The Australian has a report on concerns that the Australian coal seam gas boom may not be as large as hoped due to China finding alternate gas sources (both local unconventional gas and gas piped in from Russia. Local natural gas projects seem to be on firmer ground (even if they are offshore) - Credit ratings agency Fitch casts doubt on some LNG projects .

Following recent reports from Macquarie and Deutsche warning of lower than expected Chinese demand, Fitch, an international ratings agency, today said the significant competition between projects would see some deferred or cancelled.

Along with the massive Gorgon and Pluto LNG projects under construction in Western Australia, a swag of majors including Santos, BG Group, Shell and Origin Energy have massive multi billion dollar projects planned, leading to increased market talk consolidation is needed.

While Fitch said there would be strong growth in demand for Australian LNG exports in the medium-term, upward cost pressures for materials, equipment and skilled labour would see some projects fall over.

"Fitch does not believe that buyers' appetites will be deep enough to commit to contracts to underpin all of the proposed projects," said Sajal Kishore, a director in Fitch's energy & utilities team.

"Long-term sales contracts are key to funding and first-mover projects are far more likely to proceed in a timely fashion."

Santos last month became the latest to secure such a deal, selling a 15 per cent stake in its Gladstone LNG project to French major Total, which also agreed to buy 1.5 million tonnes of LNG a year for 20 years. ...

In an analysis last month, Macquarie suggested energy majors are too optimistic about China's long-term LNG demand, predicting only one-sixth of the 140 million tonnes a year of yet-to-be-approved LNG capacity planned in Australia to come on line in the next decade.

Key is an expected increase in Chinese domestic coal-seam and shale-gas production, combined with a proposed pipeline from Russia.

Deutsche released a similar report with regards to Chinese production, which is expected to hit Queensland's burgeoning coal-seam gas export industry more than the conventional LNG projects planned off the nation's northwest.

Michael Bretherick and his family moved to Tara, about 400 kilometres west of Brisbane,four years ago for a tree change.

He said the mining company, BG Group – owners of QGC – moved into the area about 18 months ago and has been drilling night and day for coal-seam gas.

Coal-seam gas extraction requires the removal of large volumes of water from coal seams to release trapped gases.

He cited a litany of grievances against the company, including allegations of constant noise, adverse health impacts for humans and farm stock, potential damage and contamination of aquifers, polluted dams, and contaminated water in tanks.

“Our dreams have been turned into nightmares. I’m 64 and I came here to retire but because of the mining we want to leave but there’s no way anyone would want to buy here so we can’t sell,’’ he said.

Mr Bretherick said his youngest children, aged 7 and 9, had rashes and nosebleeds after playing near a dam. ‘‘A calf fell into the dam and only lived a couple of minutes; its skin peeled off,’’ he said.

Once the mining started, neighbour was pitted against neighbour, marriages have split, businesses have closed and many locals are suffering health problems including depression, he said.

TONY Burke is considering a report that warns the coal-seam gas industry could deplete groundwater in the Great Artesian Basin.

The federal Environment Minister is preparing to rule on several multi-billion-dollar projects and remains committed to a deadline of October 22, when he is expected to advise international energy giants Santos and BG Group whether he will grant environmental approvals for their projects converting coal-seam gas to liquefied natural gas, worth an estimated $22bn to the Queensland economy.

While the projects have been supported by the Queensland government, farmers and green groups have formed an alliance to call for a moratorium on the projects.

Their main concern is a potential depletion of the groundwater, something acknowledged by CSG companies in specific areas. ...

Santos and BG Group have acknowledged their projects -- which will extract 270 megalitres a day from the coal seam at their peak in 2014 -- will have an impact on groundwater levels.

The Precipice Sandstone aquifer could drop as much as 15m, the Hutton Sandstone water table 3m and the Springbok Sands up to 5m, environmental impact statements acknowledge.

During the gas-extraction process, wells are drilled 300m to 600m below ground, pushing briny water and gas to the surface because of the pressure gradient.

The companies will offer "make-good measures" to farmers when the water table drops, including lowering water pumps, compensation and providing bulk water. But landholders have warned that Mr Burke faces a "permanent state of unrest in rural Queensland" if he approves the projects. "If this is approved, there is going to be civil disobedience and non-violent protest," said Michael Bretherick, spokesman for the Western Downs Alliance.

The New York Times reports that the oft-touted nuclear renaissance is manifesting itself in the real world - Sluggish Economy Curtails Prospects for Building Nuclear Reactors.

Just a few years ago, the economic prognosis for new nuclear reactors looked bright. The prospect of growing electricity demand, probable caps on carbon-dioxide emissions and government loan guarantees prompted companies to tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they wanted to build 28 new reactors.

The economic slump, which has driven down demand and the price of competing energy sources, and the failure of Congress to pass climate legislation has changed all that, at least for now.

Constellation Energy’s announcement on Saturday that it had reached an impasse with the federal government over the fee for a loan guarantee on a new reactor in Maryland is a sign of how much the landscape has been transformed.

Essentially, the Energy Department argued that Constellation’s project is so risky that the company must pay a high fee or provide other assurances of repayment if it wants the taxpayers to guarantee its construction loans. Constellation said the government’s demand was “unreasonably burdensome.”

The government is hardly the only one to question the economics of nuclear power right now. The would-be builders of seven reactors around the country have deferred their projects in the last few months.

One major factor driving the cautious stance of both the industry and the government is the fall in electricity demand, which peaked in 2007. In 2009, demand dropped by more than 4 percent from 2007. So far, it seems that demand in 2010 will be higher than last year, but not as high as 2007. These are big changes for an industry that is accustomed to growth on the order of 1 to 3 percent a year. With slack demand, there is less urgency to build new plants.

The plunge in the price of natural gas has also made nuclear power far less competitive. The year the recession began, 2008, the standard unit of natural gas, one million British thermal units, sold for an average of $7.96 at the well head. Last year the same amount of gas cost just $3.71, according to preliminary Energy Department figures, and for the first six months of this year, it cost $4.43.

A return to strong economic growth would push up the demand for electricity and for natural gas, but even then, natural gas prices may remain low because a technology called hydraulic fracturing has vastly increased the estimate of recoverable reserves.

Cleantech.com has an article on the benefits of microgrids - Why Microgrids Are Smart.

A few weeks ago, intelligence agencies and IT security consultants became intimately familiar with something called Stuxnet. Stuxnet is a computer virus that monitors and can reprogram industrial systems such as SCADA, a common system used to manage the electrical grid. Like most computer viruses, the origins and purpose are a bit unclear, though many have speculated that the virus targeted Iran and the country’s suspected nuclear program.

What does any of this have to do with cleantech? A lot, in fact. First, it illustrates the fears many have had about the susceptibility of our power grid to cyber attacks. The Department of Energy has been increasingly aware of these dangers, recently awarding $30M to improve cyber security.

Second, and less obviously, it is another selling point for microgrids. Microgrids are localized mini-grids that have their own generation sources (often solar), can be paired with storage, and are connected to the larger (or “macro”) grid. Picture, for example, a mall with rooftop solar panels providing power to the retail shops when it’s needed, selling excess power back onto the grid when it’s not needed, and buying power from the grid if necessary to supplement the mall’s energy usage.

While touting the advantages of the microgrid is worthy of a blog post unto itself, let me briefly point out a few benefits here. Microgrids can dramatically reduce operating costs by cutting energy purchases from the grid to negligible levels. And – if the microgrid is equipped with “smart” interconnection equipment like inverters that can sell energy onto the grid when the price is high and use batteries to store it when the price is low – it can even generate income. Of course, it requires up-front capital to finance purchases of solar panels and the like, but payback periods can be as short as one year.

Other benefits include a reduced carbon footprint (assuming the generation source is renewable), diversification of energy sources, and improved power quality. But, in light of a world vulnerable to cyber attacks that wreck havoc on the grid, perhaps the most important benefit is improved security and reliability that comes from a microgrid’s ability to operate autonomously from the larger “macro” grid. If the larger grid is shut down by a cyber attack, a microgrid can continue operating undisrupted. And a cyber-terrorist’s ability to paralyze an entire economy via an attack on the grid is at least slightly reduced when that attack fails to reach those operating on their own autonomous grids.

Indeed, prominent thinkers in other fields have emphasized the security benefits of moving away from a centralized distribution system to an increasingly de-centralized and autonomous one. One excellent example of this push is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s famous book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb believes that unforeseen and highly improbable events are more difficult to predict than we commonly believe. So instead of just trying to predict and prevent them, we need to consider how to minimize the negative impact of such events when they occur. One way to minimize their impact is to build redundancies into a system. A microgrid that can operate autonomously from the larger grid is one way of building a more redundant and robust system. This is why the United States Department of Defense is a major proponent of microgrids, developing microgrids for military bases and improving its security of energy supplies and sources.

The Guardian reports that architect Norman Foster has built a replica of Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion car - Norman Foster's back-to-front car.

Richard Buckminster Fuller had a lot of nerve. In the 1930s, the great US inventor secured the first $1,000 he needed to build a giant futuristic car, called the Dymaxion. The socialite who gave him the cash was told: "If I want to use it all to buy ice cream cones, that will be that – and there will be no questions asked."
The nearly completed Dymaxion No 1 outside the Bridgeport factory in July 1933 The nearly completed Dymaxion No 1 outside the Bridgeport factory in July 1933.

Fuller, born in 1895, is best known for his geodesic domes, but his ultimate hope was that the three-wheeled Dymaxion – which looked like a VW camper van crossed with a pinball flipper – would fly, allowing Americans to leave the highway vertically and touch down at lightweight aluminium homes, scattered wherever they fancied by a fleet of Zeppelins.

The Dymaxion was meant to be phase one of a social revolution, fuelled by the latest technology, but only three were ever built. No 1 caught fire and No 3 was turned into scrap; only No 2 survived. It now sits in the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada – or it did until 18 months ago, when the architect Norman Foster decided he wanted to fulfil a dream, and build Dymaxion No 4. So he borrowed No 2 for inspiration.

"The Dymaxion had the same engine and transmission as the Ford Sedan of the time," says Foster, who worked with Fuller, his design hero, from 1971 until his death 12 years later. "However, at three times the volume, with half the fuel consumption and a 50% increase in top speed, it not only did more with less, but anticipated the 'people mover' of several decades later."

UPI has an article on Iraq's oil reserves and their relevance in terms of peak oil - Iraq's new reserves buck 'peak oil' crisis.

Iraq's sharp upward revision of its oil reserves to 143.1 billion barrels, and the prospect that there's much more to come, has cemented the country's status as a long-term energy producer when researchers say global oil output is set to decline.

The Oil Ministry's announcement Monday raised Iraq's known oil reserves by 24 percent, eclipsing Iran's declared reserves of 137.6 billion barrels.

But, according to Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries data, Iraq trails Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in terms of known reserves of conventional crude.

The reliability of the reserves that oil producers, and oil companies, claim is usually greeted with considerable skepticism within the industry.

Indeed, there were suspicions Baghdad was hiking its figures to secure a larger OPEC quota than it would have been awarded for its previous reserves total of 115 billion barrels of oil, announced in 2001.

However, industry analysts have said for some time Iraq could have as much again in unexplored fields. That would make its reserves of conventional crude the largest in the world, surpassing even Saudi Arabia's 264.6 billion barrels.

There has been little exploration work over the last three decades. So whether that's true or not will emerge when the vast reservoirs of oil that haven't been tapped are fully explored.

This will most likely be work of the foreign oil giants Baghdad awarded 20-year production contracts last year to upgrade Iraq's oil industry.

They have already boosted output at several megafields and revised upward the estimated reserves for those fields through 3-D seismic surveys.

"The oil reserve is for 66 discovered oilfields in Iraq and there are many others that have not been discovered yet," Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani declared Monday.

"It is expected this figure will be increased when these oil fields are discovered."

The true significance of Iraq's increased oil reserves should be viewed through the prism of warnings by industry researchers of a "significant risk" global oil production could start slipping over the next decade.

A report by the UK Energy Research Council released Oct. 8, 2009, said worldwide production of conventionally extracted crude could "peak" and go into terminal decline before 2020 as known reserves are depleted.

New major reserves of oil have been discovered in recent years in Brazil, Uganda, West Africa's Gulf of Guinea and in the Gulf of Mexico but advocates of the so-called peak oil theory say these won't be enough to compensate for the rate of decline of the fields currently producing.

The New York Times report that the cause for bee colony collapse disorder may have been identified - Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery.

It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees?

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised. ...

Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.

“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”

The Business Spectator has a look at a new rare earth producer in Australia - Australia's rare earth potential.

About 97 per cent of the world’s rare earth capacity is in China, including the essential refineries which western countries have tended to shun because of environmental objections.

China’s internal usage of rare earths has been rising and it now uses about two thirds of its capacity internally and it plans to cut exports. This will lock in vast numbers of manufacturing industries to China.

When the Japanese arrested the Chinese fishing boat captain, the Chinese cut off exports of rare earths to Japan. The captain was quickly returned but there is still the issue of apology.

As things now stand, China controls the growth of its competitors in so many industries.

Presumably 'sustainable' means that China does not want to run down its reserves too fast and that the price will be increased to fulfil the predictions of Deng Xiaoping.

When someone uses the word 'sustainable' they are often making a political statement to suit their own ends. So in the rare earths context, if you want rare earths you must be nice to China. The Japanese fishing affair showed the power of this weapon.

Europe and the US are pressing China to revalue its currency and the US has some nasty measures before the House of Representatives. As I explained yesterday (China's currency powder-keg, October 7), revaluing the Chinese currency presents problems for China which at this stage it does not want to tackle. If the US wants to press the currency issue, they only have to see what China did to Japan to work out China’s reaction – there will be a declaration that exporting rare earths to the US is 'not sustainable'. It may bring the US to heel just as it did to Japan.

But dominance may not last forever. That’s where Australia comes in.

There are a number of major rare earth deposits outside China, including one in WA owned by Lynas. Stephen Bartholomeusz told the remarkable Lynas story (Lynas' Chinese gift, September 23). But for intervention by the Foreign Investment Review Board, Lynas would now be controlled by China.

Instead, the Lynas Mount Weld concentrate will be processed at Lynas’ facility in Malaysia, the first to be built outside China for decades. Australia will be a player in this market.

But that’s some years off. Meanwhile, the word 'sustainable' is not innocuous when it comes to rare earths.

TreeHugger has a post on a report by CNAS called Fueling the Future Force: Preparing the Department of Defense for a Post-Petroleum Era (pdf) on the long term need for the US military to eliminate its dependence on oil - US Military Needs to Get Off Oil by 2040: Report.

The United States military must entirely get off oil by 2040 if it wants to reduce operational vulnerabilities, reduce costs, stop new security risks caused by climate change and avoid the coming peak oil supply crunch. That's the word from the Center For a New American Security, whose Fueling the Future Force report details the hows and whys of the situation.

Petroleum is 77% of Military Energy Supply

Report authors Christine Parthemore and Dr. John Nagl say, "Reducing dependency on petroleum will help ensure the long-term ability of the military to carry out its assigned missions. Moving beyond petroleum will allow DoD to lead in the development of innovative technologies that can benefit the nation more broadly, while signaling to the world that the United States has an innovative and adaptable force."

How big is that dependency? Currently US forces rely on petroleum for 77.2% of all energy needs, with "other electric" sources coming in second at 11.4% and natural gas coming at 8.4%.

In Thirty Years Oil Will Be Hard to Come By

Why the 2040 timeframe? The report lays it out (emphasis is mine):

This 30-year timeframe reflects market indicators pointing towards both higher demand for petroleum and increasing international competition to acquire it. Moreover, the geology and economics of producing petroleum will ensure that the market grows tight long before petroleum reserves are depleted. Some estimates indicate that the current global reserve-to-production ratio--how fast the world will produce all currently known recoverable petroleum reserves at the current rate of production--is less than 50 years. Thus, given projected supply and demand, we cannot assume that oil will remain affordable or that supplies will be available to the United States reliably three decades hence. Ensuring that DOD can operation on non-petroleum fuels 30 years from today is a conservation hedge against prevailing economic, political and environmental trends, conditions and constraints.

In other words, 30 years from now there odds aren't good that there will be petroleum to fuel anything with much consistency or at minimum with any level of affordability. This echoes recently revealed reports that the German military is pretty freaked out about the prospect of peak oil as well.

Technology Review has a look at a technique for reducing sensor power consumption and extending their range - Sensors Use Building's Electrical Wiring as Antenna.

Wireless sensors scattered throughout a building can monitor everything from humidity and temperature to air quality and light levels. This seems like a good idea--until you consider the hassle and cost of replacing the sensors' batteries every couple of years. The problem is that most wireless sensors transmit data in a way that drains battery power.

Researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a way to reduce the amount of power a sensor uses to transmit data by leveraging the electrical wiring in a building's walls as an antenna that propagates the signal. The approach extends a wireless sensor's range, and it means that its battery can last up to five times longer than existing sensors, say the researchers.

The technology, called Sensor Nodes Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure (SNUPI), sends a small trickle of data wirelessly at a frequency that resonates with the copper wiring in a building's walls, says Shwetak Patel, professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Washington. The copper wiring, which can be up to 15 feet away from the sensors, picks up the signal and acts as a giant receiving antenna, transmitting the data at 27 megahertz to a base station plugged into an electrical outlet somewhere in the building.

Better Place has announced they will be participating in an electric vehicle trial in Victoria - Better Place helps Victoria harness its electric vehicle future.

Better Place, the leading electric vehicle (EV) services provider, today announced it will support the Victorian Government’s ‘Victorian Electric Vehicle Trial’.

Launched today, the trial is designed to establish Victoria as an EV friendly state ready for the mass adoption of electric vehicles.

As part of its involvement, Better Place will provide charging infrastructure to support extended range driving and the smart software and systems to intelligently manage EV charging through the electricity network.

Better Place will also provide in-car management software capable of providing real-time information on odometer readings, vehicle locations and battery state of charge to inform trial operations.

Better Place will bring invaluable experience to this trial learned through its electric vehicle deployments in Israel and Denmark.

Alan Finkel, Chief Technology Officer for Better Place in Australia said, “This is a very exciting moment for us and a real milestone in the evolution of EVs in this country.

Ian Dunlop has an article at the ABC looking at the influence of the fossil fuel industry on climate change policy in Australia - Absolute carbon corrupts absolutely.

The resource industries wield enormous power in Australia and their opposition to action on human-induced climate change is well documented.

At virtually every turn in the tortuous path of climate reform over the last two decades, resource interests have prevailed without regard to the increasing risk of catastrophic climate impacts. Gradually, as the evidence has mounted, outright denial has given way publicly to grudging lip service to the need for action, whilst privately delaying tactics continue.

The scientific consensus that, on the balance of probabilities, human activity is causing most of the warming occurring globally, is overwhelming. 

Prudent risk management suggests that an emergency response is now required.

To have a 50 per cent chance of not exceeding the “official” limit of 2 degrees Celsius global temperature increase relative to pre-industrial levels, Australia must stop emitting carbon completely in around eight years. This constraint only allows around 50 per cent of existing global fossil-fuel reserves to be consumed. So why continue expanding reserves of oil, gas and coal, with increasingly risky, and environmentally damaging, ventures such as deepwater oil exploration, tar sands, shale oil and underground coal gasification?

It begs the question whether the power of the resource industries is being used responsibly, or is this a case of “power tending to corrupt and absolute power corrupting absolutely”?

Buoyed by bullish demand forecasts, the resource sector is forging ahead with fossil fuel developments, doubling coal exports, expanding LNG exports, creating a coal seam gas industry - but with no proven means of sequestering the associated carbon emissions.

The supposed justification is that developing nations such as China and India, require our cheap resources to lift millions out of poverty, irrespective of their climate change impact. But fossil fuels are not cheap. Their real cost is only just becoming evident as the economic damage and human suffering caused by the upward trend of extreme weather events around the world demonstrates – for example in the USA, Russia, China, India and Pakistan this year alone.

The lack of accounting for these impacts represents “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen”; pricing carbon is not the imposition of a “great big new tax”, rather it is the removal of a “great big old subsidy”, a subsidy which is the major barrier to establishing low-carbon industries.

China and India are well down the track developing these industries, far more so than Australia. As the true cost of climate change hits home, their transformation away from fossil-fuels will accelerate, notwithstanding that they continue to make substantial fossil-fuel investments in the short term.

This should be cause for caution. Instead, the boosters are continually talking up the prospects of developing increasingly remote resources, and costly conversion technologies; fortunes are being made trading assets for inflated prices on which to build projects which will be largely uneconomic once the true price of carbon is incorporated.

But when national priorities, driven by escalating natural disasters, take precedence over short-term profit, authoritarian regimes such as China will change direction very fast. This is a world for which Australia is ill-prepared, as the hypocritical stance of our resource industries demonstrates.

Key industry players publicly proclaim that climate change is real and requires urgent action to reduce emissions. But the expansion of the coal industry is predicated on the success of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which we are asked to take on faith by allowing mines and power stations to be built before these technologies are proven at the enormous scale now required. Unfortunately there is virtually no chance CCS will provide the hoped-for panacea to cut emissions in the time frame needed.

At the same time, the industries fight tooth and nail to prevent the introduction of a realistic carbon price, the lack of which undermines the viability of CCS, whilst excessive compensation rung out of a weak government dampens low-carbon technology innovation. The net effect is continuing rapid growth in carbon emissions, completely at odds with industry rhetoric.

The major investment required to transform Australia into a low-carbon economy should come in part from the super profits generated from the use of our non-renewable resources. However the rabid reaction against the proposed resource tax, suggests an industry hell-bent on preserving the status quo, rather than promoting the sustainable pathways which feature so prominently in company reporting. A sensible resource tax makes good sense for both industry and the community, and “sensible” means far more than the royalty replacement kite recently flown by Clive Palmer!

This is the context in which the recent comments by BHP Billiton CEO Marius Kloppers should be judged. Finally, a CEO of a major resource company has had the courage to publicly state what has been obvious for some time – human-induced climate change is a serious problem and we need a price on carbon to have any chance of addressing it. All credit to him for taking this long-overdue leadership position. But publicly crossing that threshold carries with it fiduciary responsibilities which he did not acknowledge in his speech.

Inhabitat has a post on plans to increase use of geothermal energy in the Americas - Central America to Tap Volcanoes for Renewable Energy.

The troubled and impoverished region of Central America is rich in one thing: volcanoes. Spurred by increasing demand for electricity, several countries are moving to transform the thundering mountains’ energy into watts. Geothermal plants can use the water heated by the molten earth beneath volcanoes to drive turbines. The plants are expensive to build, but, once built, they are long-lasting, reliable, and do less environmental damage than hydroelectric dams or fossil fuel sources.

Guatemala, which already has two geothermal plants, is offering tax breaks on the equipment needed to build more in hopes of getting 60 percent of its power from a combination of geothermal and hydroelectric sources by 2022. Costa Rica already operates four plants and will bring a fifth online early next year; it’s considering an additional two. El Salvador and Nicaragua are also expanding geothermal power from volcanoes.

Reuters reports that Norway is concerned about a shortfall of hydro power and unreliable nuclear power from Sweden - Norway concerned by power supply ahead of winter.

Norway's oil and energy minister said he was concerned about electricity supply this winter due to lingering troubles at Swedish nuclear reactors and low reservoir levels at hydro power plants.

Last year spot power prices reached all-time highs in the Nordic countries due to lower-than-usual temperatures and unexpected outages at some of Sweden's nuclear reactors.

Terje Riis-Johansen acknowledged that it was a concern that some outages at Swedish reactors occurred unexpectedly or were longer than anticipated. ...

"The Swedish authorities are impatient on the situation around Swedish power stations," he said. "There is a lot of activity at a political level in Sweden about this, so that things happen as quickly as possible."

He added, "It is a real challenge with the coming winter; it is a situation that should be different than it is."

Yale Environment 360 has a report on the unconventional oil and gas boom in North America - A High-Risk Energy Boom Sweeps Across North America.

The most direct path to America’s newest big oil and gas fields is U.S. Highway 12, two lanes of blacktop that unfold from Grays Harbor in Washington State and head east across the top of the country to Detroit.

The 2,500-mile route has quickly become an essential supply line for the energy industry. With astonishing speed, U.S. oil companies, Canadian pipeline builders, and investors from all over the globe are spending huge sums in an economically promising and ecologically risky race to open the next era of hydrocarbon development. As domestic U.S. pools of conventional oil and gas dwindle, energy companies are increasingly turning to “unconventional” fossil fuel reserves contained in the carbon rich-sands and deep shales of Canada, the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountain West.

Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming hold oil shale reserves estimated to contain 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, half of which the department says is recoverable. Eastern Utah alone holds tar sands oil reserves estimated at 12 billion to 19 billion barrels. The tar sands region of northern Alberta, Canada contains recoverable oil reserves conservatively estimated at 175 billion barrels, and with new technology could reach 400 billion barrels. Deep gas-bearing shales of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain West, Great Lakes, Northeast, and Gulf Coast contain countless trillions of feet of natural gas. If current projections turn out to be accurate, there would be enough oil and gas to power the United States for at least another century.

But even as one of the largest energy booms in history has erupted along a great arc of the continent, the consequences are prompting civic discontent, lawsuits, and political battles in state capitals. The boom is producing fresh scars on the land and new threats to scarce water supplies. Government studies show that exploiting unconventional fossil-fuel reserves generates more C02 emissions than drilling for conventional oil and gas and uses three to five times more water. “It’s a pact with the devil,” says Randy Udall, a consulting energy analyst from Colorado. “The tar sands and shale oil and shale gas require a lot of water. It sets up a collision course for the West.”

In communities from Wyoming to Texas, thousands of trucks now rumble down rural roads, carrying the huge amounts of water — 2 million to 4 million gallons per well — needed to free oil and natural gas from shales by blasting them with high-pressure fluids. In places such as North Dakota, which receives modest amounts of rainfall, local residents and conservationists worry that the energy boom will deplete aquifers.

And the explosion in development of these unconventional fossil fuels raises a troubling question at the national level: At a time when the country should be embracing a renewable energy revolution, it is hurtling in the opposite direction, developing on a massive scale sources of energy that cause considerably more environmental harm than conventional oil and gas drilling.

The Climate Spectator has a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance on Indian solar power projects - India's solar advantage.

The first set of projects under India's ambitious National Solar Mission went under the hammer last week. Initial trends show that the capacity bid is at least three times more than the 620MW that is to be awarded, though the final numbers could show a much higher multiple.

There are, however, no alarm bells going off in the Indian finance ministry. The government has what can be referred to as a late-mover advantage, which has allowed it to avoid the excesses seen in some European countries.

There are a few things which stand out in the auction of India's first batch of solar projects, to be set up by 2013, and involving an investment of over $US2 billion.

For starters, the auction is primarily about large solar thermal. Bids for 470MW of capacity have been invited. This is higher than the total commissioned capacity of 437MW of solar thermal in Spain, the world leader, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance data.

On the PV side, there are just 150MW of capacity on offer in India's first round through 30 projects of 5MW each to be set up by 2013. That is a small blip in the capacity being added globally. Bloomberg New Energy Finance has projected a PV capacity addition of 14GW-to-19GW in 2010. Up to 1.2GW of new installations are expected in the Czech Republic alone this year. Germany has installed over 3GW of PV in the first half of 2010.

Secondly, there is an element of market price discovery built into the process. The attractive feed-in tariffs will now cease to matter since the 400-odd applicants will have to offer the largest discounts to get selected, a formula that India has emulated from other countries which have married feed-in tariffs with reverse bidding.

Thirdly, the government has limited its own, and the consumer's, bill for solar power by ensuring initial support for pre-defined solar capacity instead of the anyone-past-the-post kind of a scheme which has led to runaway growth of solar power in parts of Europe.

Fourthly, India has mandated the use of domestically made PV modules in this phase and domestically made cells and modules in the next phase. For solar thermal projects, the rules mandate a 30 per cent local content. Both moves reflect the worrying trend of increasing protectionism in the clean energy sector.

The Guardian has a report on Denmark's plan to free itself from fossil fuels - Wind will power fossil fuel-free Denmark in 2050, report predicts. Scotland is pursuing a similar goal - Wind will power fossil fuel-free Denmark in 2050, report predicts.

The falling cost of renewable energy and rising cost of oil and gas will allow Denmark to develop an energy network entirely free of fossil fuels by 2050, according to a report published by the government's climate commission.

The committee predicted that wind and biomass energy could meet the bulk of the country's energy requirements.

It also argued that switching to renewables would be cheaper than continuing to use fossil fuels, particularly if predictions of soaring oil and gas prices are borne out.

The report was welcomed by Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, which said the research could help further bolster the country's position as a leading generator of onshore wind energy.

"The report will also send a very clear and important signal to other countries that wind is a sustainable source of energy for future development," said Vestas chief executive Ditlev Engel. "This is a great opportunity to solidify Denmark's reputation as a laboratory for green, CO2-free power technology solutions that are globally required."

The report recommended that the government immediately start devoting 0.5 per cent of the country's annual GDP to renewable energy investment in order to help achieve the 2050 target, resulting in a total spend of 17bn kroner (£1.9bn) by 2050.

I tend to be dubious about stories of "peak coal" in the near term, but this report from South Africa is interesting - SA is nearing peak coal, say scientists.

Research by international and local scientists has shown that coal, like other resources, is finite and can be expected to comply with peak resources theory.

The theory shows that production in commodities such as oil grows until a peak is reached, whereafter production declines.

In the case of South African coal, the studies show production has already reached its peak, or soon will.

“It is commonly believed that South Africa has abundant coal reserves which will last 200 years or more,'' says Jeremy Wakeford, chair of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (Aspo) in South Africa, in the organisation's latest newsletter.

“But recent research [from] three scientific journals suggests that usable reserves are much smaller than previously thought, and that annual production could reach a peak and begin to decline within a decade -- or might even have peaked already.''

Wakeford says that “given the country's overwhelming dependence on coal, this issue has huge ramifications for our future development path''.

Coal provides 70% of the country's energy supply, supports 90% of electricity generation, is used to make a quarter of the country's liquid fuels using the Sasol process and is a big earner of foreign exchange through exports to foreign users.

Geologist Chris Hartnady, in a paper to be published in the SA Journal of Science, has forecast peak production in 2020 at about 285-million tonnes a year.

This compares with total production last year of 242-million tons. This was mostly used by Eskom (123-million tonnes), Sasol (40-million tonnes) and export (66-million tonnes).

Eskom's current expansion programme could use an additional 50-million tonnes, and if the Sasol Mafutha project goes ahead it will need another 20-million tonnes annually, says Wakeford.

David Rutledge, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, has meanwhile forecast South African production to peak in 2011 at about 253-million tonnes a year.

This is supported by research by two American professors, says Wakeford, Tadeusz Patzek and Gregory Croft, published this year in the journal Energy.

“They estimate that South Africa's coal production from existing coal fields, when measured in energy units, peaked in 2007.

“They further contend that future mines are unlikely to reverse the trend since the economics of mining dictates that most accessible reserves are mined earlier on, so that the net energy return from the coal mining declines while the production costs rise over time,'' says Wakeford.

Eskom chief executive Brian Dames bemoaned the poor quality of coal Eskom is receiving in a briefing to parliamentarians earlier this month. Dames said that Eskom was losing 1 000 megawatts of power each day because of the low quality of coal it was being supplied.

The Boston Globe has an article on the benefits of a "wetlab" for testing ocean energy - A ‘wetlab’ could put Mass. in the lead in ocean energy race.

If you want to build an iPhone app or develop a drug for Alzheimer’s disease, finding the place to do it isn’t a challenge. Massachusetts is dotted with incubators, accelerators, labs, and co-working spaces where you can rent a desk by the day. ...

But if you want to drop a tidal generator into the briny deep, or plunk a prototype wind turbine onto the continental shelf, you will inevitably face a few years of permit wrangling with a half-dozen federal and state agencies. Testing new renewable energy technologies isn’t cheap, fast, or easy.

John R. Miller would like to change that. As director of the Marine Renewable Energy Center at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, he’s campaigning for the creation of a vast saltwater incubator in the channel between Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, and the ocean waters south of the islands.

Technically, the project is being called the National Renewable Energy Innovation Zone. I prefer to think of the rectangular area as the Big Wetlab: a place where entrepreneurs and big energy companies can beta test the energy technologies of the future, sooner and with fewer hassles than they’d face anywhere else. (In the world of drug development, wetlabs are where all the important experiments are done.)

If Miller is successful — and the project recently landed $1.5 million in new federal grants — the Big Wetlab could be among the first test areas in the United States, positioning Massachusetts at the center of the emerging clean-tech economy.

“Having an area like that, which has been pre-approved for wave, tidal, and offshore wind testing, would be a huge thing that this country needs,’’ says Bill Staby, cofounder of Resolute Marine Energy Inc. “If Massachusetts can grab the ring, you’ll see a greater number of marine energy technology companies locate here, because companies want to be closer to their test sites.’’

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.

The Smirking Chimp reports that the South African government is giving up funding pebble bed reactor research - Another feeble-headed nuke drops dead.

As the "reactor renaissance" desperately demands new billions from a lame duck Congress, one of its shining stars has dropped dead. Other much-hyped "new generation" plans may soon die with it.

For years "expert" reactor backers have touted the "Pebble Bed" design as an "inherently safe" alternative to traditional domed light water models. Now its South African developers say they're done pouring money into it.

The Pebble Bed's big idea was to create a critical mass of uranium particles coated with silicon carbide and encased in graphite. These intensely radioactive "pebbles" would seethe in a passive container, cooled by helium. Without the need for a containment dome, the super-heated mass would produce both heat and electricity. Touted as needing no back-up emergency systems to prevent a major disaster, the plan was to mass-produce these "smaller, simpler" reactors for use throughout the industrial world.

Pebble Bed technology originated in Germany. But it was adopted and developed by the government of South Africa. For some it was a source of pride that a "developing" nation had become a significant player in the so-called nuclear renaissance.

But the South African government has now cut off funding for the project. Public Enterprises Minister Barbara Hogan has told the National Assembly that "sobering realities" included the lack of working demonstration model, the lack of customers, the lack of a major investment partner and the impending demand for $4.2 billion in new investment capital. As deadlines consistently slipped, Westinghouse withdrew from the project in May.

South African officials say the US and China are still working on the technology. But economic realities make any tangible future Pebble Bed as a major source of new energy largely imaginary. Critics also worry that without a containment dome, the pebble beds would be vulnerable to small groups of terrorists with simple shell-lobbing mortars. And that critical metal components would not perform as needed under the intense stresses of heat and radiation.

The death of the Pebble Bed has considerable significance. For nearly two decades reactor backers have counted it in the imaginary fleet of new generation reactors coming to save us. Its alleged bright future would make it just one of the many new nuclear technologies that would render solar and wind energy unnecessary.