I just got back from a short hike with a friend during which we discussed the status of some of the world’s largest countries vis-à-vis renewable energy. This, of course, reminded me that we’re headed into another Conference of Parties (COP) meeting, starting tomorrow. In particular, the 18th session will take place from Monday, 26 November to Friday, 7 December 2012 at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha, Qatar. The principal issue: what to do about the Kyoto Protocol. (more…)
In my piece, I took the opportunity to point out that, in addition to all the other good things that stem from bringing clean energy to the people of rural Africa and other developing parts of the world, electrification facilitates education, by providing reading light and Internet access.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this. It’s really the world’s failure to educate the BoP (“bottom of the pyramid”) that perpetuates poverty, and perhaps even worse, expands the population. Educated women do not have 12 children.
I had a Skype chat yesterday with a well-heeled investor/entrepreneur in Dubai whose family has numerous business operations in Africa and the Middle East – including Pakistan, the country in which one of my favorite projects is located. Readers may remember last June’s webinar, which featured a clean energy project in Landhi, a large industrial town in the eastern part of Karachi, which, when fully developed, will convert the dung of 400,000 tightly confined buffaloes into biofertilizer and biogas.
Currently, there is a plant there running 24 hours a day, but it’s very small, a tiny fraction of the size required to implement the concept fully. To my surprise, when I described this to my contact in Dubai, he told me that he’d been there, and knows the people who run it.
I tried to talk up the value of the project, both from a financial and humanitarian perspective, and I’m hoping that these folks will invest. If they put up $5 million, the organization’s CEO Robert Orr will be able to raise an additional $13 million in project financing, and within a year, he’ll have the entire plant operational, mitigating one of the most egregious environmental catastrophes on the planet, while creating a solid profit stream to pay off the investors.
The enemies of renewable energy are having a field day all over the world. Here’s an article about clean energy in the UK, and how it’s getting pounded with the same hammer that it is over here, i.e., uncertainty: removal of feed-in tariffs, varying taxes, changing priorities, all brought to you in living color with vitriolic arguments in the British press, as only they can do it with such splendor. In this one short article, the word “uncertainty” occurs four times, as well as “flex,” and – my favorite – “unfathomable twists and turns.”
Here’s a cool infographic called “The Fastest Electric Vehicles on Earth” that I thought readers would enjoy, from these folks. What they say here is certainly true: we tend to think of EVs as slow, glorified golf carts. Yet those of us who have driven Teslas have quite a different impression; they’re little rockets, with better acceleration than Porsches.
There is also a good discussion of the Catch 22 facing the EV adoption curve. They’ll be expensive until they’re common, but they’ll be uncommon until they’re inexpensive.
What is a society? Is it merely an assortment of separated and competing drives of short-term self-interest, and rights of possession? Is it an orchestra of individuals cooperating to achieve the enlargement and preservation of the Common Good?
Anthropologists tell us that in the dawn of our history, our species consisted of small bands of hunter-gatherers surviving by predation and forage. Even for these small bands to sustain life by that crude approach, it was essential that they share resources and the fruits of their labor and talent.
From our beginnings, sharing has been a basic aspect of even the simplest of human kinships. Over thousands of years, we slowly transformed our strategy with agrarian techniques that expanded upon that sharing. This wiser strategy granted humanity a stability and permanence of settlement that advanced through African and Semitic cultures and flowered in the European Renaissance, when something like the scientific method began to aid in the decisions we humans make. (more…)
What a candid remark – one you’d hardly hear from a senior level of the U.S. government. And how tragically and shamefully true it is.
If you’re looking for the cause of lack of interest in clean energy, I’m not sure you need to go too much further. That’s where groups like ACORE (The American Council on Renewable Energy) come in. The real mission here is to establish clean energy as an industry, rather than an interest group, an advocation, or whatever. Only when there is political might behind renewables will we begin to see its emergence into the mainstream.
Looks like the Obama Administration wasn’t kidding about an “all-of-the-above strategy,” i.e., the deployment of every available source of energy; the U.S. DoE announced the implementation of small modular reactors (SMRs). For me to see value here, in addition to being convinced of safety issues, I’d have to see a compelling cost per Watt, which I don’t.
I wrote a piece yesterday about the struggles of Project Better Place, the attempt to sell large populations of car drivers on the concept of adopting electric vehicles, and paying a certain price per mile driven, using leased batteries that, when discharged, are swapped out for fresh ones.
The entire concept has never appealed to me, frankly, except under ideal logistical, economical, and political conditions, e.g., Israel. OK, you’re a small country that desperately wants to disallow another ounce of gasoline within your borders? All right, I get that. But most of the places that Better Place wishes to sell its solution boast far from these optimal conditions. (more…)
