United Nations peacekeepers in the Central African Republic (CAR) are stepping up their presence near a refugee camp in the country’s northeast where deadly clashes last week have increased tensions in an already unstable area.

Thousands of Pro-Palestinian demonstators converge on Central United Methodist Church after a spirited march through downtown Detroit opposing the Israeli siege of Gaza. This protest was held on January 8, 2009.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

Gaza Freedom March URGENT UPDATE

December 21, 2009

We are determined to break the siege

We all will continue to do whatever we can to make it happen

Using the pretext of escalating tensions on the Gaza-Egypt border, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry informed us yesterday that the Rafah border will be closed over the coming weeks, into January. We responded that there is always tension at the border because of the siege, that we do not feel threatened, and that if there are any risks, they are risks we are willing to take. We also said that it was too late for over 1,300 delegates coming from over 42 countries to change their plans now. We both agreed to continue our exchanges.

Although we consider this as a setback, it is something we ‘ ve encountered-and overcome–before. No delegation, large or small, that entered Gaza over the past 12 months has ever received a final OK before arriving at the Rafah border. Most delegations were discouraged from even heading out of Cairo to Rafah. Some had their buses stopped on the way. Some have been told outright that they could not go into Gaza . But after public and political pressure, the Egyptian government changed its position and let them pass.

Our efforts and plans will not be altered at this point. We have set out to break the siege of Gaza and march on December 31 against the Israeli blockade. We are continuing in the same direction.

Egyptian embassies and missions all over the world must hear from our supporters (by phone, fax and email)** over the coming crucial days, with a clear message: Let the international delegation enter Gaza and let the Gaza Freedom March proceed.

Contact your local consulate here:
http://www.mfa.gov.eg/MFA_Portal/en-GB/mfa_websits/

Contact the Palestine Division in Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cairo

Ahmed Azzam, tel +202-25749682 Email: ahmed.azzam@mfa.gov.eg

If you are in the U.S. , contact the Egyptian Embassy, 202-895-5400 and ask for Omar Youssef or email omaryoussef@hotmail.com

You signed on to support the the Gaza Freedom March, that was the first step. Now call the Egyptian embassy and ask your elected official to call on your behalf. Then, hit the streets and join a solidarity action in your community: www.gazafreedommarch.org/solidarity

Thank you for being part of a global movement.

The Gaza Freedomo March Steering Committee

* * Sample text

I am writing/calling to express my full support for the December 31, 2009 Gaza Freedom March. I urge the Egyptian government to allow the 1,300 international delegates to enter the Gaza Strip through Egypt .

The aim of the march is to call on Israel to lift the siege. The delegates will also take in badly needed medical aid, as well as school supplies and winter jackets for the children of Gaza .

Please, let this historic March proceed.

Thank you.

http://www.zionism-israel.com/issues/arab_israel_peace.html

Who didn't want peace?

ISRAEL-PALESTINE PEACE TALKS

 U.N. 1947 SOLUTION

 The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process is under way, and it is hoped that the conflict will be resolved within the coming year.  However, the outcome will be influenced to a great extent by perceptions of the rebirth of Israel 60 years ago. As Israel’s 60^th birthday approaches, it should be remembered that there are two ‘narratives’ of the conflict.

The first is based on carefully researched, verifiable, relevant documents and quotations from both sides.  This approach is exemplified by such eminent historians as Sir Martin Gilbert who said: ‘I believe in true history.  What happened in the past is unalterable and definite’ (Churchill and the Jews, Simon & Shuster, 2007), and ‘You can have your own opinion, but you cannot have your own facts’ (Matthias Küntzel)

 The second is based on the writings of those who look at the conflict with a predetermined agenda, and make the facts fit into their ideology; and the  ’revisionist historians’ who have said, ‘Historical research need not be based on facts’ (Ilan Pappé, interview in Le Soir,Bruxelles,29/11/1999, www.camera.org)  

 The following pages, which contradict widely-held beliefs based on propaganda and ideology, give the hard facts.  For example:

• Jews were massacred in Palestine well into the 20^th. century
• Jews were ethnically cleansed from Palestine and other Arab lands
• Arab leaders were largely responsible for the mass exodus/migration  of Palestinian ‘refugees’
• All Israel’s citizens, including Arabs, have equal rights under the law
• Israel has received about 7%of theoriginal Mandate, which included what are now Jordan, Israel, Gaza and the ‘West Bank’.
• Arabs have repeatedly tried to eliminate her entirely by violence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

	1914	Ottoman - Turkish Muslim Empire, which controlled the whole of the Middle East, had the backing of Germany during WW1.
	1916	British and French, signed the Sykes-Picot agreement Â
Â	1917	Great Britain promised the Jews a homeland in the whole of Palestine, in the Balfour Declaration
	1922	The Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and  thereby became international law.  Â
	1922	Arabs objected , so Palestine was partitioned by Britain, giving the Arabs 78% of the promised Jewish homeland to the Arabs of Palestine for their state, to be known as TransJordan (later Jordan), and the remaining 22% to the Jews. NEITHER THE PARTITION NOR THE CREATION OF THEIR OWN STATE WAS ACCEPTED BY THE ARABS
	1937	A further partition of the remaining 22% of the land was proposed by the Peel Commission. The Arabs again rejected the partition and their own  state. The Jews were divided over whether to accepted this greatly  reduced land offer, but accepted it initially. The British government reduced the area of the Jewish state, but the Arabs still rejected the plan. The British withdrew the suggestion.
	1947	The remaining 22% of Palestine that had been mandated for a Jewish national home under international law, was partitioned by UN General Assembly Resolution 181, The Jews again accepted, while the Arabs again refused to accept the creation of either their own or the Jewish state,  threatened violence, and attacked the newly established State of Israel. See Arab League Statement and  Israel - Birth of a Nation
Â	Â	Â

November 1947

24^th November 1947

Egyptian delegate Heykal Pasha, addressing the Political Committee of the UN General Assembly, remarked on the Partition Plan for Palestine - five days before the historic vote:   

‘The United Nations….should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Muslim countries …. If the United Nations decides to partition Palestine, it might be responsible for very grave disorders and for the massacre of a large number of Jews … if a Jewish state were established, nobody could prevent disorders. Riots would spread through all the Arab states and might lead to a war between the two races’.

                                                (UN Official records of the 2^nd session of the GA ad hoc Committee on the Palestinian question, 25^th September -25^th November, p. 185)

 

[From November 1947 to 1951, Jews were persecuted in Muslim countries. This persecution followed a plan decided upon by the Arab League 5 months before Arabs left Israel (See Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands  and Arab League Draft Law on Jews-1947 .  800,000 Jews, many of whose ancestors  had lived there for centuries, were expelled or fled Arab countries. They were forced to desert their homes, and leave behind their belongings and their businesses. ]

 

24^th November 1947

 

Jamal Husseini, spokesman for the Palestine Higher Committee told the UN that:

‘The partition line proposed shall be nothing but a line of fire and blood’

(UN GA A/AC.14/SR.31,24/11/47)

29^th November 1947

[UN General Assembly Resolution 181 adopted by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions, a second partition of Palestine, and the creation of Independent Arab and Jewish states]

 

29^th November 1947

UN  Iraqi representative Mr Jamali said:

‘In the name of my government, I wish to put on record that Iraq does not recognise the validity of this decision, [and] will reserve freedom of action towards its implementation’.

UN General Assembly 128^th Plenary Meeting 11363

 

Syrian UN representative Amir Arslam said:

‘My country will never recognise such a decision [partition].  It will never agree to be responsible for it. Let the consequences be on the heads of others, not on ours’.

UN General Assembly 128^th Plenary Meeting 11363

 

Yemeni UN representative, HRH Prince Seif Islam Abdullah said:

‘The Government of Yemen does not consider itself bound by such a decision, and will reserve its freedom of action towards the implementation of this decision’.

UN General Assembly 128^th Plenary Meeting 11363

 

December 1947

Trygve Lie, UN Secretary General, later wrote:

‘From the first week of December 1947, disorder in Palestine had begun to mount.  The Arabs repeatedly had asserted that they would resist partition by force.  They seemed to be determined to drive that point home by assaults upon the Jewish community in Palestine’.

   Trygve Lie, ‘In the Cause of Peace’, NY, Macmillan, 1954, P. 174.

 

11^th December 1947

[The British announced that they would withdraw from Palestine by May 15^th 1948]

(www.wyevalley.worldonline.co.uk)

 January 1948

The British Commander of Jordan’s Arab Legion, Sir John Bagot Glubb told the Security Council:

‘Ever since January 1948, the Arabs had been endeavouring to cut the main road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and thereby isolate the Jewish inhabitants of the Holy City’.

            ‘A soldier with the Arabs’,  London, Stoughton and Holder, 1951

 

The British Commander of Jordan’s Arab League, John Bagot Glubb, wrote:

‘Early in January, the first detachments of the Arab Liberation Army began to infiltrate into Palestine from Syria.  Some came through Jordan and even through Amman.…They were in reality to strike the first blow’.

‘A Soldier with the Arabs’, John Bagot Glubb, London, Stoughton and Holder, 1951, p. 79

 

[Confirming that the fighting was started by the Arab armies, not the Jews]

 

 February 1948

February 16^th 1948

UN Palestinian Commission, on Arab Higher Committee’s rejection, said it was an effort

 

‘to prevent the implementation of the [General] Assembly’s plan of partition, and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence, including armed incursions into Palestinian territory’

and

‘Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged ina deliberate effort alter by force the settlement envisaged therein’.

Security Council Official  Records, Special Supplement, (1948) p.20

 

 April 1948

April 3^rd 1948

Near East Broadcasting Station (Cyprus) announced:

 ‘It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encourages the refugees from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and that certain leaders have tried to make political capital of their miserable situation’.

(www.sciencenewsforum.com)

 

            [This was later confirmed by Arab media]

 

‘The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies’

Falastin, Jordan, 19/2/1949, (http://palestinefacts.org)

 

‘The removal of the Arab inhabitants …was voluntary and was carried out at our request…The Arab delegation proudly asked for the evacuation of the Arabs and their removal to the neighboring Arab countries’

Arab National Committee of Haifa, April 1950,  (http://palestinefacts.org)

 (

April 9^{th  Â} Â 1948

 

Deir Yassin

 

‘The Jews never intended to hurt the population of the village, but were forced to do so after they met enemy fire from the population, which killed the Irgun commander’

(Yunis Ahmed Assad, survivor,  in Al Urdan Jordanian newspaper, 9/4/53)

 

‘The villagers protested against the atrocity claims. We said; ‘There was no rape’. Khalid said ‘We have to say this, so the Arabs armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews’.

(Aby Mahmud, resident of Deir Yassin, 20/3/98, pnews.org)

  

‘There were no rapes.  It’s all lies.  There were no pregnant women who were slit open.  It was propaganda that…Arabs put out so Arab armies would invade.  They ended up expelling people from all of Palestine on the rumour of Deir Yassin’.

(Muhammed Radwan,  Deir Yassin survivor and fighter, quoted in ‘Deir Yassin, in  ’A Casualty of

 Guns and Propaganda’ by Paul Homes, Middle East Times, 20/4/98)

 

[Survivors statements about Deir Yassin]

 

April 13^th 1948

 

[80 Jewish doctors and nurses were killed by Arabs in a massacre, planned in advance,  on their way up to the Jewish Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem]. See The Hadassah Convoy Massacre

April 16^th, 1948

Jamal Husseini, Arab Higher committee’s spokesman told the Security Council:

‘The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting.  We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight’.

(Security Council Official records, S/Agenda/58)

 

[Showing that the war started because Arabs armies attacked Israel]

 

April 26^th 1948

US Consul General in Haifa, Aubrey Lippincott:

‘Local Mufti-dominated leaders were urging all Arabs to leave the city’.

(gmroper.mu.nu)

Haifa District HQ of the British Palestine Police reported to Police HQ in Jerusalem

‘Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives’.

(www.sullivan-county.com)

[Showing again that Palestinian refugees were urged to flee by their own leaders]

 

 May 1948

 May 8^th 1948

A British Military Observer reported that:

‘The Jews have been making extensive efforts to prevent wholesale evacuation[of Arabs], but their propaganda appears to have had very little effect’.

(http://palestinefacts.org)

Following a visit to refugees in Gaza, a British diplomat reported

'But while they express no bitterness against the Jews…they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states: 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes’.

British Foreign Office Document #371/75342/XC/A/4991, (www.sullivan-county.com)

[Confirming that ‘Palestinian’ refugees were urged to flee by their own leaders]

 

May 13^th, 1948

[A Jewish Kibbutz, Kfar Etzion, and its defenders surrendered to the Arab Legion. 128 Jews were massacred by Palestinian Arab irregulars of the Jordan Legion, or members of the Legion itself. This was an example of ethnic cleansing.   The Dehaisheh refugee camp was later established on the site of the 3 Kibbutzim of the Etzion Bloc].  Gush Etzion Remembered - The Kfar Etzion Massacre

(

May 14^th 1948

 

 Israel’s Proclamation of Independence: (see Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel )

 

‘In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and to play their part in the development of the state, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions, provisional or permanent’

Tel Aviv, 14/5/48

 

[Israeli law states unequivocally that Arab citizens have ‘full and equal citizenship’]

 

May 15^th 1948

Secretary General of the Arab League, Abdul Razek Azzam Pasha, announced at a Cairo Press Conference:

‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre’.

Reported in New York Times, 16/5/48

 

May 20^th 1948

Ukraine Delegate Tarasenko told  the UN Security Council:

 

‘An armed struggle is taking place in Palestine as a result of the unlawful invasion by a number of  States of the territory of Palestine, which does not form part of the territory of any of the States whose armed forces have invaded it’

Quoted by Herzog, Israel’s ambassador, at 47th Plenary Meeting of United Nations, 26/10/1977 (United Nations official record A/32/PV.47 )

 

[More confirmation that it was the Arabs who were the aggressors]

May 26^th 1948

 

A Haifa District H.Q British Police report:

‘Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stayand carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe’.

(limewoody.wordpress.com

May 29^th 1948

[During the The Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem, the nearly 2,000 remaining Jews whose families had lived in the old city of Jerusalem were forcibly removed from the city,  Ignoring UN Resolutions, the TransJordanian soldiers destroyed all but one of the  synagogues, as well as ancient Jewish graveyards in the Old City.

 

 

May 29^th 1948

Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko told Security Council:

‘This is not the first time that the Arab states, which organised the invasion of Palestine, have ignored a decision of the Security Council or of the General Assembly’.

Security Council Official Records, SA/Agenda/77, May 29^th, p. 2

 September 1948

Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee, in an interview with the Beirut Telegraph, said:

 

‘The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state.  The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously, and they must share in the solution of the problem’.

(Beirut Telegraph, 6/9/48, cfpm.org))

Sixty years ago in December 1948

December 12^th 1948

UN General Assembly Resolution 194, Para 5 called for

‘A just settlement of the refugee problem’

[This referred to all refugees, Jewish as well as Arab]

Please contact me if you would like further information, at:

Naomi Benari meedu (at) toucansurf.com

United Nations peacekeepers in the Central African Republic (CAR) are stepping up their presence near a refugee camp in the country’s northeast where deadly clashes last week have increased tensions in an already unstable area.

Reuters, Wednesday December 23 2009
* Solar co withdraws application from federal agency
* Proposed project to have generated 150 MW of electricity
* Shares of First Solar close down 1 percent
LOS ANGELES, Dec 22 (Reuters) - U.S. solar power company First Solar Inc has dropped plans to develop a 150 megawatt solar power project in Colorado, the company said on Tuesday, shifting its focus to “higher priority projects.”
Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar is one of the world’s largest solar module makers and has more than 1.5 gigawatts of power projects in its pipeline.
The company on Dec. 17 withdrew its application with the Bureau of Land Management to build the project across 2,100 acres of high desert in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, said Steven Hall, a spokesman with the federal agency in Colorado.
Withdrawing the application lets First Solar work on higher-priority and “nearer-term” projects, company spokesman Alan Bernheimer wrote in an email.
He later added that the company is reviewing its portfolio to see which projects have the highest priority based on factors like transmission capacity.
The proposed 150 MW project was part of the pipeline of utility-scale solar farms that First Solar acquired when it bought rival OptiSolar earlier this year.
The federal agency said on Tuesday that it also denied applications for four other projects by First Solar in Barstow, California that together total about 2.5 gigawatts.
Wedbush Morgan analyst Christine Hersey said that investors should take note even though First Solar has not spent large sums on developing these projects beyond its purchase of OptiSolar’s pipeline.
“Some of these U.S. large scale projects may be a little bit more difficult to develop than investors realize,” Hersey said.
First Solar has the lowest production costs in the industry. Its cadmium telluride-based panels that convert sunlight to electricity are cheaper to make, but less efficient than traditional silicon-based panels.
First Solar’s shares closed down 1 percent at $135.50 in trading on Tuesday on the Nasdaq.
(Reporting by Laura Isensee; Editing by Robert MacMillan, Phil Berlowitz)

By SPENCER SWARTZ And JIM CARLTON
Businesses that had banked on global greenhouse-gas limits to spur alternative-energy investments now are looking to national and local policies to get more wind turbines turning and nuclear-power plants humming, after the muddled outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit.
The failure of the United Nations gathering to produce an enforceable accord to cut fossil-fuel emissions leaves the U.S., Europe, China, India and other countries to pursue the energy policies they already had.

In many cases, those policies are aimed more at strategic goals, such as economic development or reducing dependence on Mideast oil, than at threats posed by global warming.
Still, some businesses say these policies could play a major role in fostering so-called clean technology, which includes non-fossil power sources, such as wind turbines, and related know-how, such as software that equips energy grids to cope with intermittent bursts of power from solar cells.
Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for General Electric Co., whose products include energy-efficient locomotives and wind turbines, says his company is “encouraged and optimistic” because of rising sales to nations like China. He said GE’s cleantech revenues in China for the first nine months of 2009 totaled $660 million, up 50% from a year earlier.
Since 2002, venture-capital investments in cleantech world-wide have soared from about $1 billion to an estimated $5 billion to $6 billion this year, according to the Cleantech Group, a San Francisco market-research firm. After experiencing one of its first back-to-back quarterly declines in March, venture funding for cleantech, much of it based in California’s Silicon Valley, has resumed its climb.
In the U.S., the lack of a strong Copenhagen deal may set back some of these investments, already hurt by falling oil prices. But the Obama administration still plans to use the Environmental Protection Agency to clamp down on the nation’s greenhouse-gas emissions, and the Energy Department remains committed to spending billions in public funds to jump-start alternative-energy technology.
On a smaller scale, California is pursuing a program to garner a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, more than double current levels. Most Northeastern states are expected to cut carbon-dioxide emissions, based on regional targets.
The adoption of renewable-energy standards, completed or under way in many states, should boost demand for technologies that make electrical grids more efficient, says Dan Adler, president of the nonprofit California Clean Energy Fund, set up by the state to help spur cleantech investment. Such efforts have fueled the growth of Silver Spring Networks Inc., a Redwood City, Calif., grid-technology provider, which has tripled its work force since 2008 to about 450.
“From our standpoint, we have been cheerleading Copenhagen,” says Eric Dresselhuys, the company’s executive vice president, “but it’s not a direct impact on this business.”
Many U.S. states will continue to shift toward lower-carbon fuels, says Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates investor-owned electric, gas and water utilities in the state. California is “not going to turn back,” he says.
Officials at Iberdrola, the Spanish power company and the world’s biggest renewable-energy company say they are evaluating investments based on local policies, such as renewable-energy standards in states like Texas.
Some businesses, worried about a patchwork of federal and state regulation, are still pushing for Congress to enact a nationwide system for cutting carbon-dioxide emissions. But the prospects for congressional action in the 2010 election year look dim.
China, spurred in part by its desire to reduce dependence on foreign oil, remains committed to a sweeping energy efficiency program that calls for cutting carbon intensity, a measure of emissions relative to the size of the economy, by 40% to 45% from 2005 levels by 2020. That means government support for alternative energies, and for Chinese companies in that field, is likely to continue to grow.
Gao Jifan, chief executive of Trina Solar Ltd., a Chinese maker of solar panels, says the continuous cost reductions being achieved by solar-panel producers are making the technology more affordable. “So the outlook for its development is unstoppable,” he said in a statement.
In the European Union, companies still have to comply with laws that require member nations to reduce emissions collectively to 20% below their 1990 levels by 2020, despite the summit’s lack of binding targets. .
“We just didn’t get a good sense from the [Copenhagen] conference about the regulatory structures that might be in place and the general direction of where public policy is headed,” says Andrew Turpin, spokesman for Centrica PLC, Britain’s biggest energy provider, echoing complaints by other European energy investors about the gathering.
Getty Images —Rebecca Smith, Sue Feng and Keith Johnson contributed to this article.
Write to Spencer Swartz at spencer.swartz@dowjones.com and Jim Carlton at jim.carlton@wsj.com

By CLAIRE RANGEL
Wind projects are spearheading Hawaii’s goal to be a model of clean energy independence for the rest of the U.S.
The state is home to pioneering new technologies in wind power. Proposed projects include the construction of an underwater cable system to transfer electricity, generated from new wind farms, across the islands. There are also efforts to sequester wind power generated at night for use during the day.
Hawaii, like the rest of the U.S., is trying to shift away from fossil fuels because of concerns about climate change and energy independence. But the move seems more urgent there, as Hawaii is more dependent on petroleum than any other state.
Hawaii’s electricity prices are the most expensive in the country, and the state relies on imported oil to fuel power plants and meet 75% of its electricity demands. When oil prices peaked at $147 a barrel in the summer of 2008, the cost of electricity in Hawaii was five times that of the mainland.
Michael W. Allman, president and chief executive officer of Sempra Generation, said that “Hawaii will value energy storage and renewable energy more than anyone else as it’s completely captive to oil and its volatility, which puts an economic squeeze on the state.”
Six wind power farms are in development, with a supply capacity of over half a gigawatt, said Ted Peck, state energy administrator for Hawaii.
First Wind Hawaii’s 200-megawatt facility on Molokai and Castle & Cooke’s 200-megawatt unit on Lanai are two of the biggest farms planned, intending to feed one of Hawaii’s most ambitious schemes under its Clean Energy Initiative—the Interisland Wind Project.
Hawaii wants to transport the 400 megawatts generated from the farms, located on two of the smaller and most rural islands, to Oahu, the most densely populated and biggest electricity user in the state, via an undersea cable system. A longer-term target is to connect Maui and the Big Island to the project.
It would be the first time the Hawaiian archipelago would be interconnected for electricity, a “big breakthrough,” said Peter Rosegg, spokesman for the Hawaiian Electric Co.
Hawaiian Electric, a partner in the Interisland project, will upgrade Oahu’s power grid and operations system to accept the new wind power supply and will run the cable system. Mr. Peck said the goal is for the underwater cables to be laid by 2013.
But Hawaii’s bid for more wind faces a big challenge: Wind doesn’t blow all the time. In Hawaii, wind typically picks up at night, when electricity demand ebbs.Devising a workable battery storage could help harness that energy.
First Wind is testing a utility-scale battery at its 30-megawatt Kaheawa Wind farm on Maui, according to Mr. Peck.

By LIAM DENNING
In Copenhagen, world leaders debated climate change they didn’t quite believe in enough to overcome political obstacles. What does their lack of agreement portend for the U.S. electricity sector?
More uncertainty is the short answer. When and how America will handle carbon emissions are variables affecting every power company’s investment decisions and valuation.

Selling even a multi-lateral settlement to Americans was going to be difficult in the wake of the “Climategate” revelations throwing doubt on the science of global warming. Unilateral legislation ahead of next year’s mid-term elections now looks all but impossible. Meanwhile, the alternative route of having the Environmental Protection Agency regulate carbon emissions as pollutants would likely provoke strong legal challenges.
Rob LaCount, a senior director at IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, reckons that as the window of opportunity for passing comprehensive legislation closes, a more piece-meal approach becomes likely.
The big losers from this continued uncertainty are companies with large, unregulated nuclear power portfolios, such as Exelon and Entergy. Nuclear plants, with their zero carbon emissions, represent an option on carbon. If carbon were to become embedded in the electricity price, as coal and natural gas-fired generators factored it into their costs, the benefit would flow to the nuclear generators’ bottom lines. The more that day is deferred, the less tangible those extra cash-flows are.
Conversely, unregulated power producers burning coal benefit from this stay of execution. Not all benefit equally, however, with much depending on the regional market in which they operate. In the absence of a cost of carbon, coal-fired generators selling into wholesale markets where natural gas-fired plants set the marginal price of electricity tend to earn good profit margins per megawatt-hour of electricity produced.
Carbon pricing would savage such margins—that’s the idea, after all. In its absence, it might be time to reappraise Allegheny Energy, the worst-performing member of the S&P Utilities index this year. As Morgan Stanley points out, its unregulated generation portfolio is mainly coal-fired, operating where gas-fired competitors set electricity prices. At 11 times 2009 earnings versus a sector average of 13.4 times, Allegheny appears priced for change that Copenhagen did not deliver.
Write to Liam Denning at liam.denning@wsj.com