By JONATHAN WEISMAN And REBECCA SMITH
ARCADIA, Fla.—The Obama administration launched a clean-energy blitz Tuesday, with President Barack Obama sweeping into this Central Florida hamlet to unveil $3.4 billion in stimulus grants for advanced electricity-grid projects and Vice President Joe Biden traveling to his home state of Delaware to open an electric-automobile plant.
The administration Tuesday released a list of about 100 companies and communities in 45 states and territories that will receive federal subsidies to modernize the electric grid. The administration promised the projects would create “tens of thousands of jobs.”
Among the big winners are companies and communities in Florida, which received more than $267 million in grants, and North Carolina, which got more than $400 million, including more than $200 million for units of utility giant Duke Energy Corp., which has supported administration efforts to modernize technology and cap greenhouse-gas emissions.
When combined with funds from utility customers, the federal program is expected to inject more than $8 billion into grid-modernization efforts nationally, administration officials said. Even so, that represents just a fraction of what would be needed to bring the U.S. electrical grid into the digital age.
With 3,000 utilities in the U.S., federal funding still will leave millions of customers untouched. Department of Energy officials said they hope mass deployments would drive down costs for those utilities that haven’t yet taken action and would help blaze a path.
Vendors still were sorting out whether they benefit from specific grants because many utilities didn’t name specific vendors in applications. In some cases, utilities must now go to state utility commissions for permission to begin the projects because many don’t have clearance to use the ratepayer funds they pledged in their grant applications. Grants passed over some big utilities in states like California, Texas and Illinois that have been pushing ahead with meter projects, perhaps on the assumption that no further assistance was needed.
A main goal of grid modernization is to give customers and utilities more data to use energy more efficiently—which represents an opportunity for software vendors as well as companies that make electrical-system hardware. “The richness of the information you get starts to explode” as digital meters and other controllers are put in place, said Jon Arnold, managing director of Microsoft Corp.’s power and utilities business.
Tuesday’s twin events, and last Friday’s presidential visit to a wind-energy-testing lab in Boston, signal a renewed push on energy issues by the Obama administration, after weeks during which energy and climate change have taken a back seat to fights over health care and future strategy in Afghanistan. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held its first hearing Tuesday on long-stalled climate-change legislation.
The administration also sought to tie its energy initiatives to jobs. In Delaware, Mr. Biden presided over the reopening of a shuttered General Motors plant in Wilmington that has been acquired by Fisker Automotive, which plans to use it to build a new line of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
The Department of Energy said grants of $400,000 to $200 million will lead to the installation of at least 18 million advanced digital meters.

SHANGHAI — U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern said he doesn’t expect bilateral agreements on global climate issues when U.S. President Barack Obama visits China next month.
The U.S. and China will use the opportunity to look for common ground and try to facilitate agreements at the Copenhagen climate-change summit in December, he said.
“We are not trying to cut some separate deals,” Mr. Stern told reporters. “We’ll try to get as much alliance as possible [between China and the U.S.] to get a deal in Copenhagen,” he said.
He also said the two sides will continue discussions on cooperation in clean energy and technology during Mr. Obama’s visit, and these talks would also involve the private sector.
Mr. Obama is due to visit Beijing and Shanghai Nov. 15-18. His visit constitutes the last chance for high-level face-to-face talks between the two sides ahead of the United Nations summit in Copenhagen. Agreement between the two countries — the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitters — is widely seen as crucial to the success of any global effort to fight climate change.
The two nations have been locked in a stalemate for years over the degree to which either should have to commit to mandatory emissions cuts, and to what extent rich nations should have to help finance efforts by poorer nations to fight climate change.
During the visit, the two country’s presidents may ask each other what their bottom lines are on climate-change issues, a Chinese government official told Dow Jones Newswires.
“Climate-change negotiation is not an issue between two countries. It is an issue at the United Nations,” the Chinese official said, adding, “What the two countries would do is to learn about each other’s need and concerns, and to see if these concerns could be resolved through the international pact.”
Mr. Stern’s comments came as representatives of major industries testified before a U.S. Senate panel that is holding hearings this week on a proposal to cut U.S. emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020. Valero Energy Corp.’s chief executive told lawmakers the proposed bill could have a “staggering” impact on his company and cost the refining industry around $4.1 billion a year.

Firm to go ahead with £725m windfarm but says renewable targets will not be met unless government continues current subsidy levels
Tim Webb
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 October 2009 16.51 GMT
Centrica gave the go-ahead to one of the UK’s largest offshore windfarms today but warned the government that its 2020 renewable energy targets would be missed unless the current level of subsidy was maintained.
The firm, which owns British Gas, announced that it would invest £725m in the 270MW project off the coast of Lincolnshire, which will be able to power a city twice the size of Cambridge when the wind blows.
The government announced in the last budget that offshore windfarms approved by March next year would receive higher subsidies, or renewables obligation certificates (Rocs).
But officials said tonight that there were no plans to make this arrangement permanent, leaving the economics of offshore wind unviable, according to Centrica.
Sarwjit Sambhi, managing director of Centrica’s power business, said: “Without [the higher subsidy] we could not have gone ahead with the Lincs project.”
The project, which will boost the size of Centrica’s wind portfolio by two thirds, secured planning permission months ago but the slump in energy prices has resulted in a host of wind and other power projects being scrapped.
The windfarm, 8km off the coast near Skegness, will have 75 turbines. Construction would begin next year and electricity would begin to be generated around 2012, the company said.
Centrica also announced that it had sold a 50% stake in three of its smaller offshore windfarms to a subsidiary of Société Générale’s asset management arm for £84m. The company added it had raised a further £340m of debt, secured against the three windfarms, from a consortium of banks. The proceeds from both will go towards funding the Lincolnshire project.
Ofgem, the energy regulator, has predicted that £200bn will need to be invested in the next decade in green energy equipment to meet the 2020 renewable targets. These targets would require the UK to generate a third of its electricity from renewable sources such as windfarms. Centrica has promised to invest £15bn by 2020 but Sambhi said that other investors, beyond energy companies, would also be needed. “[£200bn] is a big chunk of investment to make. We need to attract other investor classes.”
The government is setting up an independent body designed to handle planning applications for large projects such as windfarms or nuclear power plants. By taking such decisions away from ministers, the hope is that national concerns would take precedence over local objections and fewer schemes would get blocked.
Sambhi said that the 2020 targets could be met, but only if the current level of subsidies was maintained. “The new planning regulations would need to be as smooth as the government has promised,” he added.
The Conservatives have promised to hand back the final say-so to ministers. Sambhi said that their decisions would have to be “transparent” for the system to work.
Sam Laidlaw, Centrica’s chief executive, said: “Our decision to build Lincs illustrates our continued commitment to develop renewable generation and confirms our position as one of the UK leaders in green energy. The government’s enhanced financial framework for offshore wind has been fundamental in improving the overall project economics of this development.”

The aim is to have 15 per cent of the UK’s energy derived from renewable sources by 2020
David Binning

The Government has said that by 2020 it wants 15 per cent of the UK’s energy to be derived from renewable sources. Things are not going quite to plan, however — the figure now stands at about 2 per cent.
Along with the large-scale proposals for wind and tidal power — and the highly controversial nuclear option — a number of other alternatives for power generation are being explored both in the UK and globally. One of the more advanced is biomass, the conversion of plant and other biological material into power, which generates no carbon emissions. Biomass has made a start in the UK with two 300-megawatt plants in Teesside and Port Talbot in development.
Around the world, much faith has been placed in solar energy, with China one of the world leaders in developing cheap and lightweight solar cell technology.
Another possibility is the conversion of waste into energy. About 100 million tonnes of waste produced each year could be converted to energy, with the potential to supply up to 4 per cent of the UK’s electricity and heating requirements, according to the Energy Technologies Institute.
When it comes to transport, there is no doubt that we need a real alternative to fossil fuels. And while there has been strong interest in electric and hybrid cars, it will be some time before they make any real impact.
Biofuels have long been touted as a panacea but enthusiasm has waned somewhat.
The Carbon Trust recently launched a programme to commercialise the use of biofuel produced from algae by 2030. It is estimated that algae-based fuels could replace some 70 billion litres a year of fossil fuel by 2030 — equivalent to 12 per cent of global jet fuel consumption

Talk of catastrophe and make-or-break summits is unrealistic. Small, positive steps will take us in the right direction
Bill Emmott

Here is an oddity. Most human progress, in overcoming natural obstacles or curing diseases, say, has been driven by optimism — the view that if we only try hard enough or apply enough brainpower, we can solve any problem. Perhaps, to wax philosophical for a moment, such optimism arises from our awareness of mortality: how else to keep ourselves going? So why, when it comes to the environment, do campaigners think that pessimism and fear is the way to drive us on?
Naturally, some fear or alarm is inherent in defining and acknowledging the size of any problem. But does it really help the cause of climate-change mitigation for us to be told that we will all have to become vegetarians soon?
Do we really benefit from being told by the purest greens that we need to change our whole lifestyles, digging allotments and owning our own windmills? Does it, indeed, help to describe the world’s current trajectory as “catastrophic”?
May I suggest, naive as I am, that honesty might be a better idea? The reason, to borrow a word beloved of environmentalists, is that honesty would be a more sustainable policy, in the face of the facts about the environment and about the Copenhagen climate change conference that is hurtling towards us in December.

For the moment, that event, scheduled to last just 11 days and to assemble 20,000 delegates from 192 countries for the task of agreeing on a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, is being billed as a unique opportunity, a make-or-break meeting to save the planet for the 21st century and beyond. It cannot possibly rise to that billing, and we should all hope that it doesn’t.
An agreement hammered out or even finalised at such a meeting is unlikely to be effective or credible. There are plenty of signs of progress in making climate-change mitigation a real, long-term strategy in all the biggest countries — the European Union, Japan, China, even the United States — even if that progress is considered inadequate by the climate lobbyists.
But anyway, a multicentury problem, if that is what global warming is (see later — I am not a denier), needs to be solved by a whole series of decisions, initiatives and efforts, not in some sort of big bang. To start by setting acceptable frameworks that can be tightened up repeatedly later makes perfect sense, especially amid a global recession.
An honest way to describe the world’s current trajectory, from the point of view both of climate change and of greenhouse-gas emissions, would surely be more like a school report: “Improving, but needs to try harder.” A more honest way to describe the trend in global temperatures is: “Stabilising, but don’t depend on it.”
And if honesty is applied to the great bogeyman of a melting of the polar ice caps it would need, since the recent Catlin Arctic Survey conducted by Pen Hadow and his explorers, to say that “the ice got thicker last year, but we’re not sure that improvement will last”.
Instead, people who point out these “inconvenient truths”, to use the phrase that won a fear-mongering failed American politician a Nobel prize, get demonised. Lord Lawson of Blaby, who pointed out in his book An Appeal to Reason that global temperatures have in fact been stable for the past decade, says that he has twice been disinvited from the BBC’s Question Time, presumably because his view on climate change is too reasonable. Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish statistician whose brilliant book The Skeptical Environmentalist exposed, by calmly laying out the facts, the falsity of so many claims that we are heading for an apocalypse, is a hate figure for greens the world over.
By now, this column will have annoyed a lot of people. But annoyance is not the only intention: it is to advocate not just honesty but positive thinking. As Dr Lomborg showed, we have succeeded in making the air much cleaner in developed-country cities and the water more drinkable and supportive of biodiversity in developed-country rivers.
Britain, like many developed countries, has more forest cover than a century ago, not less as the deforestation mantra would have it. This is worth noting not to advocate complacency but to point out that environmental improvements can be achieved, because they have been in the recent past, without resorting to hair shirts or giving up economic growth.
This is exactly what the International Energy Agency has just forecast is likely to happen in China. In a section of its annual World Energy Outlook, released early to inform the climate debate, it said that if China carries out its stated programme for energy efficiency and emissions reduction, its annual output of carbon dioxide in 2030 will be about 7 gigatonnes instead of the 11.1 gigatonnes previously predicted — and not because China is expected somehow to give up getting richer.
What this cut by a third shows is how predictions that cover decades can be hugely influenced by changes in the assumptions fed into them. Of course, there is no guarantee that this forecast will be anywhere near accurate, or that China will succeed in implementing its programme — but then all the predictions in the climate debate, of economic growth, of energy efficiency, of global temperatures, are highly uncertain. That, in fact, is the nub of our problem, not some inevitable catastrophe.
What the Chinese forecast, combined with past evidence of successful environmental policy, also suggests is that this task, of dealing with the risks arising from the unfavourable long-term trend in global temperatures, is a matter of mitigation, of adaptation and of technological development. It is not a drastic, all-or-nothing affair. It is an area of public policy and private activity in which changed government regulations and targets will need to be mixed with price signals and technological breakthroughs to produce a successful and adequate change to the world’s trajectory.
That is a more mundane, long-drawn-out and, ultimately, less costly process than the catastrophe theorists would prefer us to believe in. But it is more realistic, more honest and more likely to attract widespread public acceptance.

Professor Sir Gordon Conway warns continent will face intense droughts, famine, disease and floods
John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 October 2009 17.41 GMT
One of the world’s most influential scientists has warned that climate change could devastate Africa, predicting an increase in catastrophic food shortages.
Professor Sir Gordon Conway, the outgoing chief scientist at the UK’s Department for International Development, and former head of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, argued in a new scientific paper (pdf) that the continent is already warming faster than the global average and that people living there can expect more intense droughts, floods and storm surges.
There will be less drinking water, diseases such as malaria will spread and the poorest will be hit the hardest as farmland is damaged in the coming century, Conway wrote.
“There is already evidence that Africa is warming faster than the global average, with more warm spells and fewer extremely cold days. Northern and southern Africa are likely to become as much as 4C hotter over the next 100 years, and [will become ] much drier,” he said.
Conway predicts hunger on the continent could increase dramatically in the short term as droughts and desertification increase, and climate change affects water supplies. “Projected reductions in crop yields could be as much as 50% by 2020 and 90% by 2100,” the paper says.
Conway held out some hope that east Africa and the Horn of Africa, presently experiencing its worst drought and food shortages in 20 years, will become wetter. But he said that the widely hoped-for 8-15% increase in African crop yields as a direct result of more CO2 in the atmosphere may fail to materialise.
“The latest analyses of more realistic field trials suggest the benefits of carbon dioxide may be significantly less than initially thought,” he said.
Instead, population growth combined with climate change would mean countries face extreme problems growing more food: “We are going to need an awful lot more crop production, 70-100% more food will be needed than we have at present. Part of [what is needed] is getting more organic matter into Africa’s soils, which are very depleted, but we also have to improve water availability and produce crops that yield more, and use nitrogen and water more efficiently.”
Sir Gordon, now professor of international development at Imperial College London, oversaw a major expansion in the UK government’s support for GM research in developing countries, and said that new technologies must be part of the African response to tackling hunger and droughts. “In certain circumstances we will need GM crops because we wont be able to find the gene naturally. GM may be the speediest and most efficient way to increase yields. Drought tolerance is governed by a range of genes. It is a big problem for breeders of [both] GM and ordinary plants”, he said.
He called for more research into climate change. “There is much that we do not know. The Sahel may get wetter or remain dry. The flow of the Nile may be greater or less. We do not know if the fall in agricultural production will be very large or relatively small. The best assumption is that many regions of Africa will suffer more droughts and floods with greater intensity and frequency. We have to plan for the certainty that more extreme events will occur in the future but with uncertain regularity”.

Jonathan Watts
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 October 2009 15.40 GMT
If laptop users were willing to pay an extra two dollars to upgrade their power supply units, the world could save more than 200m tons of carbon a year, according to a leading component supplier in Taiwan.
Delta Electronics, which makes more than half of the boxes at the end of the world’s power cables, wants consumers to be informed of the carbon and energy efficiency of its products so that they can make a choice about whether to pay extra for greener computers.
The current energy efficiency standard for switching power supplies on laptop computers is 87%, though many firms fit devices that fall well below this level.
Delta says its best equipment could reach 93% for $1 or $2 more. It is not yet widely adopted because computer firms such as HP and Dell are reluctant to pass on the cost to consumers.
“The point is, consumers never know the efficiency of their computers,” said Delta Electronics’ founder and chairman, Bruce Cheng. “We are serious in our efforts to reduce global warming by our unrelenting research into ever more energy efficient products.”
The firm expects to sell about 63m adaptors this year. With an improvement of eight percentage points, it estimates the average laptop could save 8.8kWh a year.
“Consumers should ask for higher efficiency. That’s why we want a carbon label on goods. We would be the biggest benefactor,” said Emelie Yeh, a company spokesperson.
Taiwanese firms supply most of the IT components, fans and power supply adaptors in computers and household appliances. Peter Rowling, of the environmental consultancy ERM, welcomed the push to inform the public. “This is good because carbon labelling is about disclosure, but what is important is that it looks at the whole life cycle of the product. We also need to know the energy and resources that go into products.”
Taiwan is moving in this direction. Last month, AU Optronics, a leading producer of LCD televisions, announced one of Taiwan’s first carbon-footprint verification schemes. Other firms are expected to follow.
Delta, however, said users could make big energy savings simply by switching devices off when they are not used rather than leaving them on standby. The company estimates that 5% of the world’s household electricity is wasted this way each year – equivalent to the annual output of a 12GW power plant.

• London assembly study says capital produces enough waste to fill Canary Wharf skyscraper every eight days• Boris Johnson considering plans
Hélène Mulholland and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 October 2009 14.48 GMT
Boris Johnson is considering plans to convert rubbish into energy as part of plans to save at least £100m in refuse collection and disposal costs, it emerged today.
City Hall signalled the move in response to a report by the London assembly which found that the waste generated by Londoners could be used to generate enough electricity to power up to 2m homes and provide heat for 625,000 houses.
The capital produced around 22m tonnes of waste every year, the report found, enough to fill the largest skyscraper at Canary Wharf every eight days.
More than half of London’s rubbish ends up in landfill, with only a fifth (22%) being recycled, according to research by the assembly’s environment committee said.
Converting non-recyclable rubbish such as leftover food into energy, through methods that did not involve incineration, could reduce the amount sent to landfill – an increasingly expensive option as the tax on dumping waste in the ground is high and rising.
Creating gas from the rubbish which could be used for heating or generating electricity could also cut London’s carbon dioxide emissions by 1.2m tonnes and reduce emissions of another greenhouse gas, methane, which is produced when waste breaks down in landfill, the report found.
The environment committee called on Johnson to take the lead in developing the technologies to convert energy from waste such as anaerobic digestion, gasification and pyrolysis.
The technologies face a number of barriers, including public opposition, difficulties obtaining planning consent and long-term existing contracts for rubbish that prevent potential companies obtaining waste material.
Johnson, who is chair of the London Waste and Recycling Board, is already considering the move to turn rubbish into energy as part of plans to minimise refuse that ends up either in landfill or incinerated, according to his office.
“The mayor wants Londoners to recycle more, send less waste to landfill and take advantage of the massive economic opportunities available to the capital if we start to manage our waste more efficiently.
“We know that currently 75% of London’s household waste is either landfilled or incinerated, whilst around 90% of municipal waste could actually be reused, recycled or used to generate greener energy. By recycling as much as possible, and using the remaining waste to produce energy, we estimate London could save at least £100m in collection and disposal costs.”
The Waste and Recycling Board has £84m to spend over the next three years to find new ways to deal with waste.
The mayor’s draft waste strategy for London, due to be published later this year, will address many of the issues contained in today’s report, a spokeswoman added.

Population surging, oil running out and water scarce — we need solutions before then, says David Binning

By 2050 the world’s population is expected to exceed nine billion, at which point fossil fuels may be no more, countries will no longer be reliant on the Middle East for fuel, America will no longer be the world’s leading economy and areas now sparsely populated may be home to bustling metropolises.
The health of national and world economies as well as people and the environment at this juncture depends very much on widespread collaboration between governments and industries of all kinds to fast-track alternative energy programmes and global agreements on carbon trading and emissions caps.
Many hope that the Copenhagen summit in December will mark a big step in the right direction. However, no one is under any illusions about the difficulty of achieving a proper global accord, especially one that does not disadvantage developing countries.
The fact that we are in real danger of encountering some sort of energy crisis in the future is not debatable. At issue is finding the right balance between the need for long-term planning and more immediate action in identifying new reserves of fossil fuels and other short-term options.

One key concern is that the growing energy needs of countries such as China and India are pushing up prices for coal, oil and gas, leading to sharp rises in electricity costs for industry and homes.
While many acknowledge that most of the easily accessible oil and gas has been exploited, advances in geological mapping, drilling and computational modelling may buy us more time before we need to lose our dependency on fossil fuels completely.
Many people expect that nuclear power will emerge as the world’s dominant energy source in the decades to come. Once the scourge of environmentalists and people of virtually all political persuasions, nuclear has been recast as a possible environmental saviour. Some see it as the best short-term solution to addressing greenhouse emissions from the burning of fossil fuels but of all the energy types it faces the most opposition.
Some scientists stress that a reduction in CO2 emissions of the order of 80 per cent is needed within the next few decades if the world is not going to dry up, freeze or become submerged, depending on which Armageddon scenario you subscribe to.
Yet there is growing disagreement about the science of climate change. Many of the claims made in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth have been debunked in the face of mounting evidence that the planet has been heating and cooling in the same cycles since long before the industrial revolution, and has not become warmer in the past ten years.
It would seem that people will have a different, certainly a more sophisticated, understanding of man’s effect on the weather long before 2050, a fact that will influence government and industry responses to the challenges now being outlined.
David Clarke, chief executive of the Energy Technologies Institute, calculated that Britain needs to spend about £100 billion to meet its 2020 energy and environment targets and at least that amount again before 2050. This includes the massive investments needed in carbon capture and storage.
“We have to understand what we need to do from a supply chain and skills point of view,” Clarke said. “We need to think about not just what we can do but what we need to do.”
Working in partnership with big corporations to solve energy and environmental problems, the Energy Technologies Institute employs complex computer modelling to learn more about key factors, including power, heat, transport and infrastructure and the interplay between them. Predicting population and demographic changes will also be key to developing a clean and sustainable future.
Professor Peter Dobson, head of Oxford University’s Begbroke Science Park and an expert in energy and sustainability, acknowledges that there are serious concerns surrounding energy and food, but predicts that the sourcing and supply of water will emerge as the biggest challenge facing the planet, come 2050.
“We are going to be running out of fossil fuel, that’s a given. However, in terms of energy challenges we have to integrate with a whole range of societal needs like water, which is of course essential for growing food.”