I spent most of the day in Richmond yesterday attending the first Summit on Virginia's Energy Future. I'll write more about the main topic of the session next week, but a statistic from one of the panelists stuck in my mind for the entire drive home. In describing the risks that utilities take on when investing in new power plants, the President and Chief Nuclear Officer of Dominion Virginia Power, David Heacock, explained that over the sixty year life of such a facility, the cumulative difference between their high and low long-term natural gas price forecasts amounted to $7 billion, equivalent to the entire up-front cost of a nuclear power plant. He also suggested that the value of the difference between their high and low forecasts for the price likely to be imposed on CO2 emissions was in the same ballpark. Despite the recent financial crisis and accompanying loss of confidence in sophisticated risk-monetizing mechanisms that failed so spectacularly to account for low-probability events, some businesses have no choice but to assess risk in terms of its dollar impact. And as government fills in for a number of hopefully-temporary gaps in various markets, it must also grapple ... read more >>
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 This post was prompted by my reading Fred Turner's book " From Counterculture To Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism", which looks at the influence Bucky Fuller had on a range of people, in particular Stewart Brand, who helped create first the hippie counterculture and the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies, then later the cyberculture that grew up around the San Francisco bay area. I won't try to review the book myself as I wouldn't do it justice - but I highly recommend it if you have any interest in this particular piece of history.  Stewart Brand Turner has some great excerpts from his book at "EDGE" magazine - STEWART BRAND MEETS THE CYBERNETIC COUNTERCULTURE. As they came of age, Stewart Brand and others of his generation faced two questions: How could they keep the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons or by the large-scale, hierarchical governmental and industrial bureaucracies that had built and used them? And how could they assert and preserve their own holistic individuality in the face of such a world?
As he sought to answer those questions, Brand turned first to the study ... read more >>
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 High speed trains at St. Pancras Station in England (Photo: Jon Curnow via flickr) Government sees the future of transportation in high speed rail network As the United States is in the early stages of adding new high speed rail corridors to its one currently in operation, the British government yesterday uncovered its plan for a $45 billion high speed rail corridor that would connect the cities of London and Birmingham, ultimately linking to the northern cities of Manchester and Leeds. Project developers say the 250 mph could cut time to travel the distance between London and Birmingham from 84 minutes down to 49 minutes. “The time has come for Britain to plan seriously for high-speed rail between our major cities,” said Transportation Secretary Lord Adonis. “The high-speed line from London to the Channel tunnel has been a clear success, and many European and Asian countries now have extensive and successful high-speed networks. I believe high-speed rail has a big part to play in Britain’s future.” The first phase of the network buildout will cost up to $25 billion for 128 miles of track from London to the west Midlands, with the projected cost of the full 330-mile ... read more >>
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Siemens will build a new 60Hz gas turbine production plant at its existing facility in Charlotte, North Carolina. The initial investment will be approximately $135m. All Siemens gas turbines for 60Hz markets such as North and South America, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, the Philippines and Japan will be produced in Charlotte. With the start of production in Charlotte slated for the fall of 2011, gas turbine manufacturing, as well as service and other production-related activities, will be concentrated in one location in the US. Siemens said that it will create a global production hub for manufacturing, servicing and other support functions related to the supply of its gas and steam turbines and generators to 60Hz markets. Peter Loscher, president and CEO of Siemens, said: "This decision underscores our commitment to the US. Over the next five years, we expect employment at the Charlotte site to grow to nearly 1,800 people, with more than 1,000 of those positions new to Charlotte. “Furthermore, just in the past three years, Siemens has opened – and subsequently expanded – a wind turbine blade manufacturing plant in Fort Madison, Iowa, now with over 400 ... read more >>
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A new shade of green is gradually sweeping across China’s export manufacturing industry, one that took a while to take root. Companies are riding the environment-friendly wave.
Pressure from the national government and tightening regulations in overseas markets are compelling a growing number of suppliers to modify their business strategies and incorporate ecologically safe processes. The transition is neither extreme nor desperate, but the impact could be widespread as many midsize and small companies are also taking “green” initiatives. Due to the sheer number of these suppliers, they account for a large portion of the pollution and wasteful practices in the country. Irrespective of size, companies are introducing long-term strategies anchored on recycling, waste reduction and sustainable energy adoption. Recycling is the most common practice among factories, one that is carried out internally or through third parties. This, however, goes beyond reusing offcuts and scrap materials. Highly polluting industries such as leather tanning have always been required to invest in wastewater cleaning systems, but very few actually do. Now, many are investing large sums in ... read more >>
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Note by David Levy, Climate Inc. editor: I’m posting this introduction to a new book, Upsetting the Offset by my academic colleagues Steffen Böhm and Sidhartha Dabhi because it presents an important and well-argued series of critiques of the carbon markets. Many readers might find that they disagree with the analysis in the book, but it’s important to engage in these debates if we are to trust governance of the climate system to market mechanisms.
An introduction to the new book ‘Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets’, edited by Steffen Böhm and Sidhartha Dabhi (MayFlyBooks, December 2009), by the authors. The book can be ordered or downloaded free here. Dr. Steffen Böhm is Lecturer in Management and PhD Director at the University of Essex, UK. Siddhartha Dabhi is a researcher at Essex Business School, University of Essex, UK.  December 2009 saw world leaders come together in Copenhagen to try to agree on a post-Kyoto deal to save the planet from global warming. But the attempts to hammer out a new deal met with an apparent failure. But was it a failure? Many commentators would argue that the apparent failure can be seen as a welcome breathing space ... read more >>
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Over the coming months as the energy and climate discussion plays out in Congress there will doubtless be much discussion regarding the appropriate emission reduction target for the USA. Setting the scene for this, besides the bill itself, will be the US pledge under the Copenhagen Accord to reduce emissions by 17% from 2005 by 2020 – which in turn was the 2020 cap under Waxman-Markey. With this pledge as a basis for analysis, it is possible to do some simple “back of the envelope” calculations to gauge the scale of change that will be required over the coming ten years, assuming a rise in population to 340 million and that the USA does this on the basis of domestic action only. The land use / forestry emissions position (currently an annual drawdown) remains unchanged. The starting point is International Energy Agency (IEA) and US Energy Information Administration (EIA) data for the USA for 2007/2008. The US picture is shown below. 
In 2008 the USA GHG emissions (excluding land use) were 7.1 Gt, down from 7.2 Gt in 2005. That means a reduction to 6.0 Gt by 2020, or 15.5% from 2008 levels. Total primary energy use was 97 EJ. To achieve a reduction in ... read more >>
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The partisan divide on climate science has been growing for a while, as I discussed in a 2008 review of the Gallup polling. No surprise, really, since the anti-science disinformation campaign uses “experts” that are more credible to conservatives, and that disinformation is repeated to death on conservative media outlets. Now Gallup has updated its polling and just now released its own analysis, “Conservatives’ Doubts About Global Warming Grow,” with this fascinating ideological breakdown that shows how the divide has grown in the past 2 years:
Josh Nelson at Enviroknow explains further: Newly released Gallup polling seems to show a sharp drop in the percentage of Americans who know about, are concerned about and understand the threat of global warming... read more >>
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A recent announcement that IBM will invest $40 million in an"energy and utilities solutions lab" is further evidence that China's large-scale investments in clean tech are attracting private investment in R&D, not just manufacturing. This latest news from IBM will be difficult for pundits like Thomas Friedman and Brad Plumer to ignore. Friedman and Plumer have argued that the U.S. will be able to maintain its competitive edge in innovation even as clean tech manufacturing relocates overseas. IBM is not the first, nor is it likely to be the last to set-up a clean-tech R&D center in China. Dow Chemical opened one last June and a few months later Applied Materials follow suit, opening an advanced solar R&D center in Xi'an. As Breakthrough's Devon Swezey argued in, "It's Not All Good: Why You Should Worry About the Clean Energy Race," that this attitude flows more from reflexive neoliberalism than an understanding of economic history or current events. Swezey noted: "Among the reasons cited by Applied Materials for the relocation to China was that China, not the U.S., "will be the biggest solar market in the world." According to Business Spectator, IBM's Brad ... read more >>
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 Four democratic senators have introduced an initiative urging the Obama administration to suspend a U.S. Treasury grant program formed under the Recovery Act. The program enables renewable energy producers to receive grants in lieu of Investment Tax Credit payments, essentially providing valuable financing up-front rather than over a number of tax years. That program has spawned a revival in investments for clean energy projects in the wake of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and is widely lauded by RE industry members.
However, senators Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Bob Casey (D-Penn.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) are concerned that components for these projects are coming from foreign companies. In other words, they believe funds intended to boost the U.S. economy should be doing just that, not bolstering economies overseas. I absolutely agree with the notion that U.S. dollars should not be spent overseas, but the problem goes deeper than a Recovery Act grant program and ends with one gaping hole in American clean energy policy: a national renewable electricity standard (RES). The grants-in-lieu-of-credits program has been wildly ... read more >>
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