From the Inbox - The First 15,000

Today, just one week after launch, the 15,000th supporter of a clean energy future posted a message on The Wall: Join Doug and thousands of fellow supporters at the Repower America Wall now. A growing demand for clean energy from all of us together sends a powerful message to our leaders: American support for clean energy is broad and deep. We’re beginning to break through. But to get our leaders to listen and make clean energy a reality, we must rise up in numbers to make our voices heard — to overwhelm the voices clamoring for the status quo. We’re competing with powerful interests who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to protect their profits and block clean energy reforms at the expense of our families, our jobs, and our planet. Your participation on The Wall announces that we’re more than ready — we’re tired of waiting, and we want action now. With every new message you add to The Wall you demonstrate that the most powerful interest in this fight isn’t the oil or the coal lobby — it’s the American people joining together, speaking as one, for a clean energy future. Add your voice to the Repower America Wall now. Your continued participation will make The Wall even more powerful than it already is. Thanks for helping to make our clean energy future a reality. Together we can turn the climate challenge into a great opportunity for our nation and the world. Dave Boundy Campaign Manager

GREEN IDEA

American military targets biofuel Fuel companies and research institutes are pouring millions into the search for biofuels. Some of the serious work is being funded from an unlikely source, however: America’s Department of Defense. Its research agency, Darpa, has quietly been awarding biofuel research contracts to companies such as SAIC and General Dynamics. The goal? To make the military machine less reliant on fossil fuels.
For more info see darpa.mil/sto/chembio/biofuels.html

China lower risk than UK for green investors, claims Deutsche Bank

Study condemning UK energy strategy set to embarrass government as it prepares to unveil new climate change initiative
Terry Macalister
The Observer, Sunday 8 November 2009
Britain’s claim to be a world leader in green energy investment has been called into question by an authoritative new study that will embarrass ministers as they prepare to launch an important climate change initiative tomorrow.
A report from Deutsche Bank says that the UK does not have the right climate change strategy to attract international investment and is lagging behind other countries, such as Germany, France and China.
Britain’s energy strategy lacks the level of transparency and certainty required to encourage investment, according to Deutsche Bank’s study on the best places to do business. It comes as ministers prepare to launch six draft national policy statements on energy and climate change policies tomorrow.
“What investors want is transparency, longevity and certainty – TLC – in policy regimes to mobilise capital,” said Kevin Parker, global head of Deutsche Bank’s asset management division, which is based in New York.
“Many major emitters such as the US and the UK do not have enough TLC in their policy frameworks. Our rankings show that China has a lower risk for climate change investors, as does Germany, but the research also shows that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, they have demonstrated their ability to deliver scale.”
The Department of Energy and Climate Change said its host of new initiatives to streamline planning and ensure the building of new infrastructure, such as clean coal plants, is proof of its positive commitment to moving to a low-carbon economy.
“You will have seen [from] the recent announcement from RWE and E.ON about spending £15bn and creating thousands of jobs here in new nuclear plants that investment does seem to be coming,” said a DECC spokesman.
But Deutsche Bank says Japan and Australia are among the countries that represent lower risk profiles than the UK because they have more comprehensive and integrated government plans.
Parker and his colleagues are particularly keen on feed-in tariffs – which pay consumers to generate their own electricity and sell it back to the grid – to encourage green power, which have been very successfully used in Germany. Britain was originally opposed to this kind of incentive but has recently accepted that they should be introduced, although, crucially, ministers have yet to indicate what price utilities will pay to those consumers who generate their own power.
Deutsche Bank claims that the UK has attracted $17bn (£10bn) in capital investment as a result of climate change policies, compared to $36bn in Germany and $41bn in China. It admits the UK figure is still “substantial” but largely puts this down to the fact that the City is a major centre for the capital markets.
The national policy documents the government will unveil tomorrow will cover energy sectors including gas, the electricity grid and, in particular, nuclear. The nuclear document will give detailed analysis of the 11 sites put forward by developers for new plants and give initial verdicts on their suitability.
Those areas are expected to include those nominated already by EDF and RWE, such as Sizewell in Suffolk and Wylfa on the Isle of Anglesey..
Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, is also expected to give a draft “justification” statement explaining there is a national need for new nuclear stations.

New ’smart’ electrical meters raise fresh privacy issues

Relax News
Saturday, 7 November 2009

The new “smart meters” utilities are installing in homes around the world to reduce energy use raise fresh privacy issues because of the wealth of information about consumer habits they reveal, experts said Friday.
The devices send data on household energy consumption directly to utilities on a regular basis, allowing the firms to manage demand more efficiently and advise households when it is cheaper to turn on appliances.
But privacy experts gathered in Madrid for a three-day conference which wraps up Friday warned that the meters can also reveal intimate details about customers’ habits such as when they eat, what time they go to sleep or how much television they watch.
With cars expected to be fuelled increasingly by electricity in the coming years, the new meters could soon be used to gather information on consumer behaviour beyond the home, they added.
“The collection and storage and retention of the data makes it vulnerable to security breaches as well as to government access,” Christopher Wolf, the co-chairman and founder of the Washington-based Future of Privacy Forum, told AFP.
“It is really an issue of how much information about us can be collected by a third party, how much do they really need, how long do they need to keep it, what should the rules be on retention and when should destruction of it occur.”
More than eight million “smart meters” have already been installed in the United States and the number is projected by the government to rise to 52 million by 2012.
Last month US President Barack Obama announced 3.4 billion dollars (2.3 billion euros) in grants to modernise the country’s electricity grid, part of which will pay for about 18 million “smart meters.”
The European Parliament passed an energy package in April which proposed that 80 percent of electricity consumers have “smart meters” by 2020.
In Italy 85 percent of homes already have smart meters installed, the highest penetration rate in Europe, according to the Future of Privacy Forum. France is second with a 25 percent penetration rate.
“This is certainly the next stage, the new frontier, in the potential for privacy invasion,” Elias Quinn, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Energy and Environmental Security at the University of Colorado, told AFP.
“The potential is great for privacy invasion depending on who can have access to this information. We are kind of walking into ’smart meter’ development blindly. There is no general informed consent.”
Utilities could be tempted to sell the data on their customers’ behaviour to marketers who use it to pitch advertising geared to their habits, said Quinn.
A restless sleeper who gets up frequently throughout the night — identified by electricity consumption records that show he frequently turns on the lights — could be targeted with adverts for sleep aids for example.
Insurance firms, meanwhile, could use the data to justify charging higher fees to a driver whose electricity consumption records indicate he often drives while sleep deprived or regularly gets home at around the time the bars close.
The utilities would be following the lead of Internet service providers which already gear online advertising based on the content of the Web page being viewed by their customers.
“The personal benefits of the ’smart meters’ outweigh the risks. The real danger is that people do not know what the risks are,” said Quinn, who recommends laws that restrict the resale of data as a way to prevent abuses.

Rise of the monster wind farms

A £125bn plan to generate a third of the UK’s energy needs offshore may prove too ambitious

Danny Fortson

Picture a field of enormous windmills, each the height of London’s Gherkin skyscraper with blades as long as a jumbo jet. Does this sound fantastical?
The government doesn’t think so. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, recently stumped up £4.4m of public money to help finance the first of these monster turbines, to be built at a former shipyard in Blyth, Northumberland.
Dubbed the Britannia Project, the scheme is part of an ambitious plan to cut our carbon dioxide emissions by investing billions in new wind farms at sea. In the next few weeks the Crown Estate, owner of the seabed round our coast, will name the companies that have won the right to build these projects. Each will generate more power than all the world’s offshore wind farms now in operation.
In theory, the farms could provide up to a third of the country’s energy. They won’t be cheap. Executives estimate that to build them will cost more than £100 billion over the next 12 years — the same as 25 nuclear reactors.

The benefits are clear. The power generated will be emission-free as well as immune to the geopolitical machinations that affect gas and other fossil fuels. The windier conditions at sea mean they should generate maximum power about a third of the time, as opposed to a quarter for onshore turbines. They can be built on an enormous scale, giving Britain a huge boost in meeting its targets for cutting emissions.
There are, however, many obstacles and unanswered questions. Big subsidies are required — this was one of the main reasons why Ofgem, the regulator, warned recently that annual household energy bills could rocket to £2,000 by 2016, up from £1,100 today. Critics wonder if spending on household energy efficiency would be a better use of the money.
Reliability is also a concern. Nobody has ever tried to put so many power stations as far out in the North Sea. Andy Cox, energy partner at KPMG, said: “The hostile environment that awaits these projects must be a real concern to investors. Even in the more benign onshore wind sector, there have been numerous problems with gearboxes and blades failing.”
Today there are only three purpose-built ships for installing offshore turbines. The European Wind Energy Association says that more than 30 will be needed. “It’s a little scary because there are some fundamental differences from building onshore. We will have to deal with some unknowns, like wave height,” said Dave Rogers, head of renewables at Eon.
If something goes wrong, a turbine could be out of action for weeks before the weather allows a ship to go out and fix the problem.
David Still, European managing director at Clipper Windpower, the company behind the Britannia Project, envisions maintenance staff living on offshore platforms. The huge wind farms to be built after the Crown Estate’s “round three” seabed auction will be as far as 150 miles off the coast and in depths twice the 20m typical of today’s smaller projects.
“Onshore we can get to a turbine within two hours,” said Still. “You can’t be spending a lot of money on helicopters or taking a six-hour boat ride every time there is a maintenance event. The size of the new fields will bring a whole range of problems.”
Maria McCaffery, chief executive of the British Wind Energy Association, the trade group, has called the wind industry “the biggest job-creation event since North Sea oil”.
It has a long way to go. Last June Britain’s first class of certified wind turbine technicians graduated from Northumberland College outside Newcastle. The class, the only one of its kind in Britain, had six students. By Christmas their ranks will triple when another 12 pupils get their certificates.
The electricity network will also need to be radically overhauled and upgraded. Today Britain’s generation capacity sits at about 75 gigawatts. To take account of the variability of the winds, that will have to increase more than 50%, to about 120gw, to meet the same level of demand.
Stuart Bailey, head of balancing services at National Grid, said he will also have to double the additional buffer of “reserve” energy the system has on call at any one time in case a big plant shuts down. These are often pollution-spewing coal-and oil-fired plants.
Buildings costs, meanwhile, have rocketed. In the middle of the credit crunch the industry made desperate pleas to the government for aid on top of an already generous subsidy scheme. Without it, they warned, Britain’s wind energy revolution would die. The government responded by ratcheting up the subsidy by a third.
Within weeks, costs for turbines, cables and other equipment rose by a similar amount.
Offshore farms now cost twice what they did three years ago. Mortimer Menzel, of Augusta & Co, the bank, said prices will not come down until more companies enter the industry. “We have reached a peak in terms of building and construction costs because we have these generous government subsidies that are being passed straight through to the suppliers,” he said. “Commodity prices have halved since last year but turbine prices haven’t moved. If they don’t come down, we have a problem.”
Turbines aren’t the only problem. To bring the power ashore, hundreds of miles of undersea cable, at an estimated cost of £15 billion, will need to be laid.
Energy companies can no longer afford to build big farms on their own. Centrica recently sold half its stake in its new Lynn and Inner Dowsing farm to help finance the building of its next one. Npower has hired Merrill Lynch to find someone to take on half the £1.7 billion building cost of its Gwynt y Mor farm off the Welsh coast. Dong Energy, the Danish group that has plans to build more than £10 billion of offshore wind farms in the UK, including the London Array, a huge project in the Thames estuary, has hired the investment bank Rothschild to find investors to share the burden.
“They want to build this stuff,” a banker said, “but they simply can’t afford it.”
And the Britannia Project? It may never make it off the drawing board. Ken Rumph, an analyst at Nomura Code Securities, said that loss-making Clipper needs to raise $180m (£108m) to make it through next year. If it doesn’t, he said, “bankruptcy is a realistic scenario”.

Future of wind farms in doubt

Danny Fortson

BRITAIN’s biggest developer of offshore wind farms has hired Rothschild to sell stakes in its projects because it cannot afford to build them.
The move by Dong Energy, the Danish power giant, casts fresh doubt on the government’s carbon-reduction plans just six months after it ramped up subsidies to keep the offshore wind sector afloat.
Nuclear power and offshore wind are the main pillars of the government’s plan to slash pollution. Ed Miliband, energy secretary, will underline their importance when he delivers the national policy statement on energy tomorrow.
Construction costs, however, have soared. Dong has plans to develop wind farms with a capacity of 3 gigawatts, enough to supply more than 2m homes, but they will cost more than £10 billion to build — twice the price just three years ago. “The issue is that these projects require enormous amounts of capital and it’s getting very difficult to justify,” said an industry source. “The enthusiasm there once was has diminished.”

The crunch comes at a critical time. Within the next month the Crown Estate, owner of Britain’s seabed, will award the rights to develop a batch of enormous offshore sites that are meant to make up the bulk of the UK’s renewable energy capacity.
Dong is expected to sell down stakes in projects where it has 100% ownership, such as the £1 billion Walney farm in the Irish Sea.

Coral bleaching gives rise to reef bullies

Damselfish drift over bleached coral heads off the Keppel Islands

To the average snorkeler a coral reef might seem like a watery paradise, but new research has found coral bleaching could turn reefs into rough neighborhoods.

With the decline in the reef, bigger fish could bully smaller varieties out of the best positions and those smaller fish would then become much easier targets for predators, leading to dramatic changes in a reef’s ecosystem.

Coral bleaching is expected to become more widespread because of the effects of global warming.

Associate Professor Mark McCormick from James Cook University says that is very bad news for smaller fish that live in reef environments.

“The fish that are actually on them at that particular time, particularly for small fish, they tend to die four times faster than when they’re sitting on live coral,” he said.

Professor McCormick studied the effects of coral bleaching on damselfish and was surprised by the results.

He says live coral is a good place for damselfish to hide from its predators but once the algae that gives the coral its color dies off, the fish become much more visible and much more vulnerable.

All the fish really has to do to solve this problem is move to a place where they’re a bit less conspicuous and less likely to become a meal.

“If you’re a bright-colored fish sitting against a white background, you’ve got really high levels of contrast so you’re going to try and reduce that some way to make yourself less visible to a predator,” Professor McCormick said.

“And what they can do is if they move further away from the coral then the light bouncing off the sand will effectively increase their level of camouflage because the light upwelling from the sand is actually a fairly yellowing color.”

But not every fish can get its fins on prime real estate. The bigger fish tend to keep the best spots for themselves and push the smaller ones into harm’s way.

“Almost within the second that they settle they’ll start bullying one another and jostling for position, jostling for the best possible spot … to try and survive in,” Professor McCormick said.

“So what we find is that yes, it does happen and that size does actually matter when you’re on a bleached coral because you’re the one that actually gets the best possible spot. You increase your survival slightly by pushing the smaller fishes away from that precious piece of habitat.”

On healthy corals, size does not appear to matter much to prospects of survival. But near bleached corals, smaller, bullied fish were four times as likely to become a meal.

Professor McCormick says the effect is likely to be even more dramatic in other species who are far more dependent on corals than the damselfish are.

“Probably about 50 per cent of the species that we characteristically see when we go out snorkeling on the reef are at some stages in their life associated with live coral,” he said.

“And many of the species use it as an important nursery habitat. So we’re finding that these sorts of really quite major effects are happening on these sorts of habitats … then we might expect that those species that are more closely associated with live coral, it could well have much greater effects.”

Professor McCormick says a decline of small fish could have a knock-on effect, meaning there would be fewer of the larger fish that eat them.

He says the effects could even be felt in the human world because such a dramatic change to a marine ecosystem could have an impact on the fishing and tourism industries.

Source:
ABC Tropical Queensland, Coral Bleaching gives rise to reef bullies“, By Timothy McDonald for AM, accessed November 5, 2009

Ban welcomes power-sharing deal in Madagascar

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today welcomed the power-sharing agreement reached by Madagascar''s current and former leaders and urged them to implement the deal to resolve months of political wrangling in the Indian Ocean country.

Prosecutor to ask International Criminal Court to probe Kenyan violence

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has announced that he will ask the tribunal to open an investigation into the deadly post-election violence in Kenya in December 2007 and January 2008.