Author: Big Gav

The New York Times has a look at the past and future of tidal power in Maine – Generating Megawatts Like Clockwork.

WHEN Christopher R. Sauer stands before the swirling waters of the Western Passage and describes his company’s alternative energy vision, he doesn’t see an army of wind turbines or banks of solar cells.

In fact, Mr. Sauer sees nothing at all that could block his view of Canada, just across the channel. For if his plans come to fruition, an array of turbines will be operating out of sight, deep under the water, cranking out power to a substation on shore.

His company, Ocean Renewable Power, is one of a number of start-ups trying to develop tidal energy — water-powered turbines that spin in the current as the tides come and go, turning generators to make electricity that is clean and, they hope, reasonably priced.

“We’re not going to beat out the old coal plants in the Ohio Valley,” said Mr. Sauer, who has decades of experience developing co-generation plants and other power projects. “But we will be competitive with any new power source, including fossil fuels.”

That’s an ambitious goal, but Mr. Sauer, the company’s president and chief executive, has at least gravity and the earth’s rotational energy on his side.

Tides come and go twice a day everywhere around the globe. In places like Eastport — a former sardine capital at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy that is surrounded by deep channels like the Western Passage — tidal power makes the most sense, at least for the moment.

Here the tides are very high and the current strong, reaching about 6 knots, or 7 miles per hour, at peak flows four times a day. “We’ve got the best tidal current on the East Coast,” Mr. Sauer said.

Tidal power is not a new idea. A few tidal generating stations are already operating around the world, including one in France that is more than four decades old. But they represent an older approach, one that employs barrages, or dams, to hold back the high tide. The water is then released through turbines, like a conventional hydroelectric plant, when the tide goes out.

Eastport itself was the site of an elaborate and enormous barrage project, proposed in the 1930s during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who knew of the great tides here, having spent many summers on Campobello Island nearby. The project, the East Coast’s answer to Hoover Dam, was abandoned after a year.

Der Spiegel has an article on phosphorus, claiming “Essential Element Becoming Scarce” – Experts Warn of Impending Phosphorus Crisis (via Cryptogon).

The element phosphorus is essential to human life and the most important ingredient in fertilizer. But experts warn that the world’s reserves of phosphate rock are becoming depleted. Is recycling sewage the answer?

They sift the powder through their fingers, smell it and admire its soft, brownish shimmer. The members of the delegation from Japan, dressed in black suits and yellow helmets, stand attentively in a factory building in Leoben, Austria, marveling at a seemingly miraculous transformation, as stinking sewage sludge is turned into valuable ash.

Nothing suggests that the brown dust comes from a cesspool. It doesn’t smell, is hygienic and is as safe as sand in a children’s sandbox. It’s also valuable. The powder has a phosphate content of around 16 percent. Phosphate, the most important base material in mineral fertilizer, is currently trading at about €250 ($335) a ton.

Untreated sewage sludge was once dumped onto fields as liquid manure, until it became apparent how toxic it is. Human excretions are full of heavy metals, hormones, biphenyls — and drugs. New processing plants are designed to remove these toxins far more effectively than before, thereby paving the way for the use of sewage sludge in safe, human fertilizer. Ash Dec, the company that operates the pilot plant in Leoben, has dubbed the program “Ash to Cash.”

This unconventional approach could be important for all of mankind. While the term “peak oil” — the point at which production capacity will peak before oil wells gradually begin to run dry — is well known, fewer people know that phosphate reserves could also be running out. Experts refer to this scenario as “peak phosphorus.”

“While the exact timing may be disputed, it is clear that already the quality of remaining phosphate rock reserves is decreasing and cheap fertilizers will be a thing of the past,” warns Dana Cordell of the Institute for Sustainable Futures in Sydney. A phosphate crisis would be at least as serious as an oil crisis. While oil can be replaced as a source of energy — by nuclear, wind or solar energy –, there is no alternative to phosphorus. It is a basic element of all life, and without it human beings, animals and plants could not survive.

Technology Review has a look at the use of nanoparticles to improve solar power performance – TR10: Light-Trapping Photovoltaics.

In 1995, finishing her undergraduate degree in physics, Kylie Catchpole decided to take a risk on a field that was nearly moribund: photovoltaics. “There was a sense that I might have difficulty ever being employed,” she recalls. But her gamble paid off. In 2006 Catchpole, then a postdoc, discovered something that opened the door to making thin-film solar cells significantly more efficient at converting light into electricity. It’s an advance that could help make solar power more competitive with fossil fuels.

Thin-film solar cells, which are made from semiconductor materials like amorphous silicon or cadmium telluride, are cheaper to produce than conventional solar cells, which are made from relatively thick and expensive crystalline wafers of silicon. But they are also less efficient, because if a cell is thinner than the wavelength of incoming light is long, that light is less likely to be absorbed and converted. At just a few micro­meters thick, thin-film cells only weakly absorb wavelengths in the near-infrared part of the spectrum; that energy is lost. The result is that thin-film photovoltaics convert 8 to 12 percent of incoming light to electricity, versus 14 to 19 percent for crystalline silicon. Thus, larger installations are required in order to produce the same amount of electricity, limiting the number of places the technology can be used.

Catchpole, who is now a research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, began work on this problem in 2002 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “It was a case of ‘start at the beginning: can you think of a completely different way to make a solar cell?’ ” she says. “One of the things I came across was plasmonics–looking at the strange optical properties of metals.”

Plasmons are a type of wave that moves through the electrons at the surface of a metal when they are excited by incident light. Others had tried harnessing plasmonic effects to make conventional silicon photovoltaics more efficient, but no one had tried it with thin-film solar cells. Catchpole found that nanoparticles of silver she deposited on the surface of a thin-film silicon solar cell did not reflect back light that fell directly onto them, as would happen with a mirror. Instead, plasmons that formed at the particles’ surface deflected the photons so that they bounced back and forth within the cell, allowing longer wavelengths to be absorbed.

Catchpole’s experimental devices produce 30 percent more electrical current than conventional thin-film silicon cells. If Catchpole can integrate her nanoparticle technology with the processes used to mass-produce thin films commercially, it could shift the balance of technology used in solar cells. Thin-film photovoltaics could not only gain market share (they currently have just 30 percent of the market in the United States) but sustain growth in the solar industry overall.

Thus far, silicon has been losing out to cadmium telluride as the material of choice for thin-film solar cells. (First Solar, the market leader, is planning gigawatt-scale solar farms that will use cadmium telluride thin-film technology to deliver as much electricity as conventional power stations.) But tellurium is a rare material, and experts question whether the supply will support such grand ambitions. “There just isn’t enough tellurium to make a substantial difference to the way the world’s energy is produced,” says Catchpole. “Silicon is the way to go.”

The NYT has an article on generating power by incinerating waste – Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash, but U.S. Lags.

The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock.

Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago.

In that time, such plants have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark, from wealthy exurbs like Horsholm to Copenhagen’s downtown area. Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The plants run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.

With all these innovations, Denmark now regards garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem. And the incinerators, known as waste-to-energy plants, have acquired considerable cachet as communities like Horsholm vie to have them built.

Denmark now has 29 such plants, serving 98 municipalities in a country of 5.5 million people, and 10 more are planned or under construction. Across Europe, there are about 400 plants, with Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands leading the pack in expanding them and building new ones.

By contrast, no new waste-to-energy plants are being planned or built in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency says — even though the federal government and 24 states now classify waste that is burned this way for energy as a renewable fuel, in many cases eligible for subsidies. There are only 87 trash-burning power plants in the United States, a country of more than 300 million people, and almost all were built at least 15 years ago. …

Yet powerful environmental groups have fought the concept passionately. “Incinerators are really the devil,” said Laura Haight, a senior environmental associate with the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Investing in garbage as a green resource is simply perverse when governments should be mandating recycling, she said. “Once you build a waste-to-energy plant, you then have to feed it. Our priority is pushing for zero waste.”

The Guardian has George Monbiot’s latest installment of his long campaign against the global airline industry – What links the banking crisis and the volcano?. I don’t really agree with his conclusion – in the long run we’ll find that we can electrify most forms of transport and air travel will consume much of our (vastly reduced) liquid fuel production.

We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection – a solar storm – which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails.

As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive. It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business – even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps. Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I’ve sent freedom of information requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven’t got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven’t.

There’s a similar lack of planning for the possibility that global supplies of oil might soon peak then go into decline. My FoI requests to the British government reveal that it has made no contingency plans, on the grounds that it doesn’t believe it will happen. The issue remains the preserve of beardy lentil-eaters such as, er, the US joint forces command. Its latest report on possible future conflicts maintains that “a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity”.

It suggests that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10m barrels per day”. A shortage of refining and production capacity is not the same thing as peak oil, but the report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under “the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand”. A global oil shortage would soon expose the weaknesses of our complex economic systems. As the cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown, their dependence on high energy use is one of the factors that makes complex societies vulnerable to collapse.

His work has helped to overturn the old assumption that social complexity is a response to surplus energy. Instead, he proposes, complexity drives higher energy production. While complexity solves many problems – such as reliance on an exclusively local and therefore vulnerable food supply – it’s subject to diminishing returns. In extreme cases the cost of maintaining such systems causes them to collapse. …

For the third time in two years we’ve discovered that flying is one of the weakest links in our overstretched system. In 2008 the rising cost of fuel drove several airlines out of business. The recession compounded the damage; the volcano might ruin several more. Energy-hungry, weather-dependent, easily disrupted, a large aviation industry is one of the hardest sectors for any society to sustain, especially one beginning to encounter a series of crises. The greater our dependence on flying, the more vulnerable we are likely to become.

Over the past few days people living under the flight paths have seen the future, and they like it. The state of global oil supplies, the industry’s social and environmental costs and its extreme vulnerability mean that current levels of flying – let alone the growth the government anticipates – cannot be maintained indefinitely. We have a choice. We can start decommissioning this industry while there is time and find ways of living happily with less of it. Or we can sit and wait for physical reality to simplify the system by more brutal means.

Wired has an article on research into the resilience of interconnected networks – Networked Networks Are Prone to Epic Failure.

Networks that are resilient on their own become fragile and prone to catastrophic failure when connected, suggests a new study with troubling implications for tightly linked modern infrastructures.

Electrical grids, water supplies, computer networks, roads, hospitals, financial systems – all are tied to each other in ways that could make them vulnerable.

“When networks are interdependent, you might think they’re more stable. It might seem like we’re building in redundancy. But it can do the opposite,” said Eugene Stanley, a Boston University physicist and co-author of the study, published April 14 in Nature.

Most theoretical research on network properties has focused on single networks in isolation. In reality, many important networks are tied to each other. Anecdotal evidence — the crash of communications networks (.pdf) in lower Manhattan after 9/11, the plummeting of markets around the world after the Black Monday stock market collapse of 1987 — hints at their fragility, but the underlying mathematics are largely unexplored.

The Nature researchers modeled the behavior of two networks, each possessing what’s known as “broad degree distribution”: A few nodes have many connections, some have an intermediate amount of links and many have just a few. Think of the networks as having only a few branches, but many leaves. On their own, such networks are known to be stable. A random failure is likely to disable a leaf, leaving the rest of the network’s connections mostly intact.

In the new study, the researchers connected two of these networks. While many node failures were required to crash the networks when they were independent, a few failures crashed the networks when they were linked.

“Networks with broad distributions are robust against random attacks. But we found that broad interconnected networks are very fragile,” said study co-author Gerald Paul, a Boston University physicist.

The interconnections fueled a cascading effect, with the failures coursing back and forth. A damaged node in the first network would pull down nodes in the second, which crashed nodes in the first, which brought down more in the second, and so on. And when they looked at data from a 2003 Italian power blackout, in which the electrical grid was linked to the computer network that controlled it, the patterns matched their models’ math.

That broad networks could be so fragile is surprising, but even more important is how rapidly the crash happened, with sudden catastrophic collapse instead of a gradual breakdown, said Indiana University informaticist Alessandro Vespignani in a commentary accompanying the paper. “This makes complete system breakdown even more difficult to control or anticipate than in an isolated network,” he wrote.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/networked-networks/#ixzz0lpHRbeRi

KCSG.com has a report on the growth of geothermal power generation in the United States – Geothermal Grows 26% in 2009 – Utah Ranks Third Among Top 15 States.

The US geothermal power industry continued strong growth in 2009, according to a new report by the Geothermal Energy Association (GEA). The April 2010 US Geothermal Power Production and Development updated study showed 26% growth in new projects under development in the United States in the past year, with 188 projects underway in 15 states which could produce as much as 7,875 MW of new electric power.

When completed, these projects will add over 7,000 MW of base load power capacity; enough to provide electricity for 7.6 million people, or 20% of California’s total power needs, and roughly equivalent to the total power used in California from coal-fired power plants. “Geothermal power can be a critical part of the answer to global warming,” according to the Geothermal Energy Association’s Executive Director, Karl Gawell. “For example, California could achieve its 2020 goal for global warming emissions reductions just by keeping energy demand level and replacing its coal-fired generation with geothermal,” according to Gawell.

Nevada continued to be the leading state for new geothermal energy, with over 3,000 MW under development. The fastest growing geothermal power states in 2009 were Utah which quadrupled its geothermal power under development, New Mexico which tripled, Idaho which doubled, and Oregon which reported a 50% increase. In addition, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas all reported their first geothermal projects compared with the previous year.

“These geothermal power projects will create substantial sources of new employment across the country,” Gawell said. “Not only are we seeing more and more development and hiring in places with a long history of geothermal like Nevada and California, but for the first time these jobs are being created in the Gulf Coast, in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi. Along with a huge number of new construction jobs, geothermal power also creates many permanent positions that can never be outsourced,” said Gawell.

Normally a UK election is something I’d view as mind-numbingly boring, but the sudden rise of the Liberal-Democrats and their leader Nick Clegg has made the race a little more exciting (and gives British voters the chance to vote for a party that is fiscally responsible, socially liberal and against big brother and resource wars in the middle east – which is a nice change for them). The Australian has a report – Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg questions US ties.

NICK Clegg, the party leader dominating the British election campaign, has refused to rule out a push to be foreign secretary in a coalition government.

And in unusually strong language for a prominent British politician, the Liberal Democrat leader also urged greater independence from US foreign policy and a more demanding European attitude towards Israel yesterday.

Mr Clegg said Britain should no longer be “joined at the hip with our American friends”, arguing that Britain’s involvement in the Iraq invasion “was a war about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown doing America’s bidding”.

He said Israel had used disproportionate force in Gaza and kept Palestinians in poverty so Europe should use its “economic muscle”, including arms embargoes, to change the Israeli government’s policies. “I think, as a European, as a British politician, we can’t only leave it to the US to exert influence in the Middle East,” he said.

Mr Clegg’s tough comments on foreign policy will receive unprecedented attention because of his strong performance in last week’s first-ever British televised leadership debate, which led to the greatest turnaround recorded by polls in the middle of a British election campaign.

The Liberal Democrats soared to the top of opinion polls, producing the exact reverse of the last general election result – with the Lib Dems first, the Conservatives second, followed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party. …

He said the conventional wisdom in Britain had long been that “the linchpin around which all the British foreign policy should be organised is the Atlantic relationship between the UK and the US”. … “There is nothing wrong with just acknowledging that there are . . . in recent years very profound differences between ourselves and US administrations, particularly at the height of the George Bush-Dick Cheney orchestrated war on terror.”

He added: “I think it is almost sometimes embarrassing the way in which Conservative and Labour politicians talk in this kind of slavish way about `the special relationship’ (with the US).

Earth2Tech has a look at some applications that let iPad users visualise energy usage within their homes – More Energy Management Apps for the iPad.

Visible Energy’s iPad app is a tweak of its iPhone app, which is connected to the Energy UFO product that the company launched at our Green:Net conference in 2009 (Green:Net 2010 will take place on April 29). The Energy UFO product includes smart outlets that can be controlled wirelessly over a home network and the application (as well as the web site) displays energy usage and provides remote control and programming capabilities. Visible Energy says the iPad version will be available “shortly” (the iPhone app can also be used over the iPad).

The iPad could ultimately be disruptive in the home energy market, because if consumers embrace it as a popular “fourth screen” in the home, it could both displace the need for separate energy gadgets, and could also give a boost the home energy management market. The home energy market is a nascent ecosystem that’s made up of: utilities that are trying get their customers to consume less energy, startups building smart energy software and energy dashboards that will manage energy data in the home and help customers consume less, large manufacturers dabbling in connected appliances, and investors looking for ways to make money.

If you’re never heard of the market, it’s because from a consumer perspective it really doesn’t exist yet. According to Texas-based consultants KEMA, 68 percent of Americans haven’t heard of the smart grid, and exuberance in the home energy market “should be tempered to account for the challenge of engaging large numbers of residential customers.”

The early stage is one reason why the iPad could be disruptive. Visible Energy CEO Marco Graziano, told me earlier this month:

I never thought specialized displays were a good idea for monitoring energy consumption. They don’t have any sex appeal and are too expensive anyway as freebies for utilities to give away. We found that interactivity is really a plus when it gets to visualizing energy consumption and to engaging people in energy awareness. In this respect the iPad is a breakthrough.

Visible Energy is the second home energy management iPad app coming to market — Control4 launched a free iPad app during the hullabaloo of the iPad launch weekend. At the time, Glen Mella, the President and COO of Control4 told me in an interview: “We’re excited to embrace the iPad as another way to bring home automation and home energy management to the mainstream.”

There have been plenty of plans to switch Australia to 100% clean energy floated in recent times (see Beyond Zero Emissions and Desertec Australia for some examples).

The latest entrant is from Siemens, with their “Picture the Future: Australia (Energy)” (pdf) report recommending Australian business and governments spend $60 billion on alternative energy initiatives.

The report says that to meet 2050 carbon emission targets, all road vehicles would need to be electrically powered and all electricity would come from a mix of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro and gas (along with carbon-capture coal, which is an unlikely component).

Siemens also recommends all buildings be made energy efficient and smart grids helping to match demand with supply. Large-scale energy storage is expected to enable solar power to take a dominant position and nearly all homes will have rooftop solar PV.

Siemens also proposes to link Western Australia to the eastern seaboard grid system through a DC transmission network, enabling the use of large-scale solar and geothermal power stations in central Australia (unsurprisingly, given that they are one of the leaders in this field).

Sonia Shah (author of “Crude:The Story Of Oil“) has an article at Yale Environment 360 on pharmaceuticals polluting water systems – As Pharmaceutical Use Soars, Drugs Taint Water and Wildlife.

The standard that new drugs be safe for human consumption was first enshrined in U.S. regulations in 1938, after an antibacterial drug dissolved in a poisonous solvent killed 100 children. Now, armed with a range of evidence suggesting that wildlife and human health may be threatened by pharmaceutical residues that escape into waterways and elsewhere, a growing band of concerned ecotoxicologists and environmental chemists are calling for yet another standard for new medications: that they be designed to be safe for the environment.

The movement for “green pharmacy,” as it has been dubbed, has grown as new technology has allowed scientists to discern the presence of chemicals in the environment at minute concentrations, revealing the wide dispersal of human and veterinary drugs across the planet. In recent years, scientists have detected trace amounts of more than 150 different human and veterinary medicines in environments as far afield as the Arctic. Eighty percent of the U.S.’s streams and nearly a quarter of the nation’s groundwater sampled by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has been found to be contaminated with a variety of medications.

This contamination is poised to worsen as the global appetite for medications swells. The drug industry sold $773 billion worth of drugs worldwide in 2008, more than double the amount sold in 2000, and with an aging population and ever-cheaper manufacturing, pharmaceutical production is expected to grow 4 to 7 percent annually until at least 2013. Americans bring home more than 10 prescription drugs per capita per year, consuming an estimated 17 grams of antibiotics alone — more than three times the per capita rate of consumption in European countries such as Germany. U.S. livestock consume even more, with farmers dispensing 11,000 metric tons of antimicrobial medications every year, mainly to promote the growth of animals.

Drugging our bodies inevitably drugs our environment, too, as many medications can pass through our bodies and waste treatment facilities virtually intact. And it is difficult to predict where and how unexpectedly vulnerable creatures may accrue potentially toxic doses. Take, for example, the ongoing mass poisoning of vultures in South Asia by anti-arthritis painkillers.

The popular anti-inflammatory and arthritis drug, diclofenac, is sold worldwide under more than three dozen different brand names, and is used in both human and veterinary medicine. In India, farmers started dosing their cows and oxen with the drug in the early 1990s to relieve inflammation that could impair the animals’ ability to provide milk or pull plows. Soon, about 10 percent of India’s livestock harbored some 300 micrograms of diclofenac in their livers. When they died, their carcasses were sent to special dumps and picked clean by flocks of vultures. It was an efficient system, for unlike feral dogs and plague-infested rats, South Asia’s abundant vulture population — estimated at more than 60 million in the early 1990s — carried no human pathogens and was resistant to livestock diseases such as anthrax.

But vultures who fed on the treated carcasses accrued a dose of diclofenac of around 100 micrograms per kilogram. A person with arthritis would need 10 times that amount to feel an effect, but it was enough to devastate the vultures. Between 2000 and 2007, the South Asian vulture population declined by 40 percent every year; today, 95 percent of India’s Gyps vultures and 90 percent of Pakistan’s are dead, due primarily to the diclofenac that scientists have found lurking in their tissues. South Asian and British scientists who experimentally exposed captive vultures to diclofenac-dosed buffalo found that the birds went into renal failure — scientists still don’t know why — and died within days of exposure. As the vulture population has declined, the feral dog population has boomed, and the Indian government’s attempt to control the rabies they carry has started to flounder.

Inhabitat has a post on plans to expand biogas production in the UK – UK Prepares to Use Human Poop to Power Homes.

In some parts of the UK anaerobic digesters are already being used to generate electricity from human refuse, but this summer British Gas in a partnership with Thames Water and Scotia Gas Networks will start piping biomethane from the sewage system — which is derived from fecal matter — right back into the homes of 130 customers in Didcot in Oxfordshire. The new gas will take 23 days to complete its waste treatment cycle and when it enters homes will smell just like natural gas.

Using human waste for power is not a new idea. Marco Polo noticed that the Chinese used enclosed sewage tanks to generate power and bath water was said to be heated with biogas in Assyria in the 10th century BC. With populations on the rise and the issue of what to do with sewage becoming an ever present problem, why not bring it back around to electrify our houses? It’s completely renewable — as long as we keep eating — and could be a big part of the no waste holy grail.

Salon has an article by William Astore looking at the state of play in American politics – The business of America is kleptocracy.

Think of socialism and fascism as the red herrings of this moment or, if you’re an old time movie fan, as Hitchcockian MacGuffins — in other words, riveting distractions. Conservatives and tea partiers fear invasive government regulation and excessive taxation, while railing against government takeovers — even as corporate lobbyists write our public healthcare bills to favor private interests. Similarly, progressives rail against an emergent proto-fascist corps of private guns-for-hire, warrantless wiretapping, and the potential government-approved assassination of U.S. citizens, all sanctioned by a perpetual, and apparently open-ended, state of war.

Yet, if this is socialism, why are private health insurers the government’s go-to guys for healthcare coverage? If this is fascism, why haven’t the secret police rounded up tea partiers and progressive critics as well and sent them to the lager or the gulag?

Consider this: America is not now, nor has it often been, a hotbed of political radicalism. We have no substantial socialist or workers’ party. (Unless you’re deluded, please don’t count the corporate-friendly “Democrat” party here.) We have no substantial fascist party. (Unless you’re deluded, please don’t count the cartoonish “tea partiers” here; these predominantly white, graying, and fairly affluent Americans seem most worried that the jackbooted thugs will be coming for them.)

What drives America today is, in fact, business — just as was true in the days of Calvin Coolidge. But it’s not the fair-minded “free enterprise” system touted in those freshly revised Texas guidelines for American history textbooks; rather, it’s a rigged system of crony capitalism that increasingly ends in what, if we were looking at some other country, we would recognize as an unabashed kleptocracy.

Recall, if you care to, those pallets stacked with hundreds of millions of dollars that the Bush administration sent to Iraq and which, Houdini-like, simply disappeared. Think of the ever-rising cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now in excess of a trillion dollars, and just whose pockets are full, thanks to them.

If you want to know the true state of our government and where it’s heading, follow the money (if you can) and remain vigilant: our kleptocratic Houdinis are hard at work, seeking to make yet more money vanish from your pockets — and reappear in theirs.

Information Is Beautiful has a great picture showing how much the Icelandic volcano has reduced European CO2 emissions – Planes Or Volano ?.

Tom Konrad has the latest of his “peak oil investments” series out, this time peering into the murky pond of algae-to-biofuel companies – The Best Peak Oil Investments, Part V: Algae.

If you need to own your own feedstock to be a profitable biofuel company, you can either grow it, or make use of the waste from some other economic activity. The potential of biofuel from waste is inherently limited by the waste currently produced, and the amount of available waste is likely to fall over time as the economy becomes more resource-efficient because of rising commodity prices. While I think compaines that control waste streams care good investment opportunities, waste is inherently limited when it comes to replacing oil. It’s the very limitation of waste as a resource that makes it a good investment.

If you grow your feedstock on good agricultural land, you will be giving up the opportunity to produce valuable food. If you grow hardy non-food crops on marginal land, you will probably have very low yields. For instance, Jatropha has long been heralded as a non-food crop that can produce oil for biodiesel on marginal land, but the best Jatropha yeilds are produced on well-drained soil with ample fertilizer and rainfall or irrigation. Since most arable land and available water are already in use, the potential for additional biofuel production from conventional crops is limited.

Many observers herald biofuel from algae as a way to thread this needle. Algae grown in open ponds is likely to produce 5,000-10,000 gallons of oil per acre per year, while companies using bioreactors have made claims approaching 10 million gallons per acre. The higher-end claims for algae in bioreactors are either pure fantasy, or would require vertical farms with artificial light, but a 100,000 gallons per acre per year (1/100th of the high-end claims) is generally considered achievable. For comparison, Zeachem is aiming for 2,000 gallons of ethanol per acre of sugarcane per year, one of the most productive conventional biofuel crops. Corn produces less than 500 gallons of ethanol per acre per year.

The potential of a hundred times improvement in fuel yields over conventional crops keeps people excited about algae. On paper, such yeilds would allow algae to replace oil in our economy. Actually achieving these yields is tricky. Open ponds have problems with contamination by wild algae, and evaporate enormous amounts of water into the atmosphere. They also need to be fed with carbon dioxide and nutrients to achieve good yields, without so much stirring that the algae (which prefer still water) are disturbed. Bioreactors help solve the contamination and water evaporation problems, and can allow more surface area for light absorption and algal growth. But bioreactors cost much more than open ponds, and require more maintainance and attention to keep them at the proper temperatures and light levels. Like open ponds, they need to be fed CO2 and micronutrients to achieve optimal growth without creating too much turbulence for the algae to grow. …

Here’s a quick list of the publicly traded companies I know of that are working on algae, and what they do:

Green Star Products, Inc. (GSPI.PK). Green Star’s primary business seems to be selling continuous flow biodiesel reactor technology. This is not a great business because it’s currently hard to sell biodiesel for more than the cost of the inputs needed to make it. They have also developed a formulation of micronutrients that they think are excellent for increasing the productivity of certain algae strains.

OriginOil, Inc. (OOIL.OB). Origin has developed a process using electromagnetic fields to extract oil from living algae without killing the cell. If they can make it work at reasonable cost, this technology should be a real boon to the industry. Unfortunately, the company is losing money hand over fist, and does not have revenues or cash to speak of. Since the company will have to keep raising new money from investors for the foreseeable future, the stock will almost certainly continue to fall until it can begin to fund its operations internally.

PetroAlgae, (PALG.OB). PetroAlgae is attempting to commercialize an open pond “microcrop” technology (they are working with other small aquatic plants such as duckweed as well as algae.) Yields will likely be relatively low for algae because they do not add carbon dioxide to the process, and they will have to cope with large water losses from evaporation. Like OriginOil, PetroAlgae has no revenues and will need to raise money soon to continue operations. On March 5, the company privately sold stock at $8 per share, despite the fact that its shares are currently trading for around $22 on the open market. I can’t imagine why the stock has climbed since it went public in 2008 at around $3. If you can find shares to borrow, this looks like a stock to short.

PetroSun Inc. (PSUD.PK). Back in September 2007, PetroSun made a splash as the first public company to try to commercialize algae for biofuel. I was skeptical at the time, and said so in March 2008. My skepticism now seems justified, since now their website has a couple mentions of algae, but the catfish farms they converted into algae farms in 2009 are not mentioned, and their only projects and prospects are traditional oil and gas projects. The stock is down to $0.045 from $0.16 since I panned it in 2008.

Conclusion

Algae has great promise for producing liquid fuels in sufficient quantity to replace petroleum, and it can do so without using excessive water or farmland. That potential, however, is fairly far off. The technology is capital intensive and far from commercialization, a combination almost certain to make investors in the public stocks poorer rather than richer. If and when fuel made from algae is available in significant quantity to make a dent in our thirst for fossil fuels, it will probably have been developed by companies that public investors cannot currently buy. Stock market investors should wait until this industry matures from its current infancy to something closer to adolescence. Buyers of the current batch of infant companies are likely to suffer the fate of other new parents: many sleepless nights.

Andrew Revkin has a few thoughts on energy and climate – On the Energy Gap and Climate Crisis.

1) Energy matters. Energy can produce bountiful supplies of drinking water. Energy enables food production, storage and dispersal. Energy enables mobility, connectedness, health and comfort. The late Nobelist in chemistry, Richard Smalley, devoted the last years of his life to delivering an admirable distillation of the benefits of abundant energy, and need for an energy quest.

2) Even with spreading efforts to conserve energy, a world heading toward roughly 9 billion people seeking decent lives will require far more of this resource than today’s supplies and systems can provide. There is already an enormous energy gap on the planet, with some 2 billion people lacking the simple gift of illumination or a clean source of heat for cooking meals.

3) If countries like China and India follow the American pattern in transportation, ballooning demand for oil is bound to be a disruptive influence on world affairs with or without the climate impact of all those additional emissions of greenhouse gases. Think of it this way; the United States, with 307 million ( heading toward 400 million) people, now consumes nearly 20 million barrels a day; India, with more than 1.1 billion people, is barely in first gear, currently using 2.67 million barrels of oil but poised for vastly increased demand. Add in projections of car use in China and you see why status-quo fuel choices don’t hold up.

4) If humanity stays stuck on the coal rung of the “heat ladder” for another generation, there’s an unacceptable risk of driving disruptive, long-lasting shifts in climate through the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

5) Nonetheless, if I had to choose one of two bumper stickers for our car — CLIMATE CRISIS or ENERGY QUEST — I’d choose the latter. This doesn’t mean I reject the idea that we face a climate crisis. I just don’t think that phrase is a productive way to frame this challenge, particularly as defined over the last few years in the heated policy debate. The definition I’d choose is much like the one stated by Richard Somerville of the University of California, San Diego, during a climate debate several years ago over the proposition that “ Global Warming is Not a Crisis.” …

6) The world is not remotely engaged in the kind of energy quest that would be required to fill the gaps defined above. I’m talking about a sustained quest, from the household light socket to the boardroom, the laboratory to the classroom, the smart post-industrial American city to the struggling, (literally) powerless sub-Saharan village. This is not some onerous task, but an active, positive assertion that the ways we harvest and use energy — an asset long taken for granted and priced in ways that mask its broader costs — really do matter. Dry places do this with water all the time. In Israel, there is no toilet without two flush options. It’s not some goofball green concept; it’s just the way things are done.

Energy Matters has a summary of various plans to switch to 100% clean energy – A World Run On Low Carbon Energy No Pipe Dream.

The myth of low carbon and renewable energy sources not being able to supply the majority, if not all, the developed world’s electricity requirements in the near future is being busted almost weekly in recent months.

In February this year, we reported on Beyond Zero Emissions’ costed, detailed blueprint for a transition to 100 per cent renewable energy in ten years in Australia using proven, commercialised technology.

In March, a report from Siemens stated a 30 x 30 km solar farm in central Australia would meet the national electricity demand during daylight hours and allow Australia to become an exporter of clean electricity.

In another initiative, “Australia 2050: Clean Energy Superpower,” DESERTEC-Australia proposes that over the next decade, Australia retires coal-fired power generation and replaces it with natural gas power and renewable energy sources , with view to the country running on 100% renewables by 2050.

Overseas, a March study from PricewaterhouseCoopers states the most recent economic models show that the short-term costs of transforming Europe’s power system to 100% renewable energy may not be as large as previously thought.

Another Europe study released yesterday called Roadmap 2050 provides what it says is a practical, independent and objective analysis of pathways to achieve a low-carbon economy in Europe, in line with the energy security, environmental and economic goals of the European Union. The study claims that by 2050, Europe could achieve an economy-wide reduction of GHG emissions of at least 80% compared to 1990 levels.

Even China, the factory of the developed world, expects low carbon energy sources will account for more than a quarter of the nations electricity supply by the end of 2010.

The question no longer seems if a shift to 100% low carbon and renewable energy sources can feasibly happen soon, but more one of if enough political will is present to make it happen.

The Business Spectator has an update on the geothermal energy sector in Australia – A clean energy source feels the heat.

Has a cloud of steam ever generated as much excitement as the vaporised water that emerged from the Panax Geothermal’s Salamander well in South Australia last Thursday?

“Those are beautiful pictures,” said one geothermal company executive as photos were distributed by Panax in its announcement to the ASX. “It will warm the cockles of the hearts of all the geothermal energy producers.”

The geothermal industry has been having a tough time of late. A technology with pretensions to displace the fossil-fuel energy industry finds itself at its lowest ebb: an unexplained end to government funding, a lack of interest from institutional and other investors, delays in drilling programs and technical problems at Geodynamic have combined to send the share prices of most listed geothermal companies to one or two year lows.

Worse than that, it has shaken the conviction of many that geothermal can deliver on its promise of relatively cheap, emissions free baseload energy that could power Australia’s energy many times over if just one per cent of its resources are tapped.

Which is why all eyes are focused on the results of drilling at the Salamander well. The significance of the steam, says Panax CEO Bertus de Graaf, is that it is proof that the company has found a reservoir of energy, the first in a hot sedimentary aquifer in Australia. “What we don’t know yet is the quality of the reservoir,” de Graaf says. …

If Panax can prove it has an economically viable reserve of energy and can set in train plans to connect an initial 5.9MW plant to the grid by the end of 2011, then it may convince the government to inject more funds into the industry, which is currently slated to receive less than a tenth of that promised to carbon capture and storage projects, and less than one sixth promised to large scale solar – even though Energy Minister Martin Ferguson likes to talk up its potential.

This approach has flummoxed many observers, but there are signs that Ferguson may be considering supplementary funding. He was a recent visitor to the Penola project and admitted that Australia would be hard pushed to even meet its 20 per cent renewable target by 2020 without a major contribution from geothermal.

But right now, many geothermal companies cannot access funds to drill their first well, most are running short on cash, and some, such as Petratherm, which is benefiting from a $63 million grant for its Paralana project, is tapping shareholders for the second time in a year.

Crikey has an article on a chat between the “minister for coal” (Martin Ferguson) and some climate change campaigners – Minister for coal out of step with climate change action.

Martin Ferguson holds the eminently safe but greening Victorian seat of Batman. A couple of weekends earlier, an Earth Hour demonstration at his Preston office had called on the champion of emissions-intensive fossil fuel exports and power generation to switch to renewables. Australia is heavily dependent on coal for its domestic energy supply, and is the world’s largest coal exporter.

Now Ferguson was sitting across the table from us, a minder scribbling quietly beside him. He said the Government would take the emissions trading scheme to the Senate again in May, but it would fail and Labor would face the next election without a price on carbon.

What of the Greens’ proposal for an interim, two-year carbon tax? Ferguson offered two main objections: a lack of certainty for business, and the blunt statement that there would “never be a settlement” with the Greens on this issue.

While some business uncertainty is surely a reasonable price to avoid the certainty of climate impacts, Ferguson’s blanket exclusion of a climate settlement seems at odds with claimed negotiations between climate change minister Senator Penny Wong and Greens Senator Christine Milne. In the week following our meeting, in fact, The Age quoted Greens leader Bob Brown as being “in a mood to do a deal” on the ETS.

Nothing, however, would be good enough for the Greens, Ferguson claimed – climate change was, for them, a political question, while for Labor it was an economic and environmental one. He had no reply to the argument that the Greens would be hard-pressed to reject for political motives any plan that actually reflected the climate science, in stark contrast with the measures currently proposed by Labor.

While there was some enthusiasm when the talk switched to renewables, Ferguson said coal “would be with us for both our lifetimes”, with no option, it seemed, to leave it in the ground – an imperative of the strongest current science on solving the climate crisis.

He asserted, instead, that carbon capture and storage (CCS) was a “proven technology”, challenged only by the “cost of deployment”. This contrasted with large-scale concentrated solar thermal (CST) technologies already working in Spain and the United States. Solar, according to Ferguson, needed to be “proved up”.

Yet for James Hansen, the world’s leading climate scientist, clean coal is an “illusion”. In September 2009, ABC TV Four Corners also questioned the beleaguered technology in its program. A few days after our meeting, it also aired ‘A Dirty Business’, a program exposing the health and environmental impacts of coal mining in the NSW Hunter valley. Without the elusive prospect of CCS, coal is more than twice as carbon-intensive as gas, which itself is more than 30 times more carbon-intensive than CST.

Despite the profound challenges of such a massively carbon-intensive energy source, the Government’s current ETS proposal includes $1.5 billion compensation for the coal industry and $7.3 billion for fossil-fuel electricity generators. To these billions of public funds can be added the slated $47-billion, five-year investment in an obsolete power grid that, according to Fairfax green business writer Paddy Manning, “entrenches electricity generation from fossil fuels and will only accelerate climate change”.

Though disagreeing with Manning’s analysis, Ferguson admitted that $100 billion would likely be needed “just to keep where we are” with the current power network – more than a Zero Carbon Australia 2020 plan would spend over 10 years ($92 billion) towards a renewables-friendly smart grid.

Strangely, Ferguson seemed also to draw support for his multi-billion-dollar fossil-fuel grid from evidence at the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission about the role of faulty power lines in the Black Saturday fires. A safe grid is, of course, a necessity, but one geared to fossil fuels would only promote global warming and a consequent worsening of bushfire risk in Australia.

The SMH reports the Australian government is turning its back on electric vehicles, preferring to remain tied to the oil industry instead – It’s back to the bowser in the race to the future.

THE federal government has ruled out offering incentives for electric cars, preferring to support existing oil-based technology. Consumer subsidies such as those offered by overseas governments are crucial to ensuring Australian buyers can access the limited supply of electric cars, car companies say. …

The federal government instead believes the future of the car industry lies in the development of existing technology across petrol, diesel and LPG engines. … Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr said ”Over the next decade, the most rapid and cost-effective way of improving fuel economy and building more environmentally effective cars is to adapt technologies that are being deployed now.”

The government will spend $1.3 billion over the next 10 years to increase production of cleaner, more efficient vehicles. But the money is going to manufacturers, such as Toyota, for the development of the hybrid Camry, rather than consumers in the form of rebates or tax incentives. …

University of Technology Sydney researcher Chris Dunstan said electric cars offered health benefits in terms of local air pollution and, unless they were charged in Victoria, which used brown coal, they were no worse for the environment.

Mr Dunstan, the research director at the university’s Institute for Sustainable Futures, said several major issues concerning electric cars were still to be addressed, including if owners would have to use green power and where and when they could charge their batteries. ”We need to make sure we are thinking about the energy supply infrastructure and how we manage it. It goes back to not just having the technology right but the incentives also,” he said.

Mr Dunstan said 100 per cent renewable power was cheaper than petrol and the price of batteries was coming down. ”If Australia was to embrace this technology more, then there’s potential for us to be a significant player in what’s likely to be a multibillion-dollar industry in the next few years,” he said.

Dr Peter Pudney, from the University of South Australia, said the more electric cars sold, the cheaper they would become. He is calling for a push towards renewable energy and the need for immediate action. He said incentives did not have to be financial but could be the introduction of low-emission parking spaces and traffic lanes.