Al Gore

I am a fan of Al Gore. I do not doubt global warming.  But the wrong arguments have been made on renewables all along.  The current Climate Bill is, in fact, a jobs bill.

Whatever you think of climate change the fact is we’re subsidizing a market sector in hydrocarbons that is not growing, and not producing jobs.

Our Department of Energy still pays for oil and gas research. Corporate taxes are kept low in states with heavy concentrations of hydrocarbons. Energy companies still enjoy accelerated depreciation.

This despite decades of enormous profit, and increased efficiencies which mean that oil, gas and coal don’t really create many jobs. And the cost of using hydrocarbons, pollution and habitat damage, are never accounted for at all.

In contrast, our economic rivals are passing all sorts of incentives for renewable development. China now leads in solar cell production. Germans have used market incentives to construct nearly 24,000 megawatts of wind power.

Energy for the Sun, from the wind, and from the tides is a growth industry. It increases the self-sufficiency of any country that uses these resources. It creates thousands of new jobs. So Germany’s economy is recovering and China’s is back to rocketing along, while we deal with unemployment over 10%.

Source: Smart Planet

The New Green Economy

For a while, things were looking gloomy. The founders of Washington, D.C.‘s Mount Pleasant Solar Cooperative had their hearts in the right place; they even had their paperwork in the right place. But they hit snag after snag as they tried to fulfill the dream of converting their neighborhood to solar power: Contractors who didn’t want to sell solar panels in bulk. Confusion over the role of the regional utility. And the inevitable red tape of local politics.

Eventually the group’s persistence paid off, and this month they’re celebrating their fiftieth neighborhood solar installation. We caught up with co-founder and president Anya Schoolman to find out how it all happened, what’s next, and what advice she’d give to other communities who want to follow the sun.

Q. Can you explain what the Mount Pleasant Solar Cooperative is, and how and when it formed?

A. The Mt. Pleasant Solar cooperative emerged from dinner table conversation I had with my son Walter, then 12, and his friend Diego. They had seen “An Inconvenient Truth” and they wanted to know, if the Earth was going to overheat in their lifetime, “Is, um, anybody, you know … going to do anything about it?” The next question was, “Why don’t we get solar power in our neighborhood.” So we decided we would try to do something.

Our neighborhood consists mostly of rowhouses with flat roofs. We thought if we got enough neighbors together who wanted to adopt solar arrays, some solar contractor would offer us big discounts. We got the neighbors together and quickly learned it was going to be a lot more complicated than we originally thought. So we set out to to educate ourselves about all aspects of solar and to share that knowledge with as many people as possible. That’s where the “cooperative” concept really proved valuable. Read more at http://www.grist.org

Source: The New Green Economy

Petrochemicals group Sasol, the world’s leader in making motor fuel from coal, plans to reduce its carbon footprint by capturing its emissions, producing solar power and making its plants more efficient.

Henri Loubser, project director at the company’s New Energy unit, said a public-private partnership between Sasol, other energy firms and a South African university would start producing thin film solar modules within two and a half years.

“We are still speaking two and a half years before the facility can realistically be operational,” Loubser told journalists on Friday.

A South African team of scientists invented the design for the solar panels, which consist of micro-thin metallic film – only five microns thick – that converts light into energy at a fraction of the cost of conventional panels.

The Thin Film Solar Technology (TFST) joint venture will build a power plant to produce 40 MW using the film, he said.

Sasol, ranked second after power utility Eskom the country’s top polluter, reported total carbon emissions in South Africa for the financial year to end-June of 62 million tonnes.

The firm, criticised by environmentalists for doing little to streamline its operations towards a carbon-free economy, said it had set a target to reduce its emissions intensity by 15 percent across its operations by 2020 from a 2005 baseline.

It also plans to make new coal-to-liquids (CTL) plants more efficient by reducing emissions of those built before 2020 by 20% and those built before 2030 by 30%.

Loubser said producing energy from solar sources, of which there is an abundance in South Africa, will be a focus for the company, and Sasol plans to make a choice which type of concentrated solar power technology it will pursue by next June.

Loubser said Sasol also plans to make its power generation units cleaner by either converting natural gas to electricity or by building nuclear plants to power its operations.

“We will consider a technology step like that (in nuclear) … it’s baseload power and it’s a proven technology,” he said.

The company said switching from coal to natural gas already reduces its plant’s emissions by 40%.

In the long term it will also invest in producing power from hydro sources, preferably from countries around South Africa.

Sasol would like to store emissions from its power plants.

It currently captures between 20-30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from its Secunda CTL plant a year but it flares the carbon into the air as it has yet to find a proper storage site.

Sasol plans to generate half of its power needs by 2012 to beat rising electricity prices and to reduce its dependence on the national grid, especially as utility Eskom struggles to supply fast rising demand from industrial and residential users.
Source: Fin24

Green projects

A total of 112 green-power projects are under way in Africa.

Of these, 28 are taking place in South Africa, or are in the process of either being registered or applying for registration under the Kyoto Protocol’s so-called CDM (clean development mechanism), declared a statement from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) on Wednesday.

Two of these projects awaiting registration in South Africa are solar-heated water systems.

CDM projects range from the development of renewable energy sources to the planting of trees.

More than 80% of all CDM projects in Africa are located in sub-Saharan Africa.

The projects include the replacement of conventional electric light bulbs with energy-efficient bulbs in Senegal, and developing a municipal dumping ground in Uganda where power can be generated.

According to Unep there were 78 CDM projects in Africa in 2008, but in 2004 only two.

In Asia there are 3 700 live projects and in Latin America just over 820.

Across the world 4 730 CDM projects are either in progress or waiting for approval.
Source: Fin24

Copenhagen

From what I can tell, not a few companies are a tad upset about political developments over the past week that suggest major world leaders are basically ready to renege on their promise to work toward halving global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

I mean, here they are (at least some businesses) busting their own business models to figure out how to live up to the industrial end of the bargain while the politicians are defaulting to be political all over again heading into COP-15, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen from Dec. 7 to Dec. 18.

Source: Smart Planet