enough to run a neighborhood worth of homes.

Michael Kanellos, writing in greentechmedia, reports that the "City of San Jose has granted eBay permission to install five fuel cells from Bloom Energy that will generate up to 500 kilowatts of power." According to the San Jose Business Journal, eBay is "on a mission to reduce its overall carbon footprint by 15 percent by 2012 ... It’s using technology from the first green tech investment made by [venture capital firm] Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to do it."

earth2tech has a post on CHP / cogeneration company Bloom Energy, following a recent interview with CEO KR Sridhar - Bloom Energy CEO: We Can Be the Gas Station for Transportation. I liked Sridhar's take on the company's mission - "We fundamentally want to change the world. This is a mission about changing the world because energy is a passport to a better living. For the rest of the world that does not have access to power, access to electricity, to give them that is empowering them to a better life."

A year ago, venture capitalists at the firm Kleiner Perkins let slip a few juicy details about their first cleantech investment: quiet fuel cell maker Bloom Energy. Now in an interesting and rare interview with Alison van Diggelen, who produces Fresh Dialogues, Bloom Energy chief executive KR Sridhar has shared a few more tidbits, including the fact that Bloom is targeting the transportation industry in the company’s grand vision.

No the fuel cell won’t be making its way into the vehicles themselves but Sridhar tells van Diggelen that “the ultimate vision” is to have refrigerator-sized Bloom devices powering transportation within a decade. As Sridhar explains: “Our device can either produce the electricity that will charge the car or provide you hydrogen if the transportation becomes a hydrogen based. So we’ve sort of become the gas station for the transportation industry.” That sounds like the devices could provide an off-the-grid form of electric vehicle charging.

It’s yet another massive industry that the 7-year-old company, which is really just getting started on its commercial shipments according to documents associated with its $150 million Series F financing round, is hoping to tackle. The 5-kilowatt Bloom box, which has been in testing for the last few years, involves a fuel cell system that can generate electricity using a range of liquid fuels, such as natural gas or ethanol.

Other interesting points of van Diggelen’s interview include Sridhar’s reality check on how long large scale energy tech projects really take:

This is not a microchip. These are huge devices, they need to be build in very large quantities, and if you take automotive, if you take anything else, its penetration and how long it takes to build the factories, the machines for factories. These things don’t happen over night…It’s going to be slower than what the bits and bites people in Silicon Valley think because it’s not like software that you’re just going to write and then copy 800 times, or a million times over instantly, and distribute.

The Engineer-Poet recently had a post on The Cogeneration Stopgap at the Oil Drum, which looked at how the combination of cogeneration (generating combined heat and power - CHP - using natural gas) and heat pumps could be used to heat North American homes much more efficiently and extend the life of North America's dwindling natural gas reserves for a period of time while houses are retrofitted to make them more energy efficient and natural gas use is replaced with electricity. The only example of cogeneration technology touched on in the article was from Climate Energy, whose CHP unit is made by Honda.

An Australian company working in this area called Ceramic Fuel Cells were in the news recently after landing a $240 million deal with Dutch energy company Nuon to supply 50,000 CHP units by 2014. The company still needs to meet a number of commercial requirements set by Nuon - in particular improving the durability of the cells from two years to four.

The company is hoping that production will begin by June 2009 in a new €12.4 million factory in Heinsberg, Germany, which aims to produce 10,000 2 kW units per year. The cells are expected to emit 60% less carbon dioxide than traditional combustion generators. The company is also partnering with Britain's Powergen, Germany's EWE and Gaz de France.

Ceramic Fuel Cells

Ceramic's fuel cells have been under development for several years, listing on the ASX in 2004 and the AIM shortly after. The company specialises in solid oxide fuel cells, which convert natural gas (and presumably biogas) into power and heat without burning the fuel. The cells convert about 50 per cent of the energy in the fuel to electricity - traditional gas-fired power stations manage around 30 per cent - with another 35 per cent of the potential energy captured as heat from the catalytic process.

The company doesn't have any plans to market units in Australia in the foreseeable future, preferring to concentrate on the European market due to higher energy prices, specific CHP rebates in Germany, feed-in tariffs and possible carbon credits for trading on the EU emissions trading scheme (set up under the Kyoto protocol).

CHP in Britain

Reuters reported that boilers containing Ceramic's units could be sold in Britain in 2010 if utility company Powergen orders units this year. The article estimates that fuel cell units for home units will be priced between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds and that larger units priced at over 3,000 pounds will be operated by utility companies. The same report goes on to speculate that because utilities will save so much money by producing electricity using CHP (which they believe is twice as efficient as centralised generation and sending power through the grid), that they expect utilities will eventually start giving next-generation boilers to customers for free, with the units having a 4-5 year payback period.

Powergen has also previously looked at a different micro-CHP approach using Stirling Engines attached to water boilers. I can't tell what happened to this plan, though the company is assume was the prospective supplier - Disenco - is still marketing a CHP product (although full production isn't due to begin until this year, which may explain the absence of progress).

Another British CHP company called Ceres Power received an order for 37,500 units from British Gas owner Centrica in January, for delivery from 2011. These units are smaller but cheaper than Ceramic's units. Carbon Commentary have looked at this unit and claimed the main challenge facing CHP vendors in the UK is a the lack of feed-in tariffs - which would presumably affect Ceramic as much as Ceres.

Bloom Energy

Another company that has received a lot of attention in the fuel cell market is US company Bloom Energy, who are also developing solid oxide fuel cells (though there is some legal argument underway about who actually developed the technology in this case). Bloom Energy

The company is investigating using natural gas and ethanol as fuel for the cells, and most reports speculate the cells will be able to generate 100 kw of power (the company's web site says absolutely nothing). One report from Business 2.0 claims the company is aiming to sell units for around US$10,000.

Bloom is backed by a number of high profile investors, including the omnipresent Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, and has raised US$100 million in funding. According to Vinod Khosla, the company is currently building a "massive" facility in Mumbai, India.



One possible application for Bloom's fuel cells is in data centres, with the cells used to eliminate the need for uninterruptible power supplies (UPS's) and thus (in some cases) the need for additional disaster recovery (DR) facilities.

Japan

Japan has also seen trials of hydrogen fuel cells for CHP, with the hydrogen coming from reformed natural gas. The cells are leased for 1 million yen (US$9,500) for a 10-year period from Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Toyota, Honda and Toshiba are all also working on fuel cells, usually as part of efforts to develop fuel cell vehicles.

The Japanese Government is spending 2.4 billion yen (US$310 million) per year on fuel cell development and plans for 10 million homes (25% of Japanese households) to be powered by fuel cells by 2020.



The Air Car

One last note - a commenter on the "Air Car" articles noted that MDI's main business seems to be a variable-fuel stationary power supply, so presumably they could be a vendor in this market at some point as well.

Business 2.0 has a look at "the next disruptors" which includes a company called Bloom Energy working in the distributed energy / cogeneration / fuel cell area. These are a little like the building oriented energy storage devices that Richard Smalley's original smart grid vision called for - unfortunately, they require hydrocarbon fuels, so while they are a good step forward, they don't take us as far as we need to go (even a solar/wind powered hydrogen generator / fuel cell combination would be slightly better than this).

[Update: More here - COgeneration at Home: Ceramic Fuel Cells and Bloom Energy]

Their "bonus round" of innovative companies is more interesting than most of their main selection from an energy point of view, though soy bean based biodiesel would be best kept to fairly small scale production).

THE DISRUPTOR: Bloom Energy

THE DISRUPTION: Energy generators in homes and businesses

THE DISRUPTED: Electric utilities

Making electricity in central power plants is so 20th century. K.R. Sridhar has a better idea: Create energy on the spot, right where it's consumed. His startup, Bloom Energy (formerly known as Ion America), is developing a fuel cell that could kick-start the distributed-energy industry.

The problem with today's centralized approach is its vast inefficiency. In coal-and gas-fired power plants, almost two-thirds of the energy produced by converting fuel into kilowatts escapes as heat. Another 8 percent, on average, dissipates as the electricity travels over transmission lines to get to your home.

Sridhar, a former aerospace engineering professor who developed a device for NASA to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen on Mars, is undaunted by big challenges. His plan for generating energy locally is to use solid-oxide fuel cells - a concept that has been kicking around since the 19th century but is now becoming practical with advances in the ceramics needed to build the things.

Bloom's cells, still in development, are constructed around a ceramic core that acts as an electrode. At high temperatures, fuel on one side attracts oxygen ions on the other. As these ions are pulled through the solid core, the resulting electrochemical reaction creates electricity.

Such a fuel cell can run happily on almost any hydrocarbon fuel - ethanol, biodiesel, methane, natural gas. Though it consumes hydrocarbons, Bloom Energy's fuel cell does not require combustion and therefore produces half the greenhouse gas emissions of more conventional energy sources. One of its by-products, in fact, is hydrogen that could be used in a different type of fuel cell, the hydrogen-powered version imagined for propelling cars.

Bloom Energy's biggest hurdle is cost. The company needs to get the price of the machines below $10,000 apiece. At that level, they could pay for themselves in five years. (Solar panels take twice as long to recoup their capital expense.) "For it to reach mass-scale adoption, that has to be the goal," Sridhar says. "Otherwise, you are playing in a niche market."

Ultimately, Sridhar sees his fuel cells as a leapfrog technology that could find a market in developing countries that haven't yet built an electrical grid. He imagines local entrepreneurs, armed with one or two of his machines, renting out electricity to a whole village. Lighting up the world one village at a time - there's nothing niche about that ambition. ...

The next disruptors: Bonus round

Want more? We've discovered that there's no shortage of startups out there with industry-shaking potential. Here are five more ventures that could prove just as disruptive.

DISRUPTOR: A123 Systems

The leading battery technology - lithium-ion - has not changed in a decade. A123 holds patents for smaller, lighter lithium-ions with significantly longer lives. A123 batteries are installed in hybrid buses worldwide and will enter consumer hybrids in 2010.

DISRUPTOR: Renewable Energy Group

Biodiesel delivers around 50 percent more miles per gallon than ethanol. REG, an offshoot of an Iowa farm co-op, makes biodiesel from soybeans. It has 40 percent of the market and a distribution deal with Safeway.

DISRUPTOR: Desktop Factory

The cost of rapid prototyping machines is already plummeting. (See "3-D Printing for the Rest of Us," page 46.) Now San Francisco startup Desktop Factory is set to bring out a $5,000 3-D printer, undercutting competitors by 75 percent.

DISRUPTOR: Cree

Sure, compact fluorescent lightbulbs are energy savers, but they also contain mercury. Cree is the leading maker of light-emitting diodes, which are less hazardous and even more energy-efficient. Toronto and Raleigh, N.C., are already installing Cree LEDs in streetlamps and parking garages.

DISRUPTOR: One laptop per child

It isn't just Third World kids who will benefit now that Nicholas Negroponte's venture is producing its $176 laptops. The machine's innovations, such as Wi-Fi mesh networks and a power system that consumes 90 percent less electricity than standard laptops, could affect the rest of the industry.

The Green Wombat at Business 2.0 also has an interesting column, this one on Sun Greening the Data Dentre

Two weeks after the U.S Environmental Protection Agency warned that server farms could double their energy consumption over the next five years, Sun Microsystems today unveils a green data center that has resulted in a dramatic decline in electricity use. Deploying new server technology and state-of-the-art cooling systems, Sun (SUNW) consolidated its Silicon Valley data centers, halving the square footage while cutting power consumption nearly 80 percent. Although Sun reduced the number of servers from 2,177 to 1,240, computing power increased 456 percent, according to the company.

Last week Sun gave Green Wombat a sneak peak at its Santa Clara campus's next-generation data center. Through virtualization - enabling one server to do the work of multiple machines - Sun slashed the number of computers in the data center and the heat they generate. Sun has invested in smart cooling technology to reduce the considerable energy the typically goes to cool hot-running servers. For instance, in one data center room on the Santa Clara campus, servers are arrayed in long black pods called hot aisles. Hot air from the machines blows into the interior of the closed pod where it is captured by heat exchangers. (The visual effect of the stark white room and rows of black server pods is something of a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Borg.) In a traditional data center, each server rack might consume much as 2,000 watts and produce a lot of heat, says Dean Nelson, Sun's director of global lab and data center design services. The hot aisle server racks in contrast need just a fraction of that power. He points to displays in each rack that monitor the temperature of individual servers, allowing the network to distribute cooling where it's needed. As we head toward the exit, the noise level drops as the cooling system has been automatically turned off in those pods where servers aren't operating. "In a traditional data center the air conditioning would be blasting the entire center all day long," says Nelson.

If all this is good for the environment and contributes to the fight against global warming - the consolidation will eliminate 4,100 tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the company - it's even better for Sun's bottom line. By shrinking the square footage needed to house its servers, Sun avoided spending $9.3 million on new construction. Company executives say the investment in the new data center will pay for itself within three years. And by taking a load off the electricity grid, Sun earned a $1 million incentive payment from local utility Silicon Valley Power. Sun has also opened green data centers in India and the U.K.

Of course, the server and software company also hopes to sell its eco-data center solution and is launching "Eco Ready" services to assess and improve a data center's energy efficiency. "We're dealing with a lot of the same things as our customers," says David Douglas, Sun's vice president for eco responsibility. The company faces competition from IBM (IBM), Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), all of which are increasingly marketing the energy-efficiency of their servers. ...

GreenSource magazine has an interview with Bruce Sterling about his book "Shaping Things" - "Betting On The Future".

GreenSource: In Shaping Things you offer a provocative vision of the evolving relationship between people and objects and the role designers can play in promoting a more sustainable future. How does this vision apply to buildings and the built environment?

Bruce Sterling: My book is a speculation about “ubiquitous computing in the service of sustainability,” the central notion being that an ‘Internet of Things’ might make the flow of resources greener.
The one thing that unites modern building designers is that they’ve all got computers, and they’re all on the Net. They all share a certain platform now: that’s a tremendous change, it’s a revolution. It seems plausible that the digital network will move out of virtuality and into physicality: ambient computing, the 3D Web, physical computing—the idea is so obvious that it’s been reinvented and renamed many times.

Still, nobody knows how today’s professions would go about dividing up that frontier and developing it or what would be left of today’s professions if they succeeded at such a thing. Basically, it’s a question of who’s-more-advanced-than-thou. Some professions were faster at finding and leveraging the early Web than others, but the race is by no means always to the swift.

GS: Shaping Things describes scenarios in which a virtual representation of an object is more useful than the thing itself. In architecture, a trend toward building information modeling (BIM) design tools promises that someday designers will get instant feedback on the energy loads and other performance parameters of their buildings while they are still virtual models. How might this trend change the design and performance of buildings?

BS: That trend is about metrics. It’s very hard to improve what you can’t measure. If you do have metrics, you can tweak them and watch the results. You can do rapid prototyping of virtual buildings. You can generate thousands of virtual models and search them for top performance. When it comes to the management of the built environment, by using metrics you can see if there are sweet spots in the system. Are people on the top floors too hot, throwing open windows, sucking cold air in the ground floor and causing the people below them to turn up the heaters even higher? If you have instant feedback on energy loads you can see things like the “chimney effect.” You can design and construct and sell buildings that give their inhabitants a higher quality of life. Not just cheaper or greener or safer but higher. The point isn’t to make them more like a Windows operating system; the point is to make them more like buildings.

GS: In comparing building materials, designers would like to be able to rely on the field of environmental life-cycle assessment (LCA), in which environmental inputs and burdens associated with a product are quantified. But LCA is currently hampered by concerns about inadequate data and unreliable (biased) data sources. Will LCA data become ubiquitous and reliable?

BS: A life-cycle assessment system has to be a work in progress. It has to be a live thing, like Wikipedia. It’ll never be a Chinese-menu check-out system where the choices are cut and dried. Asbestos used to be considered a major health benefit: asbestos stopped people from catching on fire. You look at asbestos a little longer, you figure out, hey, it’s not a great idea breathing that stuff. If your LCA system is cast from solid litigation-proof pig iron, you will never be able to advance your profession. You’ll be forever stuck with yesterday’s limited answers. What we need is not a final textbook answer on what’s safe and allowed, but a better general interface for advancing tech development.

GS: In green buildings, there exists a tension between those who advocate low-tech, natural, or indigenous materials and those who believe in high-tech solutions for low-impact buildings. Is one approach better for the future?

BS: Knowing more is always better. Deliberate primitivism wastes time and has never succeeded. I have no problem with high-tech strawbale and adobe. Straw is a tremendous industrial material. Cellulose is a biomaterial that’s full of promise. Just because we’ve used straw for 10,000 years doesn’t mean we understand it yet. Adobe’s mud, which we don’t understand either, though it’s plentiful and plentiful is good. ...

Time has an article on flying and global warming.

Given the rage that air travel can provoke in even the most tranquil among us these days, it may be surprising that riot police aren't a more regular feature at airports. But Sunday's pitched battle between roughly 500 environmental activists and a phalanx of baton-wielding police at London's Heathrow airport wasn't about long lines, delays, lost luggage or missed connections. Instead, the protesters — who had demonstrated outside Heathrow all of last week — were trying to draw travelers' attention to the impact on climate change of the carbon gases emitted by the aircraft in which they fly. A placard from one activist at Heathrow expressed it thus: "You Fly, They Die."

Airplanes operate on petroleum fuel, which means they release large amounts of carbon dioxide when they fly. Commercial air travel is currently responsible for a relatively tiny part of the global carbon footprint — just 3.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the unique chemistry of high-altitude jet emissions may produce an additional warming effect, while the explosive growth in air travel makes it one of the fastest-growing sources of carbon gases in the atmosphere. And unlike energy or automobiles, where carbon-free or lower-carbon alternatives already exist, even if they have yet to be widely adopted, there is no low-carbon way to fly, and there likely won't be for decades.

"It's not so much where we are now, but where we'll be in 30 years' time," says Peter Lockley, head of policy development at the Aviation Environment Federation in London. "We need to bring global carbon emissions down rapidly, but this sector is just going to grow."

And grow. The Airports Council International estimates that the number of airline tickets sold per year will double to more than 9 billion by 2025. Much of the growth will come in rapidly developing Asia, where passenger numbers are increasing by 10% to 15% annually. The already badly overburdened Heathrow — the busiest airport in Europe — is pushing to open up a third runway by 2020, a move that touched off last week's protests.

Airplane manufacturers and airlines are working on ways to cut carbon emissions by raising fuel efficiency — building lighter and more aerodynamic planes, towing jets on the ground, and improving engine capacity. Designers are looking at running planes on biofuel, and Virgin Atlantic head Richard Branson has promised to build a biofueled jet by next year. But industry experts believe such incremental changes could improve efficiency by 1% or 2% a year at most, while passenger miles are set to grow at 5% to 6% annually. "We're left with a sustainability gap," says Roger Gardner, chief executive of OMEGA, a British study group looking at aviation and the environment. ...

Swissinfo notes that "Peak oil is becoming a burning issue" in Switzerland - the article features Daniele Ganser, who wrote the book on Operation Gladio - "NATO's Secret Army".

Swiss scientists say politicians and the public should have a greater awareness of "peak oil" – the moment when the world's maximum crude oil output is reached. Researchers at Basel University warn that although climate change is grabbing more headlines than the possible exhaustion of fossil fuels, a conflict is brewing over crude oil.

"The question is not for how long we will have crude oil reserves, but for how long output can grow," warned Daniele Ganser, a historian and peace researcher at Basel University, who says the significance and explosive nature of the issue is underestimated by politicians and the public.

No one can agree on when exactly the moment of "peak oil" will be – some experts say 2010, others say 2020 or 2030 – but it is a serious problem as crude oil output has grown for decades and positively boomed with the industrialisation of the emerging nations. An end to the spiral is not in sight and once the global peak is reached, a further increase is simply not possible.

"Conflict over crude oil will increase in proportion with its scarcity – the global economy is facing a recession," said Ganser. "We are running to the oil limit without thinking. It's as if we planned to climb the Matterhorn to get to the summit at midnight, leaving it much too late to descend."

Ganser says the issue of peak oil is barely a topic in public debate because it is not immediately visible. "If oil supplies run low, they are imported," he said. "That also goes for the oil-producing countries that have already reached the peak." A switch to gas or coal is not a solution, according to Ganser. "These energy sources are also finite and will one day reach their maximum output. It would therefore be wrong for Switzerland to turn to gas power plants."

Ganser points out that as early as 1978 Switzerland had defined the containment of crude oil dependency and the promotion of renewable energy types and efficiency as goals in its energy concept.

McClatchy Newspapers reports that Prices for Key Foods are Rising Sharply.

The Labor Department's most recent inflation data showed that U.S. food prices rose by 4.2 percent for the 12 months ending in July, but a deeper look at the numbers reveals that the price of milk, eggs and other essentials in the American diet are actually rising by double digits. Already stung by a two-year rise in gasoline prices, American consumers now face sharply higher prices for foods they can't do without. This little-known fact may go a long way to explaining why, despite healthy job statistics, Americans remain glum about the economy.

Meeting with economic writers last week, President Bush dismissed several polls that show Americans are down on the economy. He expressed surprise that inflation is one of the stated concerns. "They cite inflation?" Bush asked, adding that, "I happen to believe the war has clouded a lot of people's sense of optimism."

But the inflation numbers reveal the extent to which lower- and middle-income Americans are being pinched.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its July inflation report that egg prices are 33.7 percent higher than they were in July 2006. Over the same period, according to the department's consumer price index, whole milk was up 21.1 percent; fresh chicken 8.4 percent; navel oranges 13.6 percent; apples 8.7 percent. Dried beans were up 11.5 percent, and white bread just missed double-digit growth, rising by 8.8 percent.

John Howard's 1950's energy policy of supporting coal mines over clean technology industries has had another casualty, with Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas closing their last Australian plant. One day in the not too distant future the rest of the world will introduce carbon taxes and Australia will be a legacy economy thanks to our backward looking leadership.

A major world supplier of wind farm technology has been forced to turn its back on Australia because, it says, the green energy market is unviable. Vestas Australia Wind Technology will close its Portland turbine blade factory at the end of the year because it is not profitable. One hundred and thirty jobs will be lost, with the closure casting major doubt over the viability of Australia's renewable energy industry.

Vestas says it could no longer justify keeping the plant open because the investment was not worthwhile in the Australian market. "It's definitely a fact that the current environment for the wind industry is not big enough to encourage these kinds of investments," Vestas Asia-Pacific senior vice-president Jorn Hammer told AAP. "We have the view that if the government steps up to the plate and puts the necessary security for a long-term market in place we'll have another look at the market, but I guess we'll be a little more careful next time. "(Not) just believing in what they've been telling us, we need to see some hard evidence to justify investment."

The federal government has set a two per cent renewable energy target, labelled "pathetic" by Greenpeace which says it is not enough to encourage a green power industry. Labor and the Australian Workers' Union (AWU) have also blamed the government for the Vestas closure, accusing Canberra of stifling the industry.

The Danish-based company last year closed a similar $15 million factory in Tasmania, laying off 65 staff. The Wynyard plant, near Burnie, 345km north-west of Hobart, operated for three years, manufacturing blade hubs and nacelle components for its wind turbines. Mr Hammer said the plant closed for the same reason the Portland factory was shutting down.

The Portland operation opened two years ago and produces export turbine blades. Vestas had hoped to invest in new technology to develop blades for the Australian market but could not justify the outlay, Mr Hammer said.

After Gutenberg has a post on the "Green Cowboy" and his efforts to educate people about the "three poisons".

“The current energy industry has quite masterfully succeeded in lulling many Americans to sleep on the dangers of the poisons they sell, while portraying renewables as a distant dream.” S. David Freeman

Cal Cars Nooz has an announcment of a new book by S. David Freeman on winning our energy independence by using renewable resources. Freeman is an energy insider and guru, known as the “Green Cowboy”. He wants the American people to know the truth about our dependence on foreign oil, dirty coal and dangerous nuclear power — what he calls the “Three Poisons.”

We need to wean ourselves from oil, coal and nuclear to have a future. Freeman says that with existing technologies we can meet the nation’s electrical needs. Renewable energy resources, i.e., solar, wind and biomass energy, harnessed on a mass scale, can heat and cool our homes, run our cars, power our factories, and do all the things that our civilization requires. He calls for a concerted 30-year effort to close aging coal-fired and nuclear power plants.

We make use of renewable energy sources as little as we do, in part, because of a slick campaign waged by oil companies and electrical utilities to deceive Americans:

“The folks who sell oil, coal, and nuclear reactors spend tremendous amounts of money convincing the American people that what they sell is economical, safe, and clean. They contribute huge sums of money to the politicians who repeat their propaganda. How often have you heard phrases such as ‘clean coal,’ ’safe nuclear power,’ ‘clean diesel,’ or ‘low-level radioactive waste’?

“These phrases are images invented by highly paid, highly skilled advertising firms. But, these claims are lies.

Chris Mooney has a post on Hurricane Dean and global warming.

Now we see why the ancient Mayans built their cities inland from the coasts.

Early this morning, Hurricane Dean slammed the Yucatan as a still-intensifying Category 5 storm with sustained winds upwards of 165 miles per hour. Dean required some troubling readjustments of our hurricane records, and as a result, we may hear some serious chatter today about the relationship between these intense storms and global warming.

For that reason, the purpose of this post is to lay out what we can and can't reliably say about Hurricane Dean. The upshot is this: We have to be careful what we claim and how we claim it, but even so, Dean fits into a worrisome pattern.

Here are the key records that Dean either broke or otherwise affects:

1. With a minimum central pressure of 906 millibars, Dean was the ninth most intense hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic basin (for comparison Hurricane Katrina's minimum pressure was 902 millibars).

2. That 906 millibar pressure reading was at landfall, making Dean the third most intense landfalling hurricane known in the Atlantic region and the first Category 5 storm at landfall since 1992's Hurricane Andrew.

3. When measured by minimum pressure, six of the ten most intense Atlantic hurricanes--Wilma, Rita, Katrina, Mitch, Dean, and Ivan--have occurred in the past ten years.

We can't blame any one hurricane event on global warming directly. Nevertheless, the information above is certainly consistent with the idea advanced by some scientists that global warming is causing an intensification of the average hurricane. We're apparently seeing the strongest hurricanes recur in the Atlantic with a higher frequency than before -- or at least, than we've ever been able to measure before.

Measuring systems weren't as good in earlier eras, you see -- a fact that makes our records somewhat impeachable. A "record" is only what's recorded, after all. And so skeptics will inevitably quibble with our imperfect data and challenge it. There might well have been a storm much stronger than Dean 200 years ago -- we just don't know.

Nevertheless, if you look at the data we have, Dean fits into a very troubling pattern and context. Moreover, the present data, with all their admitted imperfections, aren't all we have to go on. There's also the theoretical expectation that hurricanes ought to intensify, for basic thermodynamic reasons, as global warming adds more heat to the oceans. Add together this theoretical expectation with the new records today and, well, anyone would be justified in feeling pretty worried by Hurricane Dean.

Dean was also the strongest hurricane anywhere in the world so far this year -- and by far the strongest at landfall. We can only hope that somehow, the damage is lighter than expected as the storm tears across the Yucatan today and then prepares to cross the Bay of Campeche and make a second expected landfall in mainland Mexico.

All American Patriots reports that Dennis Kucinich has Blasted The Bush Administration For ‘Setting The Stage’ For War With Iran.

Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich delivered a blistering attack on the Bush Administration today, charging that the White House is setting the stage for a war in Iran and, at the same time, using the “same mantra of terrorism to justify using military spy satellites and other high-tech military assets to put every citizen in our country under surveillance.”

“Not only are they ramping up their attempts to lie and deceive this nation into another war, they are also using those lies and deceptions to justify creating a police state right here where everyone is under suspicion and everyone is secretly under surveillance from Big Brother in the sky,” Kucinich charged.

Kucinich was responding to two separate reports since yesterday: one that the Bush Administration is planning to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, and the other that The Bush administration has approved a plan to expand domestic surveillance using spy satellites and aircraft sensors that can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings and underground bunkers. This kind of technology has been largely restricted to foreign surveillance.

By labeling the Revolutionary Guard – Iran’s military – as a terrorist organization, the Administration “is trying to deceive the American public into believing that it is in our national interest to prepare for war with Iran,” Kucinich said. “At the same time, they are, in effect, repealing the Constitution of the United States of America by turning military and foreign intelligence assets against our own citizens.”

“These are people,” Kucinich said, “who don’t understand what civil liberties are, what the Constitution represents, or what democracy is all about. What they are doing is despicably un-American and a violation of their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. Turning our own military assets against our own people is a flagrant violation of everything this nation stands for and a crime against our citizens.” Kucinich said.

Links:

* Mobjectivist - the inevitable world-wide energy transition
* IHT - Alarm over Indian Glacier's Hasty Retreat
* The Oil Drum - Saving 20 million barrels a day. The 100mpg hybrid car should be here, now!
* Inside Greentech - Garbage in, clean energy out
* Clean Break - Cleantech Network acquires Inside Greentech
* After Gutenberg - Farmers, Gitmo Guano Oil
* TreeHugger - Surfs Up, Green Dudes!
* SpaceRef.com - Scientists Discover Methane Ice Worms On Gulf Of Mexico Sea Floor
* BBC - China hails car trial a 'success'
* Reuters - Africa wages war on scourge of plastic bags
* The Guardian - Tenn. Nuclear Fuel Problems Kept Secret
* Public Opinion - Political Blogging
* Bruce Schneier - U.S. Government Threatens Retaliation Against States who Reject REAL ID
* Crooked Timber - A Perpetual Declaration Of War. "Tthe United States and the world would be better off without the US Foreign Policy Community".
* Beyond The beyond - America: Neck-Deep in Netwar, And Losing. "(((Heard a good American story lately? Me neither.)))".
* Beyond The Beyond - Neck-Deep in Netwar II: The Coming Urban Terror by John Robb, City Journal Summer 2007. I always think of Bill Joy when I read these type of posts.
* Beyond The Beyond - A Soviet Poster A Day. "(((With the passage of time they look less "Communist" and more simply "twentieth-century"... charming, historical "atompunk" details like electrification, smokestacks, railroads, cigarettes, manned space flight....)))"
* The New Yorker - Phillip K Dick - Blows Against The Empire
* Boing Boing - BoingBoingBoing #15: William Gibson
* Toronto Star - Police accused of using provocateurs at summit.
* Daily Telegraph - Fears over APEC chaos plan. Large anarchy symbol on the front page of the Daily Terror today. I guess Osama is out of fashion these days - these days the phantom menace is schoolkids and Critical Mass bike riders. Be afraid ! I can see why it is important to demonise any protesters that show up in advance, poor besieged Dubya might catch a glimpse of a few 14 years old complaining about the million dead Iraqis left in his wake from his hotel window.
* The Guardian - Guantánamo in Germany. If you're an academic studying these sorts of events, don't use the word "gentrification" in any write-ups that you produce, or you'll enter Franz Kafka's world...
* Alternet - Father of Mysteriously Murdered US Soldier in Iraq: "Why Cover Up A Crime Like This?"
* The Huffington Post - Hillary's War
* The Spin Factor - Ron Paul earns the world’s attention
* Atlantic Free Press - Dennis Kucinich: Desapparacido!
* Wikipedia - Karl Hess
* RI Humpty Dumpty