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Notes"As Hermann Scheer, the father of Germany’s feed-in tariff, often said, the intent of his disruptive law was to fundamentally restructure the German energy industry. Energy technologies, Scheer understood, came with their own “techno-logic.” Coal and gas and nukes and hydro were top-down and centralized, their profits earned by securing and exploiting scarce, expensive fuels.
Shifting to renewables isn’t a megawatt-for-megawatt swap between energy sources but a paradigm shift from one techno-logic to another. Renewables encourage smaller scale and decentralization; they reward efficiency over consumption; and they centralize the value at the level of technological development and implementation, thus to exploit free fuels.
In a market where small-scale, decentralized renewables thrive, you’ll invariably find angry conventional energy companies. They mastered a game and rigged a market for themselves, and now it doesn’t work quite as favorably for them. (Notice that none of Germany’s big energy giants, even the ones paying those big tariffs, went bankrupt during the solar industry’s heyday.)"
Writer Chris Turner explains the differing “techno-logic” associated with renewable and non-renewable energy in his MNN article, ‘What have we learned about cheap energy?’. If you’re interested, you can read one of Herman Scheer’s quotes about the transition to clean energy and its connection with democracy here.
(Photo credit: MNN)
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Notes"Well, of course it is! Every new technology is more expensive. What if we hadn’t started using computers because they were more expensive than typewriters? What if we hadn’t started using cell phones because they were more expensive than land lines? Where would we be?"/Topics/focus-clean-energy-wind-585-mfk013011.jpg)
US Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus’ no nonsense response to the argument that renewable energy sources (e.g. solar, wind, geothermal) are (currently) more expensive than non-renewable energy (e.g. oil, coal, natural gas). I found the quote in the recent Climate Progress article, ‘The U.S. Military Takes on Global Warming’.
(Photo credit: Pew Environment)
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Notes"The most important of these trends is a multi-decade shift from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy. The shift will accelerate as oil becomes harder to produce and climate change worsens. Once climate change really starts affecting people’s lives – when it cuts world grain production, for instance – people will demand action. The action will come in the form of regulations and taxes that raise the price of carbon fuels.
The shift to carbon-free energy will be akin to what economists call a “general purpose technology” transition. The modern world has seen half a dozen or so transitions in the past 200 years, including those following the introduction of railways, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the computer microchip. Each produced staggering economic upheaval: companies, jobs and whole industries vanished, while new ones exploded onto the scene. These were periods of startling innovation, rapid economic growth and enormous opportunity for entrepreneurial individuals and communities.
The coming energy shift will dwarf all these earlier transitions combined. It won’t arise from just one disruptive technology but from an integrated suite of many, such as advanced batteries, building reskinning, smart grids, cheap super-thin photovoltaic materials, ultra-deep geothermal power, and perhaps thorium nuclear power. It will spur the invention and delivery of a torrent of new technologies, goods and services in every sector of the global economy.
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Three paragraphs from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s recent article in the Globe & Mail, ‘All’s not lost, Ontario. The future is green, not black’. Homer-Dixon is the director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and the author of a number of books including, ‘Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future’, ‘The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization’, and ‘The Ingenuity Gap’. You can watch, listen and read about his work here.
(Photo credit: Eco-News)
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Notes"There are two ways to level the energy playing field. The first is to internalize the almost unmeasurably dire cost of fossil fuels, which as a byproduct of their use are radically altering the planet’s climate in ways increasingly inimicable to life as we know it, through carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes and such. In Germany, doing this to a sufficient level to make coal more expensive than renewable power would’ve made the domestic coal industry furious. It would’ve been a ferocious political battle. So the Germans under the left-wing Red-Green Coalition in 2000 went another way.
The other way – which gave rise to the feed-in tariff – is to incentivize renewable energy sufficiently to offset the avoided cost of the greenhouse gas it doesn’t create. In a sense, you’re internalizing the practice that has emerged in carbon-priced markets worldwide, in which polluters buy offsets from green energy facilities. Instead of doing such elaborate market gymnastics, you simply build the desired offset into the green energy price through a pricing obligation. Grid operators in countries like Germany buy wind and solar and other renewably generated power at costs high above the cost of coal-fired power, and the added cost is passed on to consumers. In the case of the German energy market, the average household saw energy bills rise by about 40 euros per year (fifty bucks or so) in the first decade of the feed-in tariff."Writer Chris Turner explains the “two way to level the energy playing field” in his MNN article, ‘What have we learned about cheap energy?’
(‘Renewable Electricity Generation in Germany’ graph: Volker Quaschning via Clean Technica)
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NotesClean Energy Future: ‘Solar Cheaper Than Oil in Long Run’
From Bloomberg:
Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Ali Al-Nuaimi, a member of one of the ruling royal families in the United Arab Emirates, talks about his efforts to change the way his country makes and consumes energy, and the outlook for the growth of renewable energy sources. He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness with Margaret Brennan.”
Al-Nuaimi was also recently profiled by CNN in the article, ‘From polluter to protector: The UAE’s Green Sheikh’.
(Photo credit: Masdar City)
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Thomas Edison on the great potential of solar energy. In 1931.
(Source: CleanTechnica)
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Infographic: ‘How Are Cities Tackling Climate Change’
From C40 Cities:
Earlier this year, C40 and urban sustainability experts Arup released a groundbreaking report detailing these actions and uncovering where mayors hold the most power to effect change. The research found that C40 mayors have strong powers to mitigate and adapt to climate change in sectors from transport to buildings to waste management. Those powers represent a significant opportunity, and one that many city leaders are already seizing.
40 cities across the C40 network have collectively taken 4,734 actions to tackle climate change–more than three quarters of which have been implemented since C40 was founded in 2005.
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Notes NOAA Study: Solar, wind hold promise to replace fossil fuel as world's primary electricity source'From The Vancouver Sun:
Large-scale green energy systems can affordably replace fossil fuel as the world’s primary source of electricity within 20 years, new research from the United States weather office suggests.
… a director with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Friday in Vancouver that wind and solar could supply 70 per cent of electricity demand in the lower 48 states, with fossil fuel and hydro/nuclear renewables each accounting for just 15 per cent by 2030.
Check out the rest of the article here.
(Photo credit: Vancouver Sun)
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NotesThe International Energy Agency’s ‘World Energy Outlook 2011’ Report
From The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:
Carnegie’s Energy and Climate Program hosted the U.S. launch of the World Energy Outlook 2011, the flagship annual report of the International Energy Agency (IEA). Maria van der Hoeven, IEA executive director, Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist who oversees the World Energy Outlook, and Daniel Poneman, U.S. deputy secretary of energy, discussed the key findings of the report and its projections. Carnegie Endowment’s President Jessica Mathews opened the conversation, and Carnegie’s Adnan Vatansever moderated.
Troubling Trends and Increasing Costs of Inaction
The World Energy Outlook 2011 provides insight into global energy markets and trends for today and the next 24 years. The report lays out the urgent need to combat climate change and the dire consequences of its refusal, said Mathews. Economic concerns have diverted attention from energy policy and limited the means of intervention, added both van der Hoeven and Birol.
Birol highlighted several worrying trends from the report:
- To ensure a low carbon future, there is still time to act, but the window of opportunity is closing.
- CO2 emissions rebounded to a record high in 2010.
- Energy efficiency of the global economy worsened for the second straight year.
- Spending on oil imports is near record highs.
Check out the rest of the post here. Below are two key graphs drawn from the report.
(Graphic credit: IEA via The Guardian)
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Notes Good News: 'Global investment in clean energy hits record levels'
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
Despite the turbulence in the global economy, the world invested a record $251 billion in clean energy last year, with the US streaking ahead of China in green spending and boosting confidence among climate action advocates.
New figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance showed the US spent $54 billion on clean energy, retaking the No. 1 spot it lost to China in 2009 and defying assumptions that the world’s largest economy is flagging on greenhouse gas reductions.
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”Despite financial crisis, and even though carbon pricing schemes haven’t developed quite the way they were expected to … investment keeps growing, which reflects the world view of many major economists that clean energy is going to be the major industrial driver of economic growth this century,” said Kobad Bhavnagri, Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s lead clean energy analyst in Australia.
…The indications of a rise in global investment in clean energy follows the pact by major greenhouse-emitting countries in Durban last month on a road map that would lead to a global climate change deal by 2015.
Erwin Jackson, deputy CEO of the Climate Institute, said: ”There are all these myths of the world not acting on climate change. All you have to do is follow the money.”
Check out the rest of the article here.
(Photo credit: Bloomberg)
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Under the right circumstances, solar cells from Semprius could produce power more cheaply than fossil fuels
via nextbigfuture
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Nature inspires more creative minds
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The Spring of 2012 Is the Hottest in U.S. History
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Walkable neighborhoods now more valuable than car-centric ones
If you can walk to the post office, library and eateries, your real estate could... -
Ride. a short film on bike commuting.
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Urbanized, a feature-length documentary by Gary Hustwit about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban...
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“Income Inequality As Seen from Space,” Per Square Mile, May 24, 2012
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Cycles of Life by Grant Snider
