Author: Big Gav

The Age has an article on Beyond Zero Emissions‘ launch of their “T10” campaign to switch Australia to 100% renewable power in a decade – Zero emissions possible – at $40bn a year.

AUSTRALIA could move to 100 per cent renewable energy within a decade if it spent heavily on cutting-edge solar thermal and wind technology, according to an analysis released as part of a community bid to redirect the flailing climate policy debate.

The shift would require the annual investment of up to $40 billion – roughly 3.5 per cent of national GDP – with the largest chunk going towards solar thermal power plants that used molten-salt heat storage to allow power generation to continue without sunlight.

The plan by advocacy group Beyond Zero Emissions was outlined at the launch of the Transition Decade, or T10, a grassroots campaign hoping to garner support for dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Pitched as a response to the failure to introduce national and state policies to substantially reduce emissions, T10 won support yesterday from the City of Melbourne, the Australian Greens and Victorian Governor David de Kretser.

Launching the campaign, Professor de Kretser said Australia had a responsibility to act.

”If every person in the world generated greenhouse gas emissions per person equivalent to those of each Australian today, the levels would quickly exceed those predicted to cause very dangerous global warming,” he told more than 1000 people at the Melbourne Town Hall. ”The consequences for planet Earth … would be disastrous.”

Under the Beyond Zero Emissions model, concentrated solar thermal plants at 12 sites across the country would meet 60 per cent of national energy demands. They would be supplemented by wind and photovoltaic solar panels, with existing hydroelectricity and biomass from burning crop remains as back-up.

Beyond Zero Emissions spokesman Mark Ogge said developments overseas had shown the claims that renewable energy could not provide baseload power had no basis.

The New York Times has a post on slow progress for BrightSource and their proposed solar thermal power project in Southern California – BrightSource Alters Solar Plant Plan to Address Concerns Over Desert Tortoise.

The developer of California’s first new solar power plant in 20 years has proposed revamping the project in an attempt to defuse concern over its effect on the imperiled desert tortoise.

“This reconfiguration is pretty minimal from what we’ve seen and it hasn’t really addressed the core issues on the impact on desert tortoise and rare plants,” said a representative of an environmental group said.

BrightSource Energy on Thursday plans to submit a new design to regulators that shrinks the size of the 4,000-acre Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating Station by 12 percent, reducing the number of desert tortoises that must be relocated and avoiding an area of rare plants.

The portion of the project that would most affect wildlife will be cut by 23 percent. The power plant’s electricity generation would fall from 440 megawatts to 392 megawatts.

Since BrightSource submitted an application to build a solar thermal power plant in August 2007, environmental groups have objected to its location in the Ivanpah Valley in the Southern California desert, saying it would eliminate tortoise habitat.

Surveys have found 25 desert tortoises on the site, which is about 45 miles south of Las Vegas.

Similar disputes have slowed some of the other dozen solar power plants now undergoing licensing in California, and the resolution of the Ivanpah issues could point the way to removing such obstacles.

“I want to make clear to everybody that this is an extremely important project,” Jeffrey Byron, a member of the California Energy Commission, said at a Jan. 11 hearing on the Ivanpah solar farm. “This represents the first of what we hope will be many renewable projects that will come before the energy commission.” …

BrightSource, which is backed by Google, Morgan Stanley, Chevron and BP, has signed contracts to supply 2,600 megawatts of electricity to California utilities, which are struggling to meet a state mandate to obtain 33 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

Giles Parkinson at The Australian has a bit more on the purchase of Ausra by Areva – Solar technology heads offshore for sunnier future .

THIS is a tale of two emerging solar technologies. One that gauged the state of the local market and decided to try its luck overseas and has now been bought by the world’s biggest nuclear energy group, and the other that elected to stay at home, seduced by a massive government subsidy, and has now been sold to a local company at a bargain basement price.

The fortunes of Ausra and Solar Systems have captivated those behind similar emerging technologies such as solar, geothermal and wave because they are confronted by the same dilemma: should they stay or should they go to greener pastures? The experience of these two companies and the current state of Australian policy suggests there is little incentive to stay.

It was an extraordinary coincidence that the sale of both companies — leaders in their respective fields — was announced within an hour of each other last Tuesday, and the contrasting fortunes could not have been more dramatic.

Ausra was sold to Areva and the solar thermal energy technology developed by UNSW researcher David Mills will now be used as the springboard for the French giant’s ambitions to dominate the global solar thermal energy market in the same way it does nuclear. Solar Systems, the company that was at one time to build the world’s largest solar energy utility, has been sold to the listed Silex Systems, which says it will invest around $10 million to see if it can resolve the issues around the concentrated solar photovoltaic technology and help it deliver on its former promise. …

The truth remains, however, that despite the hugely abundant natural sources of renewable energy, and the undoubted brilliance of its researchers and engineers, Australia remains a lousy place to invest in and develop renewable energy.

There is no market-based mechanism or government incentive that supports a broad portfolio of technologies, and the government still limits itself to one-off subsidies to a chosen few, which means the focus goes on the construction of “trophy” projects rather than the development of technology.

Marine, solar and even geothermal groups are seriously considering packing their bags for more receptive regimes overseas. At least there, the thought might be, they can get access to finance and attract major developers.

The New Matilda has an interesting article by James Arvanitakis looking at the debate prompted by the 2010 Intergenerational Report and pointing out its not the size of our population is that matters, its how we structure our economy to support the population in a sustainable way – Right Room, Wrong Elephant.

Photo courtesy flickr/photonquantique

In a parliamentary speech on global environmental issues delivered late last year, ALP MP Kelvin Thomson said it was time to discuss the environmental elephant in the room. At the time, you’d have been forgiven for assuming he was fed up with the shortcomings of Kevin Rudd’s climate policy as the Government focused all its attention on outmanoeuvring Malcolm Turnbull, rather than addressing the problems with its ETS.

Actually, the elephant Thomson wanted to talk about was population growth, both here and globally. Thomson read out a long list of global issues, from traffic congestion and waste, to global warming and terrorism, and explained how the population explosion was at the base of each of these problems.

Now, a couple of months later, the issue of population as a so-called “elephant in the room” is front and centre. Driven by the release of the 2010 Intergenerational Report — as well as by a Prime Minister who seems genuinely excited by the prospect of an Australian population of 35 million — everyone is talking about this particular elephant. Buying into the debate, entrepreneur Dick Smith and former NSW premier, Bob Carr, have both warned that this level of growth will lead to ecological disaster and that Australia is unlikely to be able to handle many more people.

For myself and many of my colleagues, however, this issue is far from being a new one. Population and sustainability are concerns that we see raised constantly in our work and we have seen that, while the motivations of those raising the concerns may vary significantly, the way the population question plays out is very specific. There’s just one question we are asked again and again: “What is the right population number for Australia?”

Is it a valid question? Well, perhaps, but before we even try to answer it, we need to understand that there is another elephant in the room. This one has been pointed out by British social commentator George Monbiot, and it’s one that Kelvin Thomson and his contemporaries have chosen to ignore: that those worrying most about population seem to be post-reproductive middle aged, comfortable white men who have reached a certain level of material success. Further, Monbiot reminds us, the population explosion is the one environmental problem that this high energy consuming sub-section of the population can not actually be blamed for.

In other words, to ask questions about an ideal population size completely misses the point.

On a related note, Science has a paper on the radical” changes to the current global food system required to support the expanded global population we’ll see in a couple of decades time – “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People“.

The primary recommendations of the report are:

* “Closing the Yield Gap” (achieving “best practice” results everywhere)
* Increasing Production Limits
* Reducing Waste of Food
* Changing Diets (primarily eating less meat)
* Expanding Aquaculture

A threefold challenge now faces the world: Match the rapidly changing demand for food from a larger and more affluent population to its supply; do so in ways that are environmentally and socially sustainable; and ensure that the world’s poorest people are no longer hungry. This challenge requires changes in the way food is produced, stored, processed, distributed, and accessed that are as radical as those that occurred during the 18th- and 19th-century Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions and the 20th-century Green Revolution. Increases in production will have an important part to play, but they will be constrained as never before by the finite resources provided by Earth’s lands, oceans, and atmosphere.

Patterns in global food prices are indicators of trends in the availability of food, at least for those who can afford it and have access to world markets. Over the past century, gross food prices have generally fallen, leveling off in the past three decades but punctuated by price spikes such as that caused by the 1970s oil crisis. In mid-2008, there was an unexpected rapid rise in food prices, the cause of which is still being debated, that subsided when the world economy went into recession. However, many (but not all) commentators have predicted that this spike heralds a period of rising and more volatile food prices driven primarily by increased demand from rapidly developing countries, as well as by competition for resources from first-generation biofuels production. Increased food prices will stimulate greater investment in food production, but the critical importance of food to human well-being and also to social and political stability makes it likely that governments and other organizations will want to encourage food production beyond that driven by simple market mechanisms. The long-term nature of returns on investment for many aspects of food production and the importance of policies that promote sustainability and equity also argue against purely relying on market solutions.

So how can more food be produced sustainably? In the past, the primary solution to food shortages has been to bring more land into agriculture and to exploit new fish stocks. Yet over the past 5 decades, while grain production has more than doubled, the amount of land devoted to arable agriculture globally has increased by only ~9%. Some new land could be brought into cultivation, but the competition for land from other human activities makes this an increasingly unlikely and costly solution, particularly if protecting biodiversity and the public goods provided by natural ecosystems (for example, carbon storage in rainforest) are given higher priority. In recent decades, agricultural land that was formerly productive has been lost to urbanization and other human uses, as well as to desertification, salinization, soil erosion, and other consequences of unsustainable land management. Further losses, which may be exacerbated by climate change, are likely. Recent policy decisions to produce first-generation biofuels on good quality agricultural land have added to the competitive pressures. Thus, the most likely scenario is that more food will need to be produced from the same amount of (or even less) land. Moreover, there are no major new fishing grounds: Virtually all capture fisheries are fully exploited, and most are overexploited.

Recent studies suggest that the world will need 70 to 100% more food by 2050. In this article, major strategies for contributing to the challenge of feeding 9 billion people, including the most disadvantaged, are explored. Particular emphasis is given to sustainability, as well as to the combined role of the natural and social sciences in analyzing and addressing the challenge.

Related posts :

* The Fat Man, The Population Bomb And The Green Revolution
* Norman Borlaug: Saint Or Sinner ?

Inhabitat has a post on a conceptual design to make Sydney’s ugliest building a little more attractive – Solar Building Skin Turns Sydney’s Ugliest Tower into an Eco-marvel.

Sydney’s ugliest building may soon be getting a new lease on life through to a plan to ‘reskin’ the entire tower with a high-performance photovoltaic skin. Architecture firm Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA) has proposed the retrofit, and if their plan is enacted it would turn the 1960’s brutalist building into a brilliant super-efficient eco-tower.

The University of Technology Sydney Tower has long been known as Sydney’s ugliest building (it even says so on their website). It was built in 1960 and it currently hosts the headquarters of the University.

LAVA’s proposed ‘Tower Skin’ concept would wrap the building with a lightweight composite mesh textile. The cocooned shell would then collect rain water, generate electricity and assist the ventilation system in cooling the tower. At night, the skin works as an intelligent media surface that communicates information on events in real time.

While this design is only concept, UTS is making extensive renovations on the tower with the goal of improving energy and water efficiency. Unfortunately, it probably won’t look as cool as this one. The concept design is on display at STATE. RESPOND in the Object Gallery in Sydney.

Apparently its been a little snowy in the US this winter, with the climate skeptic freakshow proclaiming this means the planet as a whole can’t be warming (which would make snow anywhere impossible) while some climate change activists say its proof of global warming. MT at “Only In It For the Gold” says its really just a side-effect of El Nino – A Hill of Snow.

Well, blizzards in DC are no big deal as far as we are concerned here, but blizzards in Texas, that’s another matter. And with reports of a minute amount of snow sticking to the ground in Florida, we have what is really an unusual event: snow cover in every one of the contiguous states. (I spotted a tiny bit of frozen precipitation in Austin mixed in with the rain, but with my cowboy hat off and my Habs’ tuque on, I wouldn’t really have called it snow.)

So what are we to make of the snowpocalypse? …

Well, when this year is different from last year, the best place to look is not in gradual climate change but in large natural shifts in climate. Of these, the prime candidate should always be the big one, the El Nino/La Nina cycle (known in the field by the inexcusable name ENSO which stands for “El Nino Southern Oscillation” which sacrifices both the oceanographers’ poetry and the meteorologists’ precision for mealy-mouthed and worthless compromise. But never mind that.) Anyway, Google being my friend, I asked it “noreaster el nino” and was promptly rewarded with the following abstract:

Lynne M. Hoppe, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD; and D. R. Smith

A significant wintertime event along the East Coast is a marine cyclone called the Nor’easter. These storms occur when cold air from the continent interacts with warm air and water just offshore, associated with the Gulf Stream. This paper investigates whether El Niño events have any influence on the development of such storms. This paper looks at winter storms for the 1983-84, 1997-98, and 2004-05 events. The number of extratropical cyclones, intensity of these cyclones and the central and minimum pressures of the cyclones were gathered. By comparing these data, conclusions were made regarding the generation and movement of Nor’easter storms. The storms during El Nino events were pushed further south due to the jet stream being pushed further south. The frequency of storms increased during strong El Niño years (e.g., 1983-’84 or 1997-’98). Although the is ability to predict when or where these storms will occur is difficult at best, this study provides clues to better understand the effect of El Niño on these extratropical marine cyclones.

Okay, kids? Got that? Jet stream moves south, and more noreasters happen IN EL NINO CONDITIONS. The US is just going to be more snow-covered in El Nino conditions.

Grist has an article on the production of nitrogen based fertilisers – Our other addiction: the tricky geopolitics of nitrogen fertilizer.

We burn through more of it per capita than any other country; and our appetite for it can only be sated with massive imports.

No, not oil—I’m talking about nitrogen fertilizer. With only 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. consumes nearly 12 percent of the globe’s annual synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production. And we’re producing less and less of it at home—meaning that, as with petroleum, we’re increasingly dependent on other nations for this key crop nutrient.

In a sense, the answer to the question of where our food comes from is not some vast Iowa cornfield or teeming North Carolina hog factory. It’s places like the Port Lisas Industrial Estate on the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, where 10 natural gas-sucking ammonia plants produce about a quarter of the nitrogen fertilizer used by American farmers.

Nitrogen fertilizer production is tied directly to natural gas, the energy source used in the United States to synthesize nitrogen-rich ammonia from thin air. So you could also imagine our food coming from some vast natural gas deposit in the Gulf of Mexico or off of Trinidad. Nearly as much as grain elevators or supermarkets, off-shore gas rigs count as vital food-system infrastructure.

But as U.S. natural gas prices began rising early this decade, the domestic nitrogen fertilizer industry went into crisis. Producers either scaled up to gain efficiency, moved to countries with cheaper natural gas sources like Trinidad and Tobago, or simply shuttered plants.

The industry has flirted with the idea of switching to gasified coal as the energy source for N fertilizer. “Recent advances in using coal to produce ammonia have increasingly made this technology economically feasible, especially at high natural gas prices,” USDA analyst Wen-yuan Huang wrote in a 2009 paper [PDF]. “Domestic ammonia production based on coal may play a larger role in the U.S. nitrogen supply if economic conditions and environmental considerations are favorable.”

But so far, only one firm, North Dakota-based Dakota Gasification Company, makes a significant amount of nitrogen fertilizer with gasified coal. Another plant, Kansas-based CVR Industries, is making nitrogen fertilizer with yet another fossil-based alternative: gasified petroleum coke. Together, these companies generate about 5 percent of our domestically produced nitrogen. But these exotic inputs don’t seem to be on the verge of pushing out natural gas anytime soon, Janice Berry, a researcher at the Alabama-based fertilizer industry tracker IFDC, told me. “I know of no companies that plan to switch over,” she said. And that’s just as well, because moving to carbon-rich sources like coal and petroleum would only add to N fertilizer’s massive carbon footprint.

Instead, with natural gas prices high, the domestic industry has shrunk. Between 1999 and 2008, domestic nitrogen fertilizer production plunged nearly 40 percent, according to a USDA report [PDF]. But demand for nitrogen—the juice that keeps those big corn crops coming—rose steadily. To fill the gap, we now import more than half of the nitrogen we consume, compared to about 15 percent just a decade ago, the USDA report states.

So where does our nitrogen come from? Given our food system’s reliance on synthetic nitrogen, that’s another way of asking: Where does our food come from?

Fast Company has an article on Facebook’s new 147,000 square foot, energy efficient data centre in Oregon – Facebook Buys Dedicated Data Center, Could Servers Be Far Behind? .

Facebook is so mind-bogglingly vast–350 million users, 70% of them actively using applications on the service–that it’s almost impossible to comprehend what it does with all that data. Which makes it surprising that it’s taken this long for Facebook to open a purpose-built and self-owned data center. What’s more, this move could clear a path for Facebook to design and build its own servers. …

Which is where Oregon enters the frame, and today’s news that Facebook will be moving into a purpose-built multi-million dollar data center facility in Prineville. Oregon was able to offer Facebook “a unique combination of suitable climate for environmental cooling, renewable power resources” as well as the availability of a suitable site, the company’s Director of Site Operation, Tom Furlong, noted in Governor Ted Kulongoski’s press release on the matter. Apparently the facility will be designed to meet LEED gold standards, employing innovative cooling and power management to “make it one of the most energy efficient data centers in the United States.”

Which is pretty impressive credentials for what many have dismissed as a “time wasting” social networking fad that’s barely making any profit. It also means Facebook’s joining the growing trend of highly eco-conscious data centers, which will be an important move as our increasingly online life generates more and more data.

Heiliger also hinted that there are more innovative moves like this on the way–along the lines of “designing and building our own servers.” The evolution from building huge data centers to designing servers is not uncommon, Google did the same thing. One requirement for building such hardware is to have a verifiably secure facility to experiment with new server architecture, which this data center will clearly supply.

Cryptogon puts the size of this data centre in context, with a post noting that some new government data centres are over 10 times the size of Facebook’s – Feds Push for Tracking Cell Phones.

For years, my guess has been that this other angle of the mass intercept program is related to persistent geosurveillance of targeted individuals. At a minimum, this is probably a component of the MAIN CORE system.

In the article below, Declan McCullagh writes, “Cellular providers tend not to retain moment-by-moment logs of when each mobile device contacts the tower, in part because there’s no business reason to store the data, and in part because the storage costs would be prohibitive.”

Just a few days ago, another of McCullagh’s articles made a similar, limited hangout argument about the retention of URLs.

Focusing on the network operators misses the point. The beam splitters don’t discriminate; they send a copy of everything, every single bit, to Uncle. So, sure, the carriers don’t want to spend money on archiving all of that surveillance data, but what is the state doing with its copy of the stream? …

Related:

Brand New 1.5 Million Square Foot NSA Data Centers (Utah / Texas)

The Age has an article saying “Sceptics are undermining the credibility of fundamental scientific institutions and their research” – Crisis of climate-change confidence.

Amid the thousands of stolen emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, posted on websites late last year, a telling exchange among the scientists has been largely overlooked.

It refers to reports that the US and Saudi Arabian governments had played a key role in picking a new candidate to chair the United Nation’s peak scientific body on climate change.

The emails, dating back to April 2002, noted reports of ”intense lobbying” by the US oil industry, specifically Exxon, to try to persuade officials in President George Bush’s White House to block the high-profile British atmospheric chemist, Dr Robert Watson, getting a second term as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Just months before, in September 2001, the IPCC under Watson had delivered its groundbreaking Third Assessment Report, which confirmed that the earth was warming and found there was, ”new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities”.

The finding, supported by the US National Academy of Sciences, provoked a severe backlash from critics of climate change science and figures in the oil and coal industry. Watson, a former science adviser to President Bill Clinton, was viewed by science sceptics and some in industry with deep suspicion.

A memo obtained under freedom of information by a US environment group revealed that Exxon’s lobbyist, Randy Randol, wrote to a key Bush official within weeks of the president’s inauguration in 2001 asking, ”Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the US?” By early 2002 the Bush administration was backing a new candidate for the IPCC chair, an Indian engineer, Dr Rajendra Pauchari.

”You may not have seen this latest piece of politicisation from the Bushies,” the former head of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Tom Wigley, wrote in a email to his old colleagues Phil Jones and Mike Hulme in April that year.

That year Jones would come under scrutiny by climate sceptics in the US over data he had used for some critical research to support his finding on rising temperatures in cities.

Jones noted the concerns over the IPPC chairman. But his colleague, Hulme, in a prescient response, argued, ”Why should not an Indian scientist chair IPCC? One could argue the [climate change] issue is more important for the south than the north …

”If the issue is that Exxon have lobbied and pressured Bush, then OK, this is regrettable but to be honest is anyone really surprised? All these decision about IPCC chairs and co-chairs are deeply political … ”

Pauchari was elected chairman by a majority of countries and Watson was defeated. In 2007, under Pauchari, the IPPC handed down its next series of reports, not only confirming the 2001 findings on global warming but strengthening them.

”Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level,” the first of the 2007 reports stated bluntly.

More significantly, the new report found that most of the increase in warming since the mid 20th century is, ”very likely” due to a human-caused increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. After Pauchari accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPPC, the Indian engineer once favoured by the Bush White House became the object of attack by global warming sceptics.

IN recent weeks, with climate science and scientists again under siege in the media, on sceptic blogs and from critics within their own ranks, the hacked East Anglia emails are a timely reminder that the so-called science ”war” over global warming is nothing new.

The credibility of the IPPC and some of the high-profile individuals who contribute to it have come under attack after every report. The attacks often escalate just before the crucial UN meetings of government ministers, which follow the reports that are supposed to debate how to cut global greenhouse gases. From Kyoto in 1997 to Copenhagen in 2009, climate sceptics and industry critics have targeted the science’s credibility and challenged the need to cut greenhouse gases.

The hacked East Anglia emails were posted on sceptic websites just weeks before December’s Copenhagen climate conference. The arguments against the climate science, even though supercharged by the emails, had little immediate effect on the UN conference. But the emails’ content is affecting public opinion in Britain and most likely the US and Australia. …

But despite the crisis engulfing climate science in recent weeks, no serious scientific academy, university or government research agency around the world is disputing the IPPC’s core findings: that global average temperatures have been increasing and that human activity is very likely responsible because of the burning fossil fuels and deforestation, which is increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

”The hacking of the emails will have zero impact on the scientific case for climate change,” says Will Steffen, the head of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute.

While he acknowledges that some of Jones’s temperature data was questioned in the hacked emails, Steffen points to thousands of studies across all the scientific disciplines over recent years that have supported the IPPC’s findings on global warming.

”There is an enormous amount of evidence from the recent warming of the planet beyond the instrumental atmospheric temperature record,” says Steffen, who authored a report on the issue last year for the Department of Climate Change.

”This evidence includes rising ocean temperatures, reductions in Arctic sea-ice thickness and extent, the melting of permafrost, the satellite measurements of rising atmospheric temperature, the loss of ice mass in Greenland, and more recently Antarctica, and thousands of ecological case studies on land and in the ocean showing changing times for ecological events like the flowering of plants and mating of organisms, the migration of fish, plants, birds and many others in response to the warming environment.”

Grist has a post from Senator Bernie Sanders on his solar power bill – It’s time for a solar revolution.

This country spends, in a typical year, $350 billion importing oil from Saudi Arabia and other foreign countries. While this is no doubt good news for the Saudi royal family, one of the richest in the world, it is bad news for the average American.

The vast majority of the American people understand that now is the time to move to energy independence so that we are no longer subject to the greed of OPEC or Wall Street speculators, or need to fight “wars for oil” in the Middle East. Americans also know that if we are serious about addressing environmental pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and the imperative to create millions of good-paying jobs, we must move aggressively to energy efficiency and such sustainable technologies as solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass.

Thomas Edison, one of history’s greatest inventors said; “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” He was right then, in 1931, and he remains right today. The American people agree. Today, 92 percent of all Americans want our country to develop solar energy resources, and 77 percent believe the federal government should make solar power development a national priority.

That is why I was joined by 10 of my colleagues (Senators Whitehouse, Cardin, Gillibrand, Merkley, Lautenberg, Leahy, Boxer, Menendez, Specter, and Harkin) in introducing the Ten Million Solar Roofs Act. The bill is all of 9 pages and is pretty straightforward. It calls for 10 million new solar rooftop systems and 200,000 new solar water heating systems over the next 10 years. When fully implemented, this legislation would lead to 30,000 megawatts of new photovoltaic energy, triple our total current U.S. solar energy capacity. It will increase by almost 20 times our current energy output from photovoltaic panels. The legislation will rapidly increase production of solar panels, driving down the price of photovoltaic systems. It also would mean the creation of over a million new jobs. The passage of this bill would dramatically reorient our energy priorities and would be a major step forward toward a clean energy future for the United States. ..

Interestingly, while solar has a great deal of public support, you might not know that from listening to energy debates in Congress. As a member of both the energy and environment committees, I am constantly astounded by how many of my colleagues prefer to focus on what the government can do for the nuclear or coal industries, rather than why the government should support clean and sustainable energy. In fact, many senators and congressmen are fighting for a “nuclear renaissance” and want the federal government to offer loan guarantees covering the cost to build 100 new nuclear plants. This could place at risk up to $1 trillion in taxpayer money.

In my view, this is an absurd proposal. First, it is enormously expensive and financially risky. Second, if we don’t know how to safely dispose of the highly toxic nuclear waster we currently have, what are we going to do with the new waste generated by 100 additional plants?

The SMH has an article on the recommendations from an independent public inquiry into Sydney’s public transport system (with the inquiry including ASPO Australia’s Garry Glazebrook, amongst others) – Finally, a plan that will get Sydney moving . Related articles include – European transport model to cost $71b, Linking the network to where the jobs are, This is too important to be left to the politicians, And never the trains shall meet and MyZone has sting in the tail for people living in the west.

THE Keneally government should delay building an expensive underground metro network for at least 10 years and focus on new heavy and light rail projects across Sydney, an independent inquiry recommends.

Not only would taxpayers save billions by postponing the metros, but reallocating money to a new heavy rail line through the central business district and across the harbour would provide at least 25 per cent more passenger capacity on the CityRail system for decades.

The inquiry, headed by the state’s former rail and roads boss Ron Christie, and backed by the Herald, proposes huge benefits for the transport-starved north-west and south-west suburbs, by building rail links to connect commuters to the job-rich arc between North Ryde and Mascot.

Mr Christie says the government should start work immediately on lines between Epping and Rouse Hill, in the north-west, and Glenfield and Leppington, in the south-west. At a total cost of $5 billion, these lines are cheaper than the seven kilometre CBD Metro, and should be completed by 2015.

Based on market research that measured people’s willingness to pay for better public transport, and using financial analysis by Allen Consulting, the 450-page report proposes $36 billion worth of new transport infrastructure be built over 30 years, and another $35 billion in operating and financing costs.

Mr Christie, who oversaw the successful transport operation during the 2000 Olympics, urges the government not to sign contracts for the $5.3 billion CBD Metro and $8 billion West Metro until it consults voters.

Mr Christie supports the proposed West Metro but only between Westmead and Barangaroo, not to Pyrmont or Rozelle and, critically, not using a corridor under Pitt Street, which should be reserved for CityRail. But he also says its construction should be deferred until 2020.

In the most searing critique yet of the metro proposals by a respected expert, Mr Christie warns: ”The proposed routes would jeopardise, perhaps fatally, future heavy rail capacity expansion and congestion-relief options within the CBD and across the harbour.”

While the government argues that the CBD Metro is the ”core” of a future Sydney-wide metro system, Mr Christie has found no overall network plan or system of fares has been made public.

The report reveals that the government has quietly abandoned its five-year-old metropolitan strategy, which was to create a European-style ”City of Cities” by encouraging jobs and medium-density housing in centres such as Parramatta and Liverpool.

The recent upswing in people talking about peak oil in the mainstream media continues, with Arup head Philip Dilley being quoted by the Scotland Herald – Peak oil theory could become a stark reality.

“Within five years we think peak oil is going to affect every aspect of our daily lives,” warned Philip Dilley, chairman of engineer Arup, yesterday. We are set for shortages and rising prices. And just to cheer you up, gas is probably going the same way too.

It all sounds familiar. The concept of “peak oil”, the stresses caused when oil production stops increasing, has been kicking around since the 1950s. …

But the membership of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, whose report Dilley was introducing, suggests these concerns are reaching the mainstream and business is getting anxious.

As a man known more for his fondness for pursuing commercial space flights and his airline brand than his love of the environment, Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson makes an unlikely green advocate.

As do others, including Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish Hydro Electric owner Scottish & Southern Energy and Brain Souter, founder and boss of transport firm Stagecoach.

Published yesterday, the taskforce’s second report (their first in autumn 2008 sank without trace because we were too busy worrying about our banks going bust) was notable for the starkness of some of its conclusions.

As the global economy expands, oil demand could rise from 80 million barrels a day to 120 million barrels a day by 2030. It could hit 180Mb/d by 2050. Yet the scope for production increases is limited.

Arup director John Motes said: “There may be a huge amount of oil in the ground, we are not saying there isn’t. But there is a limit to the rate at which we can extract it.”

This is because much of the stuff is in the form of tar sands or inaccessible locations such as Antarctica where it is time consuming and expensive to get the stuff out of the ground.

Currently around 80Mb/d comes out of the ground, the report found. But the taskforce is sceptical that this can get much above 92Mb/d.

Inc has an article on New Zealand based distributed manufacturing company Ponoko – The Future of Manufacturing.

It’s easy to mistake the laser cutter that sits in the Ponoko headquarters for an ordinary office appliance.

The machine stands roughly 3 feet tall — about the size and shape of a copy machine — and is encased by that dun-colored plastic that is so familiar in the modern workplace.

“It’s basically a big-ass printer,” says Ponoko’s CEO, David ten Have. “But it gives you an idea of where things are headed.”

The laser cutter looks sort of like a printer because it is, in fact, a sort of printer. Instead of arranging ink on paper, the machine carves materials using a highly concentrated beam of light that is controlled by a computer. Lift the lid, insert a flat piece of wood or plastic, and in 15 minutes or so, you have the parts for a tabletop, a lampshade, or a toy car.

For ten Have — a small, serious man of 34 with close-cropped dark hair that is flecked with silver — this is only the beginning. One day, he believes, perhaps 50 years from now, machines like this will be inexpensive enough to be in every home and will be capable of making almost anything. Buying a physical product — a cell phone, for instance — will be as easy as buying an MP3 on iTunes. Products won’t be shipped in containers; they will be downloaded as digital design files and then printed on our desks while we sip our morning coffee. Not only will this be exceedingly convenient, but ten Have says that it will reorder the global economy, green the planet, and unleash an unprecedented wave of creativity as regular people design their own stuff.

This is the wild, abstract future — fodder, perhaps, for keynote speeches and think tank prognostications but not the sort of thing you would expect to quickly turn into a profitable business. Yet ten Have is building such a business. Ponoko is piecing together an infrastructure for this new kind of supply chain, beginning with the laser cutter that sits a few feet from his office in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s July; the weather is sweltering in the United States, but in New Zealand, where the seasons are backward and buildings aren’t equipped with insulation, you feel the winter wind indoors. Ten Have is standing over a space heater in a small, damp room attempting to explain what this machine has to do with the future of manufacturing. “We’re trying to take Made in China and smear it across the globe,” he says. “We’re designing a factory for the 21st century.”

Forbes has an opinion piece by Jeremy Leggett on peak oil – The Next Crisis: Peak Oil.

“The next five years will see us face another crunch–the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well… Our message to government and businesses is clear: act. Don’t let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did.”

So wrote the CEOs and Chairmen of the companies involved in the U.K. Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy–Richard Branson of Virgin, Ian Marchant of Scottish and Southern, Brain Souter of Stagecoach, Phillip Dilley of Arup and I–in the forward of our second annual report, released on Feb. 10.

In the report, we produce data that suggests a peak of global oil production at less than 95 million barrels a day, up from some 85 million now, and we summarize fears that could result in a peak of less than 92 million, plus a steep fall beyond the peak, all at a time when demand is rising well in excess of 100 million barrels a day. The data is based on research conducted by consultancy Arup into current and projected oil production levels, extraction costs, exploration projects that are underway or in the pipeline and growth projections for developed and developing nations.

This is a loud blast of the whistle from a fairly broad group of companies. Neither are we alone on this side of the “premature peak oil” debate. The CEOs of oil companies Total and Petrobras are on record as saying the world will never produce more than 89 million barrels a day. The IEA has warned of an oil supply shock within five years and on Thursday raised its oil demand forecast for 2010 to 86.5 million barrels a day.

Reuters has a report on the increasing cost of finding and developing new fields – Oil exploration costs rocket as risks rise.

Finding oil and gas to replace the world’s fast dwindling reserves is increasingly risky as rigs probe areas once seen as too difficult or too dangerous, and costs are rocketing, which could imperil future supply.

The cost of discovering each new barrel of oil and gas has risen three-fold over the last decade as technology has pushed the frontiers of exploration into ever more remote areas.

As old fields run dry, oil companies are drilling wells in some of the most inhospitable regions, where political, physical, geological, geographical, technical and contractual risks are high, and they have had remarkable success.

Despite escalating challenges, the annual rate of discovery of new fields has remained remarkably constant at 15-20 billion barrels, more than enough to compensate for the loss of existing reserves that are declining at between 5 and 15 percent a year.

But the cost of this success is staggering, and unless consumers pay more for oil in future, some analysts think we could face an energy supply crunch within a few years.

“The age of cheap oil has gone and it is not going to come back,” said Paul Stevens, senior research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London. “The world is not going to run out of oil tomorrow, but it is more and more expensive to find and will continue to be so,” he said. “The worry is that investment may be squeezed as risks rise, and that could bring us to a looming supply crunch.”

Santos recently raised their gas reserves (largely due to new coal seam gas exploration) by 42 per cent, saying “the reserves upgrade brings its total reserves to 1.44 billion barrels of oil equivalent at the end of 2009”.

They now say they have enough gas to proceed with the first phase of their Gladstone based LNG project (partnering with Petronas), noting that total 2P reserves for the project were 4,003 petajoules as of December 31.

Santos CEO David Knox recently made an address to the Melbourne Mining Club, spruiking the proposal that brown coal fired power stations in Victoria be replaced with gas fired power, and pointing out that the Cooper Basin may have more life in it than many think, courtesy of shale gas – the Business Spectator has a report – Gas game changer.

In the address Knox forecast that, in time, the share market would come to understand the enormity of the Santos gas reserves and how they can supply both the export LNG markets at export prices and the local markets at prices that are based on current low levels, plus an inflation adjustment.

In particular, he said, over time there would sufficient gas to replace the four Victorian brown coal power stations, which are one of Australia’s biggest sources of carbon emissions.

The eastern Australian export gas would come from Gladstone, while Gunnedah gas in NSW could be used for both export and local. But then he added a third source – the Cooper basin. Until relatively recently, the Cooper basin has been seen as a dying field but Knox said that the new technology to extract gas from tight shale rocks opens up a new opportunity for the basin to supply NSW, Victoria and South Australia. …

Knox pointed out that Exxon has paid $US40 billion for a shale gas deposit in the US. No one is suggesting that the Cooper basin is worth anything like that, but its significance to Santos and to Australia was dramatically underestimated until today’s Knox address.

Knox has warned that the natural gas market in the Asian region is becoming very competitive as the US becomes self-sufficient in gas. Nevertheless he believes that the potential in the international market has been underestimated because of the carbon reductions it offers.

Beach Energy has also been showing interest in Cooper Basin shale gas, with chief Reg Nelson claiming unconventional gas had the potential for “a very large gas resource in the order of many tens of trillions of cubic feet that could begin to approach the CSG reserves of Queensland”.

Oil and Gas Journal says that Drillsearch Energy are the other company active in the unconventional gas sector in the Cooper Basin.

If Nelson is correct, this would further expand Australian gas reserves, extending their lifespan even under a scenario of greatly increased consumption to around a century (and thus further undermining any arguments to restrict exports based on resource nationalism – though obviously environmental issues remain, particularly given the experience in the US with unconventional gas extraction).

Environmental concerns are also dogging the coal seam gas industry, with farmers starting to resist developments in rural Queensland. The Brisbane Times has a report – Farmers wonder if LNG is worth its salt.

The Darling Downs area in Queensland is not exactly a hot-bed of anti-business radicalism. The prime agricultural region – which has also found itself in the midst of the energy boom – held the seat of the former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, while the office of the Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce is in nearby St George.

But in response to energy companies’ plans to extract billions of dollars worth of gas from the area’s underground coal, normally conservative farmers are shaping up for a fight with big business.

A clutch of energy giants are planning to use the area – part of the Surat Basin in the state’s south – as a source of gas to four separate liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plants in Gladstone. All want to make final investment decisions this year, in time to catch a predicted upswing in Asian energy demand and ship their first gas from about 2015.

Mirroring a bitter stoush between farmers and miners in NSW, farmers north of the border are questioning if cashing in on the energy boom might threaten the environment they depend on.

But this is not just a debate over environmental impacts and regional development. The battle highlights an emerging tension between resources development and the rural economy, which could provide another hurdle to the LNG industry’s ambitious expansion plans.

One of the most problematic byproducts from coal-seam gas extraction – which requires drilling thousands of holes for each LNG plant – is salt. ”It’s toxic to the plants, it’s toxic to the soil, it’s toxic to the animals,” said Ian Hayllor, a grain, oilseed and cotton farmer based 250 kilometres west of Brisbane.

AgForce, a peak organisation representing rural producers, says the coal-seam gas projects proposed in Queensland could produce up to 50 million tonnes of salt over the projects’ lifetime, suggesting it should be renamed the ”salt-mining industry”.

Salt cannot be burnt or sent into the ocean. It needs a commercial use, but the LNG companies have not yet found one. Santos, one of the LNG proponents, has said trucking the salt to other parts of the country is not economically viable; others are still looking for alternatives.

Mr Hayllor’s other concern involves the most valuable commodity of all in these parts: water. It is produced in abundance by the drilling process. Up to 36,000 wells may be drilled in Queensland over the next three to five years.

While the “waste water” could be treated and put to use, Mr Hayllor said the intensive drilling also threatened a shallow aquifer in the Darling Downs that supplied towns, businesses and farmers.

BusinessWeek reports on a new geothermal power project in Kenya – Kenya Electricity Signs $1.3 Billion Geothermal Deal.

Kenya Electricity Generating Co., the East African nation’s biggest power producer, signed a contract worth more than $1.3 billion for Sinclair Knight Merz Pty Ltd. to be consultants for the construction of facilities to provide 280 megawatts of geothermal power from underground hot springs.

Work will begin this month and take three years, Ken Gen Managing Director Edward Njoroge said in an e-mailed statement today. The geothermal power project, which will be Kenya’s biggest, comprises two fields in Olkaria near the town of Naivasha, he said.

“The scope of the project includes four 70-megawatt power generating machines, steam-gathering systems, substations, transmission lines and other infrastructure,” Njoroge said

The ABC has an update on Panax Geothermal’s progress in South Australia – Geothermal well 25 per cent finished.

The company drilling a geothermal well near Penola, in South Australia’s south-east, says it is more than a quarter of the way through the project.

Panax Geothermal has a massive rig set up at a site near Penola and has already drilled more than a kilometre. It says if it is successful it will be Australia’s first geothermal site to access hot water in an aquifer to create energy.

The company’s managing director, Bertus de Graaf, says two months has been set aside for the drilling program. “We’re targeting a maximum depth of 4,000 metres,” he said.

REW reports that French energy company has purchased solar thermal power company Ausra – Areva To Acquire CSP Company Ausra . Is this a sign they see real future growth opportunities in solar and nuclear as (at best) a legacy business ?

Areva this week said that it will acquire 100% of Ausra, provider of large-scale concentrated solar power solutions. This acquisition launches Areva’s new global solar energy business and the company said that it reflects Areva’s strategic objective to be the world leader in concentrated solar power (CSP) and will further strengthen and diversify its renewables portfolio.

This acquisition is expected to close in the next few months, subject to customary regulatory approval. Ausra will continue to operate out of its existing Mountain View, California headquarters.

“Today is about making a strong company even stronger. With Areva, Ausra is joining forces with one of the world’s global energy leaders. Combining Areva’s financial and commercial strengths, and its energy expertise, with Ausra’s proven technology and experienced management team will help position Areva for even greater success in the renewable and carbon-free energy industry,” said Dr. Robert Fishman, Ausra’s chairman and CEO.

Ausra’s Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) solar steam generators are designed for existing fossil-fired plants, new standalone solar and solar/fossil hybrid power plants and for industrial process steam customers. Ausra is the first solar steam boiler manufacturer to be awarded the ASME ‘S’ Stamp the industry hallmark of acceptance and certification.

The market for concentrated solar power plants is expected to grow substantially in the next decade with an average annual growth rate of 20% and should reach an estimated installed capacity of over 20 GW by 2020. With this acquisition, Areva is planning to capture large market share in the emergin sector.

Late last year, Ausra was selected as the solar steam boiler supplier for the proposed 100-megawatt JOAN1 concentrated solar thermal power (CSP) project currently under development in Ma’an, Jordan.

Technology Review has an article on “efficient cells made using abundant elements” from IBM, which may be an alternative to thin film solar cells – Efficient Solar Cells from Cheaper Materials.

Researchers at IBM have increased the efficiency of a novel type of solar cell made largely from cheap and abundant materials by over 40 percent. According to an article published this week in the journal Advanced Materials, the new efficiency is 9.6 percent, up from the previous record of 6.7 percent for this type of solar cell, and near the level needed for commercial solar panels. The IBM solar cells also have the advantage of being made with an inexpensive ink-based process.

The new solar cells convert light into electricity using a semiconductor material made of copper, zinc, tin, and sulfur–all abundant elements–as well as the relatively rare element selenium (CZTS). Reaching near-commercial efficiency levels is a “breakthrough for this technology,” says Matthew Beard, a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, who was not involved with the work.

The IBM solar cells could be an alternative to existing “thin film” solar cells. Thin film solar cells use materials that are particularly good at absorbing light. The leading thin film manufacturer uses a material that includes the rare element tellurium. Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, says the presence of tellurium could limit the total electricity such cells could produce because of its rarity. While total worldwide electricity demand will likely reach dozens of terawatts (trillions of watts) in the coming decades, thin film solar cells will likely be limited to producing about 0.3 terawatts, according to a study he published last year. In contrast, the new cells from IBM could produce an order of magnitude more power.

TR also has an article on micro concentrating solar PV – Micro Solar Cells Handle More Intense Sunlight.

A startup company hopes to bring down the cost of generating power with concentrated sunlight by using microscale solar cells that can utilize twice as much light as other panels, without the need for expensive optics or cooling systems. Panels made from the tiny cells, which the Durham, NC-based company Semprius developed using a novel microprinting technology, also offer significant savings on materials costs. In late January, the company announced a joint agreement with Siemens to develop demonstration systems based on its technology. Semprius plans to begin volume production of the modules in 2013.

Adding concentrating lenses to solar panels increases the amount of electricity they can produce. But photovoltaic concentrators add a great deal of expense to a solar installation. The optical systems themselves are expensive and bulky–the larger a cell, the larger its paired lens must be. More intense light also means that more performance-degrading heat must be dissipated using heat sinks or fans. Although the cost is partly offset by the efficiency of high-concentration photovoltaics, it limits the potential power of such concentrator systems. The two major suppliers of concentrated solar modules, Amonix and Emcore, both sell systems based on conventional-size cells that operate under 500 times concentration sunlight with costly cooling systems.

Semprius’s solar modules contain arrays of square cells that measure just 600 micrometers on each side. These cells have three semiconducting layers–each of which is based on gallium arsenide and absorbs a different band of sunlight–and they are made using a combination of chemical etching and printing, which means fewer raw materials are wasted. They can operate under sunlight concentrated 1,000 times using cheap optical systems. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratories, the efficiency of the resulting modules ranges from 25 to 35 percent and they can provide electricity for about 10 cents a kilowatt hour. The company expects the final costs, including installation, to be $2 to $3 per watt.

Peak oil seems to be slowly raising its profile in the mainstream media again lately, with the Wall Street Journal providing a recent example – The Next Crisis: Prepare for Peak Oil.

As Europe’s leaders gather in Brussels today, they have only one crisis in mind: the debts that threaten the stability of the European Union. They are unlikely to be in any mood to listen to warnings about a different crisis that is looming and that could cause massive disruption.

A shortage of oil could be a real problem for the world within a fairly short period of time. It was unfortunate for the group which chose to point this out yesterday that they should have chosen to do so on the day the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, reported that the effects of the financial downturn had led to a slight downgrade in its forecast for oil consumption this year.

Against the gloomy economic backdrop that Europe currently provides, siren voices shrieking that a potential energy crisis is imminent and could be worse than the credit crunch are liable to be dismissed as scaremongers. Since they are led by Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin group runs an energy-guzzling airline, and include Brian Souter, who runs Stagecoach, another energy-hungry transport business, they are also at risk of being seen as self-interested scaremongers.

But the work of the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security shouldn’t be disparagingly dismissed. Its arguments are well founded and lead it to the conclusion that, while the global downturn may have delayed it by a couple of years, peak oil—the point at which global production reaches its maximum—is no more than five years away. Governments and corporations need to use the intervening years to speed up the development of and move toward other energy sources and increased energy efficiency.

In the first report from the task force, Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, wrote that “It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive.” He went on to quote King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia commenting on a new oil find: “Leave it in the ground…our children need it.”

The latest report from the Taskforce points out how much modern economies depend on oil, whether for transport, heating or even fertilizer. Demand may have peaked in the developed world but any shrinkage there, is likely to be more than outweighed by the developing countries, with their rapidly expanding appetite for energy to fuel industry needs and consumer aspirations. The International Energy Agency, in its World Energy Outlook report last year, estimated global oil demand, currently running at just over 85 million barrels a day, could reach 105 million barrels a day by 2030. The Taskforce, assimilating various opinions, believes 92 million barrels a day will be the most that global supplies will be able to generate, “unless some unforeseen giant, and easily accessible, finds are reported very soon.”

Erica Thompson has a post about the report mentioned above at The Oil Drum – The Release of the Industry Taskforce Report on Peak Oil and Energy Security.

Today’s (10th Feb 2010) launch of the second report of the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES) was rather more high-profile than the previous one. After summaries of the report from other contributors, Richard Branson arrived late to read out a short speech and media interest (informally measured by the rate of camera flashes) picked up; we can expect a scattering of news stories about the report to follow, in the usual places.

As we reach maximum oil extraction rates, the era of cheap oil is behind us. We must plan for a world in which oil prices are likely to be both higher and more volatile and where oil price shocks have the potential to destabilise economic, political and social activity.

Our message to government and businesses is clear. Act now.

The Business Spectator has an article on combined solar thermal and gas fired power stations (the technically unambitious option those who don’t want to pay for in-built energy storage go for – however its still streets ahead of more coal fired power or regular gas) – Solar and gas are the perfect fit.

Some of the sector may be wondering at the timing of the comments by Australian Solar Energy Society John Grimes – who buckets federal Energy Minister Martin Ferguson in the article as “clearly no fan of solar” and dismisses the Rudd government as not likely to get its solar policy settings right even in its next term – at a point when the government is formally taking in applications for grants from its $1.5 billion “solar flagships” program.

Next Monday is the deadline for applications to be handed in and the government intends to announce the first tranche of awards in July (in time to boast about them at the federal election thereafter, one assumes).

One of the ironies of the situation is that a favourite to win a sizeable chunk of the government’s millions – to be handed over by Martin “No Fan” Ferguson – will be one of the fossil-fuelled companies with a proposal to link solar thermal and peaking power gas, claimed as a world first development in industrial-sized generation.

Brisbane-based ERM Power, Australia’s largest private electricity generator, is making no secret of its desire to be the first in this race. It is interested in building a solar/gas hybrid plant at its planned Wellington power station in New South Wales or at its third Braemar station in central Queensland, preferably both, working with giant global engineering business Siemens as the technology provider.

The concept is simple: use the solar generation when the sun’s available and switch to gas as back-up when it isn’t.

New South Wales director Andy Pittlik says the Wellington project, which ERM Power sees as the next cab off the rank in its building program after constructing four other gas plants in the past 18 months with 1,740 MW capacity, will also use new open-cycle technology that produces more power while burning less fuel.

Managing director Phillip St Baker, son of founder and chairman Trevor, claims the company is on track to build about a third of Australia’s new generating capacity in the next five years after contributing half of new construction in the past five.

He says the biggest drawback to solar thermal power production is the “very, very expensive” cost of storing electricity for the 12 hours a day the sun doesn’t shine. “That’s why we want to integrate the technologies to deliver affordable, reliable power 24 hours a day – and, when you integrate solar and gas, you can make use of common infrastructure such as the boiler and the steam turbine, too.”

St Baker says the company is also looking at building a 900 kilometre gas pipeline to link its now-commissioned Braemar 2 peaking plant on Queensland’s Darling Downs with the proposed Wellington development, near Dubbo. This $500 million link would interconnect coal seam gas resources with conventional gas supply from Victoria.

Shapeways has an chat with Bruce Sterling, talking about all sorts of random topics – Shapeways interviews Bruce Sterling.

Bruce Sterling is a noted sci fi author, futurologist & speaker. As well as being an award winning author and one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement he is an early and constant booster of Augmented Reality technology and coined the word Spime. Spimes are pieces of technology that know where they are and can reveal their entire history to you. He is also behind a project that hopes to document dead media, founded a green design movement, loves Bollywood movies, is a hacker in the original sense and you really should read his Wired blog Beyond the Beyond.

Joris Peels: I was wondering if at one point you would be interested in doing an interview about 3D printing/the future?

Bruce Sterling: Well, man, all I can tell you is that I’m hanging out at a monster science event with labs-on-a-chip and 3d biofactories. …

I should have pointed to Bruce’s annual “state of the world” fest on the Well at the start of the year, but it kind of got lost in the link bucket – Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010. He seems to have a bit of a bee in his bonnet about global warming inspired genocide, going all Herman Kahn on the subject.

On the subject of geo-engineering, I think it’s a crock. We’ll never
get there. They’re all techie fantasies, far-out sci-fi notions, Star
Wars physics-style. The cheapest and most effective method of
geo-engineering is to cut the world’s population in half.

Just a tremendous massacre. That’s the genuinely effective
geo-engineering: it’s fast, it commonly works, it’s been proven
effective for centuries by lebensraum exponents everywhere, and if you
chose the right tactics and weaponry it might even look like a big
accident.

You don’t have to put on a fascist armband and start ranting for the
public’s blood; an effort like that could be quite subtle and covert,
the very opposite of showboat geo-engineering. “Mysterious deadly flu
in the Congo? We’d better keep all our health workers right here,
they’re badly needed in New York!”

Nobody’s gonna sit around watching Copenhagen delegates debating giant
phony orbital solar mirrors if the windmills in Copenhagen harbor are
blowing over When and if it becomes obvious that we truly need
massive, ultra-costly geo-engineering interventions, that we have no
other choice, then somebody — likely some traumatized veterans of
weather havoc who are full of Al Qaeda self-righteousness — they’re
gonna cut emissions in half by cutting people in half. Mankind
wouldn’t lack for means, motive, opportunity and eager volunteers.

Genocide has much more proven shelf-appeal than any of these hokum
Rube Goldberg geo-schemes. It’s by no means easy to kill off half of
everybody, but we’ve already invented a wide variety of ingenious ways
to attempt that, and almost all of ’em are much simpler, more rugged
and more plausible than putting the North Pole under a tinfoil hat.

You don’t see these Gothic issues raised in public discourse much, but
you go hang out with some Beltway thinktank asymmetric-warfare types,
and man, they talk this kinda stuff all the time. Kind of a Herman
Kahn think-the-unthinkable industry. “Should the Center for Disease
Control be scanning flu-strains for signs of designed interventions?”
“Gee uh, maybe not, could cause panic… but if we had some
off-the-books funding for that, that capacity could be pretty handy.”
…

*Today, people look at our crazy, broken, self-absorbed finance
system, which we used to frankly worship like a pagan god, and they’re
so full of bitterness and skepticism… “How could they ever let
things get into such a parlous state! What benefit did they ever bring
us? They’re all crooks and charlatans!”

I don’t think that modern Internet zealots are crooks and charlatans,
but I see no reason why a weird system of small-pieces-loosely-joined
couldn’t drift into fungal lunacy just like the financial system did.
Maybe harder, faster, and less retrievably. They’re children of the
same era. They’re built with the same logic.

*After all — who’s minding the store there? To what end? It’s all
about whatever seemed to work — moguls, monopolies, offshoring…
Works great technically (sometimes), might create utter social mayhem
(somebody else’s problem). All the broadband you can eat and you’re
left with a mouthful of ashes.

*If that happened, who would we blame for that? Wouldn’t we be
staring at each other with that same shocked, shocked look that Alan
Greenspan had in Congress? “Gosh, I can’t believe that they would
irrationally do such bad things to themselves.” Markets are not
inherently rational, and the Internet isn’t rational either. Not a bit
of it.

*Some day this too will pass. “What comes after network culture?”
We’re so enmeshed in network culture that it’s hard for us to envision
anything outside it now. That’s dangerous. It’s like believing in
contemporary finance to the point that alternatives become unthinkable.

Stewart Brand, years ago: “And the larger fear looms: we are in the
process of building one vast global computer, which could easily become
The Legacy System from Hell that holds civilization hostage — the
system doesn’t really work; it can’t be fixed; no one understands it;
no one is in charge of it; it can’t be lived without; and it gets worse
every year.” Does that sound familiar? It’s sounds plenty familiar
if you’re talking about the global economy now, but that’s not what
Stewart was talking about.

“Today’s bleeding-edge technology is tomorrow’s broken legacy system.
Commercial software is almost always written in enormous haste, at
ever- accelerating market velocity; it can foresee an ‘upgrade path’ to
next year’s version, but decades are outside its scope. And societies
live by decades, civilizations by centuries…”

Speaking of genocide, Peter Costello is looking to profit from the Cambodian one by investing in still depopulated rural regions – Costello’s $600 million Cambodian crusade.

Peter Costello’s first major private sector venture is a $US600m investment fund aiming to bring agricultural technology to Cambodia, one of the world’s most corrupt countries. …

In a video interview with the paper, Costello said he would “bringing in major multinational agro-technology firms and investors in a bid to add value to the Kingdom’s farming sector”, as well as teak and palm oil.

The massive investment will be greater than the total foreign investment Cambodia attracted in 2009, and will far exceed any previous investment in agriculture in one of the world’s poorest nations. Cambodian Government approval will be required both for the investment fund and its projects, which, according to BKK chairman Alistair Walton (who is also chair of chair of Indochina Gateway Capital) will be over 100,000 hectares in size. …

Anderson cited record commodity prices and Cambodia’s swathes of unoccupied land wiped out by the Khmer Rouge as a major incentive behind the project.

“Commodity prices spiked in 2008 and in many developing countries there’s limited land available, limited water. In Cambodia there’s an abundance of land and water because the Khmer Rouge wiped out 40% of the people. Thailand and Vietnam are the largest agricultural hubs in South East Asia, while Cambodia exports next to nothing…,” said Anderson.