Author: Big Gav

CNSNews has an article on the National Broadband Plan in the US – FCC’s Broadband Plan Sets Groundwork for National Smart Grid To Transition To More Green Energy Use.

The National Broadband Plan, recently published by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), would lay the groundwork for the federal government to establish a nationwide “smart” electrical grid that would change how Americans use and pay for electricity, affecting such things as homes and transportation with battery-powered cars.

The proposal, published March 16, outlines the federal government’s plan to use the nation’s broadband Internet infrastructure to further key national policy goals, including health care, education, and energy.

The intersection of federal energy policy and myriad private sector broadband and wireless Internet networks, which the government hopes to harness, is known as the smart grid, a high-tech linking of the country’s Byzantine electrical infrastructure centered around green energy production and Internet connectivity.

As the plan states, “Broadband and advanced communications infrastructure will play an important role in achieving national goals of energy independence and efficiency.”

The proposal explains that to achieve this national goal, the government plans a “massive” build-out of information technology to construct a “smart grid” where government, industry, and individuals can monitor energy production and use in real time, allowing consumers to apparently better control their energy usage and public utilities to apparently better control the production and flow of energy.

“The United States is undertaking a massive communications and information technology buildout to produce the Smart Grid,” the plan says. “The vision is to build a modern grid that enables energy efficiency and the widespread use of both renewable power and plug-in electric vehicles.” I.e., electric cars.

I’m not sure this could really be true, but if so its pretty alarming…

The Guardian has an article on Jeremey Leggett and the debate in the UK about the value of solar PV – Jeremy Leggett: caught between low carbon and high-voltage rows.

A tiny doorway next to a BetFair shop in south London is the unassuming headquarters of Solarcentury, a company that arguably stands to gain most on 1 April when the feed-in tariff – or “great green rip-off” as some call it – comes into force.

The company, or at least its founder, is at the heart of the next phase of Britain’s low-carbon revolution by encouraging homeowners to fix panels on their roofs to generate renewable energy.

But while executive chairman Jeremy Leggett should have been devoting 24 hours a day preparing for the busiest period of his commercial life, he has been forced to spend some of his time fighting off an unexpected assault by environmentalists in the Guardian blogosphere. The irony is that Leggett is an ex-Greenpeace employee and, as a former Imperial College geologist, a powerful and knowledgeable ally to the environment campaigners on a range of issues, including “peak oil” – the point when global demand outstrips supply.

The debate over whether the feed-in tariff costs too much for the expected carbon reductions rumbles on but even this “social entrepreneur”, who has always enjoyed a good tussle with more traditional foes, admits he has had enough of swapping increasingly fraught online words with George Monbiot, Chris Goodall and other notable greens.

“It certainly perplexed me,” he said. “If I did not know the individuals involved, I’d have presumed that this is the nuclear industry pushing back at a time of imminent possible success for the renewables industries. They [atomic power firms] have declared a form of war, with EDF and E.ON having this line to government that says ‘You can have nuclear or you can have renewables, but you can’t have both’, when previously they argued you could have both.

“But I know the actors [environmentalists] so I know it is not possible [for them to be nuclear lackeys], but George and Chris must know how damaging it is at this time. At the very minimum it is annoying that George has come out with this heady rhetoric, yet as far as I know did not actively engage in the government’s long consultation on the issue.” …

Leggett has also crossed swords with Monbiot over the latter’s claim that it is an “impossible dream” to build up a proper British renewables products industry given the competition from low-cost areas such as China: “I say that is needless defeatism because the global market is pitifully small. Seven gigawatts of solar was installed last year, the equivalent of seven nuclear power plants, and to think we cannot catch up and have a fully integrated national industry is needless defeatism.”

And this is an area where Leggett’s scary view about the world running out of oil much faster than anyone expects neatly gels with the need to promote a self-standing renewables sector.

“Security of energy supply is going to be a real issue so should we not be deliberately building a vertically integrated renewables industry on the British Isles? I think the world is going to change dramatically and globalisation, of necessity, is going to be massively set back by the unaffordability of oil, so trade routes are going to shrink and there is going to be an incredible explosion of independent thinking.

“Companies and governments are going to think much more than they do now about this. We need to be making much more stuff at home. We can’t be dependent on markets far overseas.”

Leggett has pushed the peak oil debate on to the political agenda by getting an increasingly broad church of industrialists – such as Sir Richard Branson, Brian Souter of Stagecoach, and Philip Dilley of Arup – to come on board. The bandwagon seems finally to have made its impact on the UK government, which is softening its former position that peak oil was being over-hyped.

The New York Times has an article on a baby step towards the “internet of things” (itself one component of a closed loop manufacturing system that we need to develop to kick our resource extraction habit) – They Don’t Talk Trash, They Track It.

“Smart” phones offer the intelligence of a computer, with the convenience of a phone. “Smart” meters let homeowners choose between using cheap and expensive electricity.

A 5-year-old group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spent the last year attaching thousands of tracking devices to pieces of garbage in Seattle and New York City. The devices send out pulses to signal where they are.

The signals go to MIT’s SENSEable City Lab for analysis. Last year, they also went to art exhibits in both cities, where live maps revealed the many paths garbage takes.

For example, a plastic soap bottle tossed in a Manhattan recycling bin took several twists and turns around the city before crossing the river to Kearny, N.J.

Carlo Ratti, who directs the City Lab, said each city he’s lived in — Turin, Italy; Paris; Cambridge, England; Boston — has suffered from congestion, pollution and inefficiency problems.

He believes new technologies, like iPhones, social networking and wireless communication, can inform city dwellers and make cities “smarter.” “The only way we can actually solve some of the big problems, like climate change, is if we really coordinate and act together,” Ratti said. “What, for the first time, is really bringing us together is the power of networks in general and the Internet.” …

The aim of project “Trash Track”: to study where recyclables go. Dietmar Offenhuber, a doctoral student in the lab, said there’s plenty of research on how things are made, but little is known about how they degrade and finally disappear. Among the questions here — especially for cities paying millions for recycling programs — are how much greenhouse gas is created and how much energy is wasted in the process. Another might be whether recycling really happens.

“Even the people working in waste removal don’t really have a clear knowledge or picture of where the stuff goes,” he said.

That’s partly because trash goes through so many handoffs en route to its final destination, Offenhuber said. Trash companies follow their own haul, for example. But once they separate the aluminum and sell it to a collector, their records end. No single database tracks a soda can through its cycle. …

But according to Offenhuber, telecom companies are watching Trash Track to see if it can be scaled up. By the end of this year, he said, the SENSEable City Lab wants to deploy thousands more trackers, and it wants to focus on e-waste.

That will help the companies develop a tracker that’s cheaper and easier to use. Ultimately, the device may even come in a tracking “kit” that lets someone attach it to an item, then log on to a Web site that tells its whereabouts.

The ABC has a report om the latest find of coal seam gas in Australia, with Bow Energy claiming a 3 tcf find and hoping to sell it for export as LNG as well as using it in a local power station – Energy firm finds 20yr gas reserve.

A Queensland energy company says it has found enormous reserves of coal seam gas in the Bowen Basin in the state’s Central Highlands. Bow Energy says it has identified three trillion cubic feet of gas in the Blackwater area east of Emerald, enough for at least 20 years.

The company says it will start work later this year on a power station to feed electricity into the national grid. Chief executive John De Stefani says it is building a gas-fired power station at Blackwater that should start operating early next year. “There’s sufficient capacity in that region for that power. It will go into the grid,” he said. …

Mr De Stefani says the company also hopes to sell gas to proposed LNG plants in Gladstone.

The Australian reports that rumours about a Woodside takeover of Santos are being downplayed by the companies involved –
Santos and Woodside deny takeover offer.

SPECULATION that oil and gas giant Woodside Petroleum has made a $15 billion bid for gas firm Santos has been dismissed by both companies.

Shares in Santos spiked in early trading yesterday following rumours Woodside had approached it, but the stock stabilised after the pair denied the reports.

Analysts said investors had bought into the scuttlebutt because there was heightened interest in the coal-seam gas sector following the $3.44bn bid for Arrow Energy by BG Group and PetroChina.

Woodside chief executive Don Voelte yesterday said the company did not normally comment on market rumours but said there was “nothing to it” in relation to the takeover speculation.

Adelaide-based Santos was forced to deny the rumours after it received a “speeding ticket” from the Australian Securities Exchange, requesting an explanation for a run on its shares

Renewable Energy World has an article on the initial rollout of electric vehicle charging stations in the US – Electric Vehicles Charge Ahead in US.

Urban planners are deciding where to locate more than 11,000 charging stations in 11 major cities. They want those stations up and running when the first mass-market electric cars from Nissan and General Motors go on sale at the end of this year.

Last year, the Department of Energy awarded $100 million to eTec, an electric transportation research and development firm, to build electric vehicle charging networks in five states. Now is when the rubber meets the road, or more precisely, construction begins.

“You know, there’s a lot of excitement over this,” says Rich Feldman, a regional manager for eTec. “This is going to result in oil savings. There’s going to be jobs that come out of this project in terms of people installing the equipment. We’re obviously launching a whole new industry here. There’s going to be other spinoffs and economic opportunity.”

Feldman is supervising the installation of more than 2,000 electric car chargers in the greater Seattle area in western Washington, and another 2,000 at homes and public places in four Oregon cities. They’ll be near shopping centers, fast food restaurants and movie theaters, “the variety of places that people think about when they’re able to park and leave the vehicle for an hour or two.”

Feldman’s infrastructure company has partnered with Nissan. The car maker bought lots of ads during the Winter Olympics to promote its forthcoming all-electric model named the Leaf. Nissan is inviting drivers to sign up on its website to be among the first to buy one.

Feldman says eTec hopes to convince a subset of Nissan Leaf buyers to participate in a study. It wants 900 drivers in each state to let researchers from the Idaho National Lab monitor their driving and charging behaviors. “In exchange, they get a free, home-based charging station,” he explains. Lessons learned about consumer preferences on placement, features and payment options could guide the eventual national rollout of charging infrastructure.

The Nissan Leaf and the plug-in Chevy Volt are supposed to hit U.S. dealerships late this year. They’re the first wave of mass production electric cars. Mark Perry, who directs product planning for Nissan North America, says new owners will have no trouble finding a power station. “So the concern, ‘If I use this vehicle or purchase this vehicle, can I get charging?’ that’s going to be a very easy answer here.”

The price of the fully electric Nissan is being announced at the end of March. Then the company will start taking deposits from consumers, who likely will pay a substantial premium over a comparable gasoline powered compact. The four-door, five-passenger Leaf has a range of about 160 kilometers.

Perry says that Nissan will sell and lease the car and battery as a package. “There had been a lot of conversation about separation of car shell and battery and different approaches,” he said. “Nissan is still going to explore different business models in other parts of the world. But here in the U.S., definitely an entire transaction.

The Age has an article on difficulties with Victoria’s smart meter rollout leading the government to suspend it for the time being (not wanting any problematic issues during an election year it seems) – Plug pulled on smart meter plan.

THE state government has temporarily pulled the plug on Victoria’s $2 billion smart energy meter program.

Energy Minister Peter Batchelor last night announced an indefinite moratorium on the rollout of the new technology to every home across the state – because of concerns pensioners and the poor would be hardest hit by higher electricity prices.

Mr Batchelor made the announcement, an election-year embarrassment for the government, after meeting representatives of the poor, including St Vincent de Paul and the Victorian Council of Social Service.

He made it clear the government intended to push ahead with the scheme, but gave no indication as to how long the moratorium might last.

The plan to install smart meters in all 2.5 million Victorian homes and small businesses over the next four years, and introduce a new time-of-use pricing regime, has been beset by controversy.

The government argues the new technology, which can read a household’s energy use every 30 minutes, will enable people to monitor their use in peak periods and turn on high-energy appliances such as dishwashers during off-peak times. …

VCOSS chief executive Cath Smith last night welcomed the moratorium, saying Mr Batchelor had recognised that people who spend a lot of time at home during the day or who could not shift their energy use to off-peak times could suffer. …

Mr Batchelor said last night: ”We are committed to ensuring the transition to a new pricing structure is managed carefully and sensibly.” He promised to regularly review the effect of time-of-use tariffs on families.

But he defended smart meters, saying they would help Victorians tackle climate change.

Earth2Tech reports that smart meters continue to get some mixed receptions in the US as well – It’s Come to This: Citizens Against Smart Meters.

The backlash against the smart meters installed in Texas by utility Oncor doesn’t seem to be dying down. Actually the protesters are getting more organized and turning to social media. A group called Smart UR Citizens — whose members describe themselves as “a group of Texas citizens that are fighting the unrealistic utility charges which we believe are caused by the Smart Meter” — has a new web site, an online petition, an intro video and an online survey, and is inviting community members to submit videos and comments about their experiences.

The small group is also holding rallies outside of Oncor’s headquarters and using social media to get the word out. Dallas Morning News reporter Elizabeth Souder reported in the newspaper’s blog Texas Energy and Environment yesterday that the group was supposed to hold a rally Thursday afternoon — as she put it: “The protesters will be the ones waving red shop flags.”

Oncor seems to have been making a variety of attempts to address the smart meter backlash. The utility has been releasing information about weekly tests in local areas, including OakCliff, Temple and Killeen.

But utilities are still trying to figure out the best way to communicate to these types of customers about transitioning to smart meters. As this IDC Energy Insight report say, utilities “have not thought through the implications of new technology and products on customer relationships or the business process.” In other words, utilities are not at all prepared for the increased amount of communication, education and interactivity that will be required from installing new smart grid technology.

Reuters has a report on South Korean plans to build 520 MW of tidal power generation over the next 4 years – S.Korea to invest $1 billion in tidal power plants.

Korea Western Power Corp (WP) will invest a total of 1.22 trillion won ($1.07 billion) to build 20 tidal power plants likely from next year through 2014, the government and officials at the utility said on Thursday. The power plants, to be located in about 200 km southwest of Seoul, will have a total capacity of 520 megawatts (MW), the world’s largest, they said. …

Asia’s fourth-largest economy, heavily dependent on oil and gas imports, set a voluntary 2020 emissions reduction target last year to a 30 percent reduction from its forecast under a business as usual scenario. Renewable energy accounted for 2.4 percent of South Korea’s total energy consumption in 2008. The country aims to increase that to 11 percent by 2030.

Richard Flanagan has an article in the SMH arguing that Labor should try to treat the Greens as partners rather than the enemy – Tasmania’s lesson: when Labor attacks the Greens, it threatens itself.

For the best part of the past 12 years the ALP ran Tasmania as if it were a sub-branch of Norm Gallagher’s Builders’ Labourers Federation, in which Jim Bacon, the first of Labor’s last three premiers, had once served as Gallagher’s loyal lieutenant

And, like the old BLF, its working-class rhetoric of being one with the many workers hid secret deals with a few big-business mates in forestry and gaming.

Cronyism, bullying, purging, threats, lies, blacklists and intimidation were the order of the day. The perception became commonplace that the government was rotten.

Tasmanians let this pass for a very long time because they were frightened, because any who came between the ALP and its exercise of power had their lives made miserable.

But the greatest cost was in the end to the ALP itself, which ceased to become a force for any progressive politics. It lied, it deceived, it sold Tasmania’s soul for a mess of pottage, all so it could keep itself in privilege.

So far to the right did the Tasmanian ALP move that Robin Gray, the former Liberal premier and board member of the timber company Gunns, last year proposed a Liberal-Labor coalition on the ground that nothing now divided the two major parties and it would keep the Greens out of power.

”No policy issue,” Mark Latham has said, ”or set of relationships better demonstrates the ethical decline and political corruption of the Australian Labor movement than Tasmanian forestry.”

But that is only half the story: the other half is that its desire to destroy the Greens led the Tasmanian ALP to so many of the poisonous accommodations it made with the forestry industry.

And last Saturday Tasmanians made it clear they had had enough.

Lindsay Tanner wrote on this page yesterday that the high Green vote represented the defection of the educated and the affluent from Labor’s ranks.

But this is a myth. The collapse of the Labor vote was about the many people who are neither educated nor affluent having had enough of what they perceived to be the collusion of Tasmanian Labor with corporations against their interests.

One Tasmanian Green MP, Kim Booth, is a sawmiller, more a lager guzzler than a cafe hopper. Another Green MP, Tim Morris, was the highest votegetter in the electorate of Lyons, which combines rural and forestry areas with some of the poorest public housing estates in Australia.

The former Liberal leader Rene Hidding put Morris’s unprecedented vote down to the fact people in that electorate – which Gunns has papered with its highly unpopular plantations – were frightened their drinking water was poisoned by the plantations.

It was, then, not the latte sippers voting Green but the poison swillers frightened of what they believed the unholy union of corporate power and the ALP may have done to them.

Tanner is right to argue the ALP treats the rise of the Greens in Tasmania seriously as a national portent. But, in suggesting the ALP sees the Greens as a new enemy, he is repeating the terrible mistake made by the Tasmanian ALP that left it politically gangrenous and led it to its drubbing in the election. …

Come the federal election, pundits are predicting the Greens gaining the balance of power in the Senate. The ALP can choose to treat this as an opportunity, as helping them to prosecute a more progressive agenda. Or it can make the mistake it made for too long in Tasmania and treat the Greens as its greatest enemy.

Through the 20th century, Big Brother was the state. In the 21st, it may well be the corporation, be it Gunns or Halliburton or the coal industry. We need corporations as we need states but, as the global financial crisis has shown, as climate change demands, we need checks upon their excessive powers.

In that battle the progressive forces could do worse than come together, recognising their differences, accepting their conflicts, but avoiding the unforgivable crime of fratricide. And who knows? In the mash-up there just might arise a better future.

National Geographic has an article on a large scale sodium sulphur battery being built in Texas – Texas Pioneers Energy Storage in Giant Battery.

Presidio, Texas, has one link to U.S. electrical power, stretching some 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Marfa in the high desert to the banks of the Rio Grande.

Built in 1948, the transmission line was around when Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean walked Marfa’s streets while filming the epic movie Giant.

Electrical storms erupt frequently in the rugged expanse between Marfa, nearly one mile (1,600 meters) above sea level, and Presidio, on the Mexico border, “one of the hottest places in the nation,” in the words of city administrator Brad Newton. “It really creates a situation unique to our geographic area,” he says.

Reliance on a single aging, transmission line in this hostile terrain has made life in Presidio different than in most of the United States.

Chronic power outages and electrical fluctuations have been the norm.

And sweltering in the dark has been only part of the problem. The situation wreaks havoc with electrical devices, causing computer systems to reset frequently—an annoyance in homes and a constant worry for authorities.

“The area is a significant border crossing and for them to lose computers was not a good option,” said Calvin Crowder, president of Electric Transmission Texas, LLC, a joint venture between subsidiaries of American Electric Power and Warren Buffett’s electricity company, Berkshire Hathaway’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings.

ETT is just completing installation of a system designed to resolve Presidio’s power woes.

The hoped-for remedy is a battery, a Texas-size battery, which could eventually end up playing an important role in wider use of green power generation such as solar and wind. The U.S. $25 million system, which is now charging and is set to be dedicated April 8, will be the largest use of this energy storage technology in the United States.

The four-megawatt sodium-sulfur (NaS) battery system consists of 80 modules, 8,000 pounds (3,600 kilograms) each, constructed by the Japanese firm NGK-Locke. They were shipped to Long Beach, California, in December and transported to Texas aboard 24 trucks.

The cost of the battery system includes $10 million just to construct the building in which it will be housed and the new substation it requires.

REW has an article on some large scale offshore win power developments in Europe – Iberdrola To Build 400-MW Baltic Offshore Wind Farm.

Iberdrola Renovables has bought 100% of the rights to build the Ventotec Ost 2 offshore wind complex in the German zone of the Baltic Sea. The rights were purchased from a German joint venture comprising Deutsche Erneuerbare Energien GmbH and Ventotec GmbH. They were awarded the permit in 2007.

The Ventotec Ost 2 offshore wind complex is far along in the permitting process and is expected to be commissioned by 2014. The wind farm’s 80 wind turbines, each with a capacity of of 5 megawatts (MW), are expected to generate a total of 1,200 gigawatt-hours (GWh).

The project is located in the northern part of the priority wind area known as Westlich Adlergrund, and will be built approximately 40 kilometers from shore. The average depth of the water is approximately 39 meters.

The German government has set a target of installing at least 10,000 MW of offshore wind capacity by 2020 and Iberdrola recently created an Offshore Wind Division designed to channel the development of this significant volume of offshore wind power.

Recently, Iberdrola and Vattenfall were awarded the construction rights to build one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world in the United Kingdom. The North Sea zone, known as East Anglia Array, has the potential to develop up to 7,200 MW, with construction is expected to begin in 2015.

The company is also involved in the development of several further offshore projects in Germany and has a pipeline of 2,300 MW in the United Kingdom, including the 500-MW West of Duddon Sands facilities, which it will start construction onin 2012, and Argyll Array, which will have an installed capacity of up to 1800 MW.

Technology Review has a look at the British surge towards harnessing wave and tidal power – Wave Energy Scales Up Off Scotland.

Scotland hopes to ride the next renewable energy wave. Site leases for several big wave and tidal power projects were awarded last week by the U.K. government, concluding a two-year bidding process that elicited strong interest from major utilities and energy entrepreneurs. The awards open the way for six wave energy projects and four tidal energy systems around Scotland’s Orkney Islands that could collectively generate up to 1.2 gigawatts, exceeding the U.K.’s 700-megawatt target for the bidding round. This is an immense scale for an industry that so far has installed only pilot projects involving a handful of small devices. …

Technical and environmental challenges could, of course, slow some marine energy technologies more than others. That is what McAdam is betting for Aquamarine’s Oyster wave converter, a buoyant steel flap that uses wave power to drive a hydraulic piston and send high-pressure water to a turbine generator on the shore. The design puts no fast-moving parts or power generator in the water, and McAdam claims this will minimize both technical failures and threats to marine life. In contrast, the tidal devices selected by all of the Orkney site developers, made by OpenHydro, Marine Current Turbines, and Hammerfest Strøm, use underwater turbines.

McAdam says that Aquamarine has worked through minor valve and pipeline glitches since installing the first Oyster demonstrator, a 315-kilowatt device, at EMEC in October. Aquamarine is now building its commercial-scale device–a three-flap array feeding a single 2.5-megawatt turbine–which it plans to test at EMEC next year.

Building that device is expensive, and this is the biggest challenge of all facing the industry. Developers of the Orkney sites will benefit from marine energy’s favorable treatment under the U.K.’s renewable energy mandates. However, that value only kicks in when the projects reach full scale, and developers say additional small-scale installations are needed.

“Where we’re lacking at the moment is this capital intensive phase of installing equipment to prove that it’s feasible,” says McAdam. He notes that Alex Salmond, who leads Scotland’s government, is planning a green energy conference later this year that will consider further incentives for marine energy.

A 2005 study by the Palo Alto, CA-based Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) suggests that wave energy could be generated at comparable cost to onshore wind power off Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Massachusetts. EPRI has previously said that wave and tidal energy could meet about 10 percent of U.S. electrical demand. Paul Jacobson, ocean energy leader for EPRI, says these first-pass estimates are now being updated by a comprehensive national wave energy assessment that EPRI will complete next year, and a national tidal assessment underway at Georgia Tech.

The SMH has a report on rumours that Woodside is considering a bid for coal seam gas producer Santos – Santos in Woodside crosshairs .

The Santos share price has risen strongly in the past three weeks on the strength of rumours that Woodside has been sounding out industry personnel about their willingness to join a team for a major venture, now said to be a move on Santos.

Analysts described the Santos rumours as chatter and pointed out that Woodside has its own LNG growth plans to pursue without having to bother with the unknowns of LNG exports from coal seam gas resources. The chatter nevertheless persists.

The theory is that Woodside would sell Santos’s non-export gas interests to defray the cost of the acquisition. A bid for Santos has been on the cards since the South Australian government lifted the 15 per cent shareholding restrictions in the company – a throwback to when Alan Bond was stalking the Adelaide company.

The Santos rumour comes as BG Group has jumped to the lead in the race to become the first of the Queensland gas exporters after formally signing a deal for the supply of $50 billion of gas to China.

The signing followed the May 2009 agreement with China National Offshore Oil Corp for gas sales from its proposed Curtis LNG project near Gladstone.

The agreement covers the supply of 3.6 million tonnes of LNG annually over 20 years. The value was not disclosed and is dependent on oil price assumptions. A range of $40 billion to $60 billion is expected.

It ranks as one of the biggest LNG contracts ever written and has particular importance because it is the first fully-termed sales and purchase agreements for the supply of LNG from coal seam methane, as distinct from an understanding to buy on terms yet to be decided.

Following its 2008 takeover of QGC, BG is laying claim to a resource base to underpin the Curtis LNG development of 13.5 trillion cubic feet. The deal with CNOOC also means that the project is now fully sold on its planned output of more than 8 million tonnes of LNG annually. Previous supply deals with Singapore and Chile have been struck.

BG plans to have the plant on Curtis Island come on stream in 2014.

The Business Spectator has a somewhat mystifying column arguing that Germany’s economic model is flawed because it is so successful – The Flawed Giant Of Europe. The underlying cause of the unreasoning seems to be the cursed work ethic, equating unemployment with misery. This might be true if you can’t afford a generous social welfare system – however the Germans can, as a result of their economic success – so the real objection here is basically a (demented) political one – which is what you’d expect from someone working for a conservative think tank I guess. If the worst a country has to worry about is that people might have to mow their own lawns, things are pretty good (unless your goal is to have plenty of poor people around to do your menial work for you I suppose)…

Although concerns over our own productivity are only natural, focusing on this measure alone is too narrow because it ignores labour cost and employment effects. A closer inspection of German productivity reveals that a nation’s high productivity can create an economy in which people find it hard to get their lawns mowed.

Germany’s productivity is as legendary as the ingenuity of its engineers. When the marketing executives at Audi AG realised they were being mistaken for an Italian car manufacturer, they were quick to use their domestic slogan Vorsprung durch Technik (advancement through technology) in international advertising campaigns.

The Audi catchphrase worked wonders in selling the company’s Germanness, but it describes more than just this single carmaker. It also sums up the business model of Germany Inc. No other country has based its economy on such a combination of high technology, extreme efficiency, and capital-intensive production. Unfortunately, this may have more to do with the country’s labour market and welfare state than with sophisticated German engineering.

The German language is productive indeed. It has forged a complicated word for this phenomenon: Entlassungsproduktivität – the productivity gains from lay-offs. Economists like Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the IFO research institute in Munich, have long argued that high labour costs are driving German companies to substitute capital for labour. This boosts labour productivity – and unemployment.

For many decades, German trade unions had successfully pushed for higher wages, particularly for low-income groups. Germany’s welfare state also contributed to increasing work costs. It is financed by payroll taxes, which means that employers have to pay roughly 25 percent in taxes on top of their gross wages bill. Add to that a well-developed – and costly – system of worker co-determination, whereby employees are involved in the management of a company, and it is not difficult to understand why German companies have been focusing their efforts on increasing efficiency and labour productivity. If it is costly and difficult to employ a worker, companies naturally start exploring other options – such as a new machine that could do the job just as well.

The German Federal Statistical Office provides good data to illustrate this. Between 1991 and 2009 capital intensity per worker, that is the private capital employed per job, rose substantially. In constant prices, it went up from €212,000 to €298,000 within this period – a cumulated increase of over 40 percent. This is not a new development, however. According to research by IWG Bonn, Germany’s capital intensity per hour worked has been higher than in any other industrialised country, except Japan, since the mid-1960s. This is even more remarkable considering the fact that working hours in Germany are among the lowest in OECD countries.

Although Germany’s productivity record may sound enviable, it has come at a huge price. It has triggered an enormous sectoral change and created a legacy of lasting unemployment. Jobs were cut in labour intensive industries where production was shifted to low-cost countries, mainly in Eastern Europe and Asia. Thus, in industries such as microchips, car components and textiles, Germany has lost employment thanks to a shift to increased capital intensity.

What this long process has brought about is an economy that is at the same time extremely productive and yet not very conducive to job creation. Workers lacking the qualifications necessary to be employed in high-productivity jobs are often relegated to a life on benefits. The jobless rate among them is much higher than in most other industrialised countries.

Martin Wolf at the FT is also having a go at the Germans (along with the Chinese), coining a new name for the 2 massive exporters, “Chermany” – China and Germany unite to impose global deflation. His arguments about the long term unsustainability of trade imbalances between nations make more sense than the nonsense peddled above at least.

Australian bank NAB has implemented a variant on a cogeneration system (apparently using traditional technology rather than a “Bloom Box” style fuel cell) within their main data centre in order to cut power bills and Tri-generation plant to cut bank’s energy bill.

NATIONAL Australia Bank expects to save nearly $1 million in annual power costs by installing a tri-generation plant at its main data centre in Melbourne. Tri-gen plants produce electricity and use waste energy to produce heat and cooling. The resulting energy consumption is much lower than using a traditional electricity grid.

NAB embarked on the tri-gen path two years ago for sustainability purposes, as it was facing power consumption growth of 10 per cent annually.

ComputerWorld has more, noting that server virtualisation also helps save a lot of energy consumption – NAB data centre uses trigen, saves 20k tonnes of carbon.

Trigen technology introduces cooling processes into co-generation technology, which reuses heat from energy manufacture. Co-generation is the technology behind the famous New York stream system which transports heat for homes and office buildings.

The gas-powered data centre channels excess gas — heated to more than 300ºC — into the 2 megawatt trigen plant where it is sent into an absorption chiller that boils refrigerant liquid to produce cold water for cooling.

NAB data centre platform specialist, Glenn Allan, said the trigen plant was quietly switched on early this month. “We are farming a single energy expense for multiple re-use,” Allan said. “We are the first [to use trigen] in data centres, but you will be able to count the months until the next deployment.”

Allan said trigen power will gradually replace the data centres’ remaining energy grid dependence and will be considered for incorporation into all new NAB data centres. “These aren’t emergency stand-by technologies — they are running the baseload power every day of the week,” Allan said. …

NAB’s primary Melbourne data centre has been a favourite of the banks’ carbon razor gang, as part of the carbon neutral initiative through which the bank has conducted efficiency assessments, bought a fleet of hybrid vehicles, switched to 10 per cent green power and slashed energy use in its 790 branches. …

Power and cooling costs can also be significantly reduced by replacing ordinary servers with blades and using virtualisation, Allan said. Blade servers are the staple in NAB’s data centres and, while virtualisation has been deployed extensively, he warned that the enterprise consolidation ratios may not reach some of the more optimistic predictions. Allan said the most productive uses of virtualisation are only coming out now after the “toy factor” mentality has passed.

“There is a litany of inventions in history where the usefulness is only discovered later… virtualisation could be made more useful if I could create backup application on a server, inflate it for 90 minutes then remove it so it doesn’t take up resources,” he said.

“[Virtualisation] will lower the server-to-power ratio — NAB has 16 blades to six power supplies — and if you virtualise, the ratio becomes incredible,” he said. “The case for virtualisation is off the table; everyone should do it, if not for the power savings than for the improved change management capabilities.”

The data centre uses cold and hot isle systems and Allan, who is eagerly watching research in jet impingement chip cooling, said every data centre should operate advanced cooling management models.

Greentech media has a look at the prospects for Shai Agassi’s Better Place venture – Will Better Place Make It?.

Can three cents be transformed into billions of dollars?

That’s the big question when it comes to Better Place, the well-funded start-up that wants to put people into electric cars. Driving a gas car costs about 12 cents a mile when gas costs $3 a gallon, says Jason Wolf, vice president the company’s North American division.

Electricity, on the other hand, costs about 3 cents a mile: a kilowatt hour costs around 12 cents and a car can go around 4 miles on a kilowatt hour. A battery for an electric car, meanwhile, will cost around 6 cents a mile over a 200,000 mile lifetime.

Since Better Place says it will supply the electricity and batteries to consumers, the company has a margin of 3 cents per mile (12 cents minus 9) before potential customers complain about the higher cost of going electric. Granted, 3 cents doesn’t sound like much: I harvest more loose change than that every time I do laundry. And Better Place proposes building thousands of charging stations, hundreds of battery swapping stations, and devising software so these cars won’t crash the grid when charging.

But look at it from another perspective. There are around 200 million drivers and 254 million vehicles in the U.S. and insurance companies say the average person drives 12,000 miles a year. That comes to 2.4 trillion miles, or $72 billion of potential three-cent transactions per year. Even one percent of that would probably placate investors. And in Europe and Asia, higher gas prices boost that 3 cent margin to 9 or 12 cents. Additional revenue can come from selling semi-depleted batteries to utilities, which isn’t part of the above calculations.

And with the battery separated from the car, the down payment and resistance toward going electric goes way down.

“When you buy a Toyota, you don’t buy eight years of gasoline,” Wolf said. “You take out the battery and now you have a much, much cheaper car.”

Big math problems like that, along with their inherent uncertainties, make Better Place one of the more intriguing companies in greentech today, or in any market, for that matter. In a short period of time, the company has joined the ranks of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Tesla Motors as a subject of endless debate and speculation. How did they raise over $700 million? How much have they spent? Will car dealers and manufacturers work with them?

Renewable Energy World has a look at developments in the world of energy storage – Energy Storage’s Quiet Revolution.

When A123Systems saw its shares jump more than 50 percent in a successful Nasdaq debut back in September, some industry insiders expected it would be the first of a bevy of big energy-storage headlines. Instead, energy storage seems to have fallen out of the limelight, getting nothing near as much hype as Bloom Energy, a fuel-cell company focused on electricity generation instead of energy storage, generated when it launched last month.

But a series of recent small announcements suggest that energy-storage technologies are quietly making progress toward commercialization nonetheless. “There seems to be a lot more buzz in the last few months, and what’s interesting is it’s not all on the automotive side,” said Sara Bradford, a principal consultant for global research firm Frost & Sullivan. While automobiles remain a key area for new energy-storage technologies, she’s seeing a “spillover effect” as research and investment spreads into other areas, including grid applications for utilities and nonautomotive transportation.

Some examples? In February, Valence Technology signed a $45 million deal to supply its lithium-ion battery systems for a new line of hybrid-electric yachts, sailboats and motorboats from Beneteau Group. And International Battery, another lithium-ion rechargeable battery manufacturer, announced it was selected to supply battery systems for an American Electric Power smart-grid demonstration project in Ohio.

The community energy storage part of the project, which is being developed by S&C Electric Company, is intended help stabilize the grid and provide backup power, potentially enabling plug-in electric vehicles and a higher percentage of intermittent renewable-energy sources, such as solar and wind power.

In January, battery maker GS Battery teamed up with screen-printed solar-cell manufacturer Suniva to develop solar-power systems with batteries that can store the energy for times of peak demand. And Ice Energy — which reduces peak electricity demand from air conditioners in the middle of the day by making ice at night, when demand is low and surplus electricity is available, and using it to help cool air conditioning refrigerant when temperatures are high — signed a deal to sell its devices to the 11 municipal utilities represented by the Southern California Public Power Authority.

While many of the announcements have represented only small steps — such as pilot projects or an entrance into niche markets — they show that a number of technologies are on the right track, and some are ready to go, she said. “Exciting things are happening that set the stage to really make [commercialization] happen short-term,” Bradford said. “These announcements are certainly steps in the right direction to get these technologies ready for electric vehicles and the grid.”

Greentech Media reports that US smart grid technology vendors Silver Spring and GridNet are competing to land Australian smart grid contracts – Silver Spring, GridNet Rivalry Heats Up Down Under.

Silver Spring Networks — the people who want to hook your home’s electricity meter to the grid with mesh radios — will work with Australia’s Western Power to link up one of the most isolated electricity networks in the world.

Western Power provides electricity to more than 850,000 homes and businesses but over a service territory covering 322,000 square kilometers. That’s going to take some extra repeaters and infrastructure to make sure everyone is linked up. The contract will initially cover six service areas in the overall service territory.

Silver Spring has landed contracts to deploy its technology in California, Texas and Florida, among other places, arguably putting it at the top of the pack of smart grid network providers. This latest deal, however, brings an element of human drama.

GridNet, which proposes using more powerful broadband networks to link up consumers and utilities, and its partner General Electric last year signed a deal with Australian utility SP AusNet. The utility plans to use the next-generation wireless technology to link about 680,000 household customers with smart meters. Future uses of that grid could include linking distribution grid sensors and controls, rooftop solar panel monitors, “smart charging” systems for plug-in electric and hybrid vehicles, and a host of other smart grid applications.

GridNet is also trying to seal up other Australian deals, vice president of marketing solutions Judith McGarry told us recently. GridNet hasn’t landed as many deals in the U.S., McGarry said, because it got started later. Australia as a result has become something of the test case for the company. Although it plans to accommodate all sorts of broadband standards, GridNet is now mostly focused on WiMax.

I came across this interesting iPhone app while reading a newsletter from a local solar panel company – good to see people making good use of the technology – Energy Matters Solar Analyser for the iPhone (as this post probably looks somewhat like an ad, I’ll note I’ve got no connection to the company whatsoever and have no idea if they are any good or not).

The Energy Matters Solar Analyser is a revolutionary solar power site evaluation tool for the iPhone 3G, 3Gs and iPod Touch, providing full solar site analysis – and it’s free! While originally designed for solar industry professionals, it’s simple enough to operate that just about anyone can use it. …

By utilizing the compass (on iPhone 3GS) and inclinometer functions of the iPhone, together with built in GPS and sun positioning functionality, the Solar Analyser can perform site evaluations in seconds. The Solar Analyser is easy to use, requiring minimal set-up time – you simply trace the skyline with the “heads up sight” and press “Analyse”.

Using the Solar Analyser’s high resolution graphical display and easy to review results, you can determine a realistic estimation of the kWhr solar power that can be generated at a location, taking into account the local shading. It also supports fixed, single and dual axis tracking systems.

The Solar Analyser includes a large database of solar panel and inverter models. Select your dream system configuration and the tool will also calculate the $/month production of the site (Australia only).

Technology Review has an article on research into improving the efficiency of plastic solar cells – Giving Plastic Solar Cells an Energy Boost.

If the efficiency of polymer solar cells–which are cheaper and lighter than silicon cells–can be boosted significantly, they could be ideal for plastering on rooftops or laminating on windows.

Solarmer Energy, based in El Monte, CA, is on target to reach 10 percent efficiency by the end of this year, says Yue Wu, the company’s managing director and director of research and development. Organic cells will likely need at least that efficiency to compete on the photovoltaic market.

In collaboration with Luping Yu, a professor at the University of Chicago, the startup has previously engineered polymers that absorb a broad range of wavelengths and has made cells that convert sunlight to electricity with a record efficiency of nearly 8 percent.

Polymer solar cells with even higher efficiencies are in the works. Solarmer is collaborating with Yang Yang, a materials science and engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Yang is working on a stack of multiple cells that absorb different bands of light. He expects to achieve 12 to 15 percent efficiencies using this approach along with new polymers and better device design. So far, he has made laboratory prototypes that are better than 6 percent efficient.

Polymer solar cells should be cheaper to make than thin-film cadmium-telluride or copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) ones because they use low-cost materials that are easy to print, says Michael McGehee, a materials science and engineering professor at Stanford University. But McGehee believes polymer cells will need to be more than 15 percent efficient to have a major impact on the solar power market. “We still don’t understand the physics well enough to know what the theoretical limit is,” McGehee says. “I think cells with 15 to 20 percent could be possible.”

Technology Review also reports that General Electric is getting into the thin film solar market – GE to Make Thin-Film Solar Panels.

GE has confirmed long-standing speculation that it plans to make thin-film solar panels that use a cadmium- and tellurium-based semiconductor to capture light and convert it into electricity. The GE move could put pressure on the only major cadmium-telluride solar-panel maker, Tempe, AZ-based First Solar, which could drive down prices for solar panels.

Last year, GE seemed to be getting out of the solar industry as it sold off crystalline-silicon solar-panel factories it had acquired in 2004. The company found that the market for such solar panels–which account for most of the solar panels sold worldwide–was too competitive for a relative newcomer, says Danielle Merfeld, GE’s solar technology platform leader.

She says cadmium-telluride solar is attractive to GE in part because, compared to silicon, there’s still a lot to learn about the physics of cadmium telluride, which suggests it could be made more efficient, which in turn can lower the cost per watt of solar power. It’s also potentially cheaper to make cadmium-telluride solar panels than it is to make silicon solar cells, making it easier to compete with established solar-panel makers. Merfeld says GE was encouraged by the example of First Solar, which has consistently undercut the prices of silicon solar panels–and because of this has quickly grown from producing almost no solar panels just a few years ago to being one of the world’s largest solar manufacturers today.