Solar Systems Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Silex Systems Limited , has announced the completion of a 1MW solar power generation facility at the Nofa Equestrian Resort near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Weeks before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue first-ever limits on carbon emissions from existing power plants, opponents in some Midwestern state legislatures and governors’ mansions are attempting to put up roadblocks.
The impending federal rules could require massive changes in the nation’s electrical system, including the closure of some coal-fired plants.
Last week, for example, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill that asserts that Kansas will make its own decisions about emissions from coal-fired plants. The bill-signing ceremony took place at a western Kansas coal plant.
Specifically, the bill calls for Kansas regulators to establish an emissions standard for each plant, depending on the cost of new controls. It also would calculate statewide carbon emissions by averaging all sources of power -- wind farms along with fossil fuel-fired plants.
“What we are saying is, let us, the state of Kansas, handle this,” Brownback said at the event.
In Missouri, several bills are pending. A couple of them have passed at least one chamber.
“It’s all about politics,” said John Hickey, a Sierra Club lobbyist in Missouri. “Legislators are trying to pressure the EPA, the governor, the DNR and the Congressional delegation.”
President Barack Obama instructed the EPA to issue draft rules in June. They are to be finalized in June of 2015.
Then, state agencies -- such as the Department of Natural Resources in Missouri -- will be charged with developing plans to meet the federal targets.
One of the Missouri bills taking aim at the impending EPA standards is SCR 40. That resolution, in essence, states that the EPA “should let (Missouri) set lower standards, and take a longer time to meet them,” said John Hickey, a Sierra Club lobbyist in Missouri.
A resolution is really just an expression of opinion, and doesn’t have the force of law. And yet to Hickey, it’s significant in the same way that aiming a gun is -- even if you don’t pull the trigger.
“You pull the gun out; you send a message,” he said. “They have so many ways to punish the DNR. It’s just one tool to say, ‘We’re going to mess with you -- with your budget, with your appointments.’”
Rebecca Stanfield of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sees in these measures the palm prints of the American Legislative Exchange Council -- and especially its coal-industry members.
“These are tactics the coal industry is using to try to intimidate the EPA and to build opposition to standards on carbon pollution,” she said. “I know of no state in the Midwest where there isn’t an effort by the Koch brothers and the coal industry to have a statement come out saying, ‘This is bad.’”
When asked about the role and perspective of Peabody Energy, a St. Louis-based coal company, a spokesman issued the following statement:
“Peabody Energy supports technology advancement and continuous emissions improvement, while opposing proposed rules that would punish electricity consumers and act outside of the bounds of the law.”
Stanfield is confident that the campaign won’t get far.
“The most they can do is tie the hands of the state,” she said. “Then they’ll be faced with the federal plan. At the end of the day, the rules still have to be met.”
And states will fare best, she believes, if they embrace the standards and try to implement them through their state environmental regulatory agencies.
“These are people with long histories working in our states. They know the resource mix. It makes the most sense for those people to develop the state’s plan.”
Sabre-rattling targeted at the EPA and Congress has failed to get anywhere in a couple of states. Resolutions have been introduced in both legislative chambers in Illinois, but have gone nowhere.
In Iowa, state Rep. Ralph Watts introduced a resolution into the House of Representatives in March that stated that “it is in the best interests of electricity consumers in Iowa to continue to benefit from reliable, affordable electricity generated by coal-based electricity generating plants.”
The resolution, HR 118, urged the EPA “to respect the primacy of Iowa and other states and to rely on state regulators to develop performance standards for carbon dioxide emissions that take into account the unique policies, energy needs, resource mix and economic priorities of Iowa and other states.”
Iowa state Rep. Chuck Isenhart, who describes Watts as “a climate denier,” interpreted HR 118 as “very one-sided” with a heavy emphasis “on the merits of continuing to burn coal.”
Isenhart and fellow Rep. Art Staed introduced several amendments that emphasized the merits of more wind and solar power, and of cooperating with the EPA in carrying out the upcoming standards.
Their aim was to stop the resolution from moving through the legislature. It appears they succeeded in that.
Rep. Watts and his supporters “wanted to send this to Congress and the EPA, that the Iowa House wants to resist the rules of the EPA, and to continue to use cheap coal,” Staed said. “The rest of us think it doesn’t represent the people of Iowa, or the Iowa House.”
Had it passed, Staed said, “You’d see it printed in every magazine that is opposed (to controls on carbon emissions), and that would give it more credence. That’s the wrong message. Iowa is going to continue to use more wind and solar, and reduce its use of fossil fuels.”
Rep. Watts, who spent his career in the electricity and gas industries, said he considers it “quite possible” that the coming EPA limits on carbon dioxide emissions will “effectively stop coal-fired generation.“ And the specter of climate change, he said, is “not an issue that warrants us shutting down coal fired plants.”
His aim in pursuing a resolution, Watts said, was to persuade Congress to stop the EPA from issuing the regulations, or to override them with a new law.
Hickey, of the Sierra Club, shares the concern that even strictly symbolic measures can pack some punch.
“Look at the other rules that have been challenged and delayed,” he said. “Look at coal-ash waste. They want to delay, delay delay.”
The EPA turned its sights on coal ash after the largest-ever spill of coal ash waste in the U.S. In December 2008, an estimated 50,000 to 82,000 tons of coal ash, along with 27 million gallons of water, poured from a storage pond near Kingston, Tennessee and into a couple of rivers. Coal ash contains toxic heavy metals such as mercury, lead and cadmium.
In 2009, then-administrator of the EPA, Lisa Jackson, promised that the agency would write rules for the disposal of coal ash, the byproduct of coal combustion in power plants. In 2010, the agency conducted seven public hearings and collected nearly half a million comments.
Regulations have not been forthcoming.
Hickey considers the current pushback against EPA rules on carbon emissions to be “same song, second verse. They’ve been able to delay so many other regulations; why not tie up this one too? The fossil-fuel industry has found that if they try to delay EPA action, they can have success.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the EPA has the prerogative to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and ultimately, that law of the land must be followed, said David Weiskopf, a sustainable energy fellow with NRDC in Chicago.
If a state legislature requires its environmental protection agency to “jump through a lot of hoops, it will take more resources,” he said. “It doesn’t do anything but waste taxpayer money.”
States will be best served, he said, by fulfilling the mandate “in the lowest-cost way, and by encouraging local industry.”
***
Editor's note: This article is reposted in its original form from Midwest Energy News. Author credit goes to Karen Uhlenhuth.
Bloomberg | GE Buy of Alstom Energy Business Not a Done Deal ABC News Associated Press. General Electric inched closer to buying the energy-related businesses of France's Alstom by making a $16.9 billion bid, but rival offers and the concerns of French politicians may hold up or scuttle the deal. GE's bid, announced ... GE Bids $17 Billion for Alstom Energy to Preempt Siemens GE has advantage in French energy tussle GE Offers Alstom $17 Billion For Its Energy Businesses |
When the world's largest photovoltaic power plant went online this week in Arizona, it began generating 290 megawatts of clean green electricity that's powering 100,000 homes in neighboring California under a 25-year contract with utility Pacific Gas & Electric.
Energy efficiency targets in 26 US states generated 85% of America's total energy savings - so what can they teach the rest of our country
How 26 States Created 85% Of America’s Energy Efficiency Savings was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.
Hull Daily Mail | Start date set for £150m green power plant Construction Enquirer Construction will start early next year on a £150m green energy power plant in Hull after contractors were confirmed to design, build and operate the scheme. A joint venture of MWH Treatment and the Spencer Group have secured preferred bidder status ... £150m green power plant in Hull : Spencer Group named as 'preferred bidder ... First of its kind renewable energy plant to be built in the UK |
The First Nations community of Fort Chipewyan in Alberta, Canada, has been hit quite hard in recent years by the lingering effects of decades of fossil fuel industry extraction in the region. The inhabitants can no longer practice their traditions, or, for that matter, even provide a livelihood for themselves except through involvement with said
First Nations Community Hit Hard By Fossil Fuel Industry Asks It For Solar Panels was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.
Space.com | Dark Matter and Dark Energy Mysteries: Do Neutrons Hold the Key? Space.com Neutrons bouncing in Earth's gravity are helping to shed light on two of the greatest mysteries in the universe, dark matter and dark energy, researchers say. Dark matter is an invisible substance thought to make up five-sixths of all matter in the ... |
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An essential medical procedure repairing deep wounds could be radically improved with a new approach: gluing skin and other tissue together with solutions of nanoparticles.
Mexico Lays out Energy Reform Rules ABC News The Mexican government on Wednesday unveiled its proposed rules for a historic opening of its state-owned oil and energy industry, saying contracts and production licenses should be put out for public bid and go to the company that offers the best return. |
The “Internet of Things” means different things to different people, from General Electric’s networked jet engines and power turbines and Cisco and IBM’s smart streetlights and parking systems, to smartphone-enabled home security, entertainment and medical devices.
All of this will need an IT infrastructure to built on, from the chips that turn devices “smart,” to the cloud computing platforms that make them all work together. That’s the goal that startup Ayla Networks has set for itself, and on Wednesday it landed a $14.5 million Series B round to test it out with an expanding list of partners.
Existing investors Voyager Capital and Crosslink Capital were joined by some high-profile new investors in Wednesday’s round. Those include strategic investor Cisco, Chinese venture fund SAIF Ventures, and the World Bank’s International Finance Corp.. The Sunnyvale, Calif-based startup also announced it was actively designing products with makers of “residential fire and safety monitoring, thermostats and broader HVAC control, water treatment and management, door locks, and home control.”
Ayla, founded in 2010, came out of stealth last summer with a $5.4 million Series A round, and a pretty impressive list of partners. On the chip side, Broadcomm and STMicroelectronics had agreed to embed Ayla’s software on their latest generation of low-power Wi-Fi chipsets. Wednesday’s announcement added Murata Americas, NXP, and United Scientific Industrial Co. to its list of chipmaker partners.
That’s am important distinguishing feature for a startup, and CEO and co-founder Dave Friedman says it’s at the heart of the platform’s scalability. “A reference design does not scale,” he said. “If I give you software and say, put it in your thing, everyone’s going to do it a little bit differently.” With embedded software, “I can support it in a thousand different designs,” he said. “It never changes.”
That also helps Ayla to manage the ebb and flow of connectivity and data in an ever-shifting sea of hot spots, sleeping cells and the like. “If you were to characterize the system, the thing you’re trying to connect in that space, it’s very fragmented -- but one thing we know is that if it’s going to join the Internet of Things, it’s going to need communications,” he said.
From there, “We have a platform that connects and binds these things very easily to the cloud, where these virtual platforms exist,” he said. “Our customers don’t have to write software to the cloud. We’ve removed the friction there.”
Ayla likes to refer to its process as “Agile IT -- being able to make changes, make new rules, make things talk to other things, talk to the cloud,” he said. “Building in that level of flexibility and extensibility, that takes nothing but experience on how to do this over and over again.”
Ayla’s biggest partner to date is Sina, owner of Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, which has adopted the startup’s cloud platform for consumer devices. The partners are looking at lighting control, door and window monitors, and indoor air-quality management applications. But Ayla is definitely targeting North America, and is working with unnamed partners that Friedman said included some heavyweights in the field.
How does Ayla’s approach blend in with all the other technology going into the Internet of Things? We’ve seen a number of home automation startups, such as Digi International, GreenWave Reality, iControl, Alarm.com, MiOS, Control4 (now public) and Nest (now Google), working with telecommunications and home security firms, home improvement and retail electronics stores, and of course, countless utility pilot projects.
All in all, these companies do what they do well, Friedman said. “They’re very focused on the set-top box, the intelligent gateway, and when to prioritize different packets, and how to connect them to the cloud. That’s an area of expertise we don’t have -- in some ways, we’re solving different problems, and can work together.”
As for Cisco, Friedman declined to say much, beyond the fact that the networking giant was coming on board as a strategic investor. Cisco has IoT projects across the world, and is often working quietly with any number of technology providers to make them work more smoothly. Other major players like Honeywell, GE and Panasonic are designing their own networked device cloud platforms.
Huntsville among 51 US communities vying for $5 million Georgetown energy ... al.com ... for $5 million Georgetown energy prize. downtown Huntsville. The city of Huntsville is among 51 U.S. communities competing for a $5 million Georgetown University Energy Prize, an incentive-based competition to reduce American energy consumption. |
Yingli Solar is teaming up with an as-yet-unnamed “leading” French PV module manufacturer in order to help the French partner meet the requirements of the national tender program under which its partner won large-volume tenders. The cobranded products will be produced in France, but will feature high-performance polycrystalline solar cells manufactured by Yingli Solar. The
Yingli Solar Teaming Up With French Module Manufacturer was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.
Myopic, partisan and unsustainable government -mandated greenhouse gas controls for questionable climate threats inflate consumer costs and cause electric power shortfalls, and always have unintended pollution.
The global fossil fuel industry faces a loss of $28 trillion in revenues over the next two decades if the world takes action to address climate change, cleans up pollution and moves to decarbonize the global energy system.
The assessment, made by leading European brokerage Kepler Cheuvreux, underlines what’s at stake for the fossil fuel industry, including factors such as a push for cleaner fuels and concerted efforts to reduce emissions, and helps explain the significant pushback from the oil and coal industries against such policies.
The Kepler Cheuvreux report, penned by a team led by Paris-based analyst Mark Lewis, a former head of Deutsche Bank’s carbon and energy team, says the oil industry has the most to lose, with a potential loss of $19.3 trillion in revenues in the period 2015-2035. The coal industry stands to lose $4.9 trillion, while the gas industry could lose $4 trillion.
The most at-risk projects are the high-cost, high-carbon sources -- particularly deepwater drilling, oil sands and shale-oil plays -- which rely on high prices for oil.
Kepler Cheuvreux arrives at its primary conclusions by comparing the forecasts included in the International Energy Agency’s “New Policies Scenario,” which is effectively a business-as-usual scenario, and what would be needed to meet the 450 Scenario, which is based on the parts-per-million level seen as a benchmark for capping global warming to a maximum 2°C. These graphs below illustrate the emissions reduction path, as well as the IEA’s estimate of how this might affect production of various energy sources.
But Kepler Cheuvreux says that its predictions do not rely on there being a global climate agreement struck in Paris at the end of 2015. The report notes that trillions of dollars are still at risk from unilateral and regional action, pollution controls such as those being implemented by China, and the falling of cost of renewables, which will likely displace more coal, gas and oil production.
“The oil industry’s increasingly unsustainable dynamics...mean that stranded-asset risk exists even under business-as-usual conditions,” Kepler Cheuvreux writes. “High oil prices will encourage the shift away from oil toward renewables (whose costs are falling), while also incentivizing greater energy efficiency."
The following graph illustrates the problem. Much of the existing production is low to medium cost, but the remaining reserves -- such as those locked under the Arctic -- are complicated and expensive to extract.
On this point, the report reflects the majority view of leading investment houses, including Citigroup’s latest assessment that the “age of renewables has begun” on the basis of costs, and Sanford Bernstein’s recent warning that the world faced a scenario of energy price deflation because of the impact of the plunging cost of solar and its likelihood of displacing of fossil fuels across the world.
The global fossil-fuel industry has been clinging grimly to the IEA’s New Policies scenario, seeking to justify the huge investment it is making in exploration and ever-more capital-intensive projects to both shareholders and bankers.
Kepler Cheuvreux is particularly critical of ExxonMobil’s recent carbon risk report, saying it had focused almost exclusively on business-as-usual scenarios and “did not advance the debate at all.”
The report says that most existing fossil-fuel production is not at risk. Instead, the risk is in the proven reserves that yet to be developed. As Citigroup and others, including HSBC and Deutsche Bank, have previously noted, these proven but as yet undeveloped assets form a significant part of some company’s market and asset valuations.
On the subject of renewables, Kepler Cheuvreux reports that major cost reductions have been achieved in recent years, and this is likely to continue over the next two decades -- just as the upward trajectory for oil costs becomes steeper.
“This suggests, perhaps paradoxically, that there could be a real risk to the oil industry from rising oil prices under a business-as-usual scenario, as combined with continuing reductions in the costs of renewable technologies, this could drive the accelerated substitution of oil in the global energy mix over the next two decades,” the report states.
“In turn, this would risk creating stranded assets over the medium to longer term both for the oil industry itself and -- owing to the central role of oil in energy pricing more generally -- for the global fossil-fuel industry as a whole.
“The implications of such a scenario would be momentous, as it would mean that the oil industry potentially faces the risk of stranded assets not only under a scenario of falling oil prices brought about by the structurally lower demand entailed by a future tightening of climate policy, but also under a scenario of rising oil prices brought about by rising demand under increasingly constrained supply conditions.”
As noted, the Kepler Cheuvreux report is highly critical of ExxonMobil’s recent assessment of how it is managing carbon risk. The brokerage said Exxon was too focused on business-as-usual, was dismissive of the risk of a coordinated global policy response ever happening, and was far too “binary” in its assessment of the climate-policy risks the oil industry faces.
“We have already acknowledged that a 450 ppm deal by December 2015 does not look at all likely, but the point about global climate policy is as much the direction of travel as the speed.
“And in effectively dismissing the likelihood of policymakers ever getting genuinely serious in terms of policy ambition, we think ExxonMobil is giving itself a free pass in terms of the need to at least contemplate what a 450-ppm world would mean."
The report also notes that certain kinds of investments -- notably high-cost, high carbon assets such as Canadian oil sands -- could become socially unacceptable as investments for growing numbers of institutional investors over time. Indeed, this was one of the assets explicitly cited by shareholders that forced Exxon to write its carbon risk report.
“We can also envisage a risk of stranded assets arising for oil companies under a scenario of rising oil prices,” Kepler Cheuvreux writes.
“Specifically, if oil prices rise faster in the future than currently assumed by the IEA in its base-case projections, we think this could lead to an acceleration of the policy incentives for, and deployment of, renewable-energy technologies and energy-efficiency measures, and hence a faster shift away from oil in the global energy mix over the next three decades than ExxonMobil assumes."
***
Editor's note: This article is reposted from RenewEconomy. Author credit goes to Giles Parkinson.
Wall Street Journal (blog) | Which Big Energy Users Are Getting Power From Green Sources? Wall Street Journal (blog) Companies know that green power isn't just good for the environment, it's good marketing. Last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency posted its National Top 100 list, which ranks the largest green-power users within its Green Power Partnership. |
Iowa Now | High-energy student pursues low-energy solutions Iowa Now In the past four years, she has spearheaded many sustainable campus initiatives, including tray-less dining, water-bottle filling stations, the replacement of trash cans with recycling bins, and energy conservation. “I'd like to think I've left the ... |
Originally published on EV Obsession. Series production of BMW’s battery-electric BMW C evolution maxi-scooter has now begun at the company’s Berlin plant. The electric scooter — which is BMW’s first to be mass produced — began development back in 2011, as the BMW E-Scooter concept. The storage modules used in the BMW C Evolution are,
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Energy Future files for bankruptcy, company splitting up Dallas Morning News (blog) Energy Future Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday morning after reaching a debt restructuring deal with creditors to would break up the company and eliminate more than half its $40 billion in debt. The filing in U.S. Bankruptcy ... |
A survey that challenged IT managers to imagine the data center of 2025 offers up some optimistic, even surprising, findings.
One of the world's leading renewable energy providers Urban Green Energy has announced the release of their latest cutting-edge vertical axis wind turbine , the VisionAIR3.
Given the right conditions, wind turbines can generate lightning (for reasons other than simply being elevated), new research from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) has found. The relatively fast movement of the wind turbine blade tips directly triggers electrical discharges, according to the work. The researchers think that their new findings will be useful
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