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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I think we’re all a bit curious about the ultimate disposition of the energy industry – both here in the US and around the globe.  In the States, 49% of our electricity comes from coal, and the penetration of renewables is under 2%.  Worldwide, about 80% of energy for all purposes comes from burning hydrocarbons.  So if that’s where we are, where are we going?

In the US, we have a complicated array of vectors in this space. We have constantly falling prices for PV and wind — and promising new technologies coming along right behind them, yet we have a Republican majority in the Senate that has aggressively begun to block all actions that would mitigate global climate change.

So, again, what are the most likely scenarios for change, if any, through the coming decades?  I was lucky enough to have received a crystal ball for Christmas that comes in handy on occasions like this; let me pull it out, and I’ll tell you.  But first, maybe we should look at a few high-level questions that frame the discussion: (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

One generally considers that people with a lot of money are smart; after all, it was Aesop who told us 2500 years ago: “A fool and his money are soon parted.”  But some of us are having difficulty understanding how CODA, the electric vehicle company whose planned introduction of a lithium-ion powered sedan appears to be floundering, continues to raise huge amounts of money from apparently intelligent investment bankers and venture capitalists. (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Warm thanks to 2GreenEnergy co-founder George Alger and website superstar Adam Battenfield for their work on the new “media” page, which is intended to present my capabilities as a public speaker or TV/radio guest on clean energy. 

Wow, guys!  I actually look reasonably good here!  How on Earth did you accomplish that?

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Occasionally I check the analytics on the 2GreenEnergy site to see where our traffic is coming from.  I was delighted to see that we got over 100 visitors the other day from a site that doesn’t have a word of English on it.  Check this out. 

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

It’s a frustrating time for those of us who follow the international energy news and try to get the big picture on the slow migration to renewables. The biggest single problem, of course, is that we live on a planet with almost 200 sovereign countries each with autonomy to create of its own energy policy — or simply avoid the issue entirely, like we’ve done here in the US.  And often, failure of a big country to act responsibly in this space is taken as an invitation for another country to behave irresponsibly as well.

Today we learned that Japan has postponed or even scrapped its national cap-and-trade plan, due to go into effect in 2013 because of intense lobbying by powerful business interests and because the measure has yet to make headway in other key countries.

Where is all this taking us? Are we to blame the Australia’s flood “of biblical proportions” (waters 30 feet above normal) on global climate change? I honestly don’t know. But as usual, I urge any of the new GOP administration in Washington who may be climate change deniers simply to adopt any of the other five or six good reasons to accelerate the pace at which we move away from fossil fuels.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Uncategorized

I’ve gotten a great number of fascinating comments on my piece on science’s coming under attack from politics and religion, for example:

Like you, I am worried about the religious campaign to undo hundreds of years of scientific development. Unfortunately, history tells us that politics and religion have been closely linked since the earliest civilizations. The Egyptian pharaohs were the high priests of their polytheistic religion. During the decline of the Roman Empire, emperors were gods and today we not only face the threat from the religious right but also the Muslim jihadists.

This is true. But at least in the West, have a couple hundred years of history that has begun to build a separation here. Starting with the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century, and the principles of the French and American Revolutions, our civilization has seen fit to identify independent roles for scientific inquiry versus belief systems that are not amenable to evidence or proof. For my money, this is a vitally important ingredient in building a world that is capable of sustaining itself going forward.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

This is a continuation of The Vector’s coverage of James Woolsey’s position in the imperative to move to renewable energy based on national security concerns.

You’ve got both the terrorism and enhancing of the bad guys — What Tom Friedman calls “Fill ‘er up with dictators,” and all the issues associated with that.

First of all, oil, like gold before it, has the effect that Paul Collier at Oxford, and Tom Friedman cite sometimes called the “oil curse.” Generally it’s just that an autocratic state, when it depends for a huge share of its income on a commodity that has a lot of economic rent attached to it, that rent accrues to the central power of the state essentially. (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Tucson Electric Power has signed up to solar photovoltaic array projects with capacities of 35MW, 25MW and 5MW; single-axis tracking PV arrays with capacities of 12MW, 4MW and two of 5MW each, a concentrating PV plant with capacity of 12MW and two of 2MW each; a 50MW wind project; and a 2.2MW landfill gas generator project. The desert city company emphasises that none of the projects require water. The utility company expects to be buying power from the first of these renewable energy projects in 2012.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Biomass

New York and the New England states produce about 14 million tons of waste from the construction and demolition (C&D) of buildings.  And one of my clients is in the process of building a gasification plant to process with as much that tonnage as he can possibly get his hands on.

He’s latched onto an interesting opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade, as they say. Insofar as a great deal (up to about 30%) of this waste is wood, biomass-to-energy processes can be brought to bear to extract and make use of the chemical energy, while reducing the financial and environmental costs of shipping this material off to landfills.

But, as I’m learning, many of the flavors of waste-to-energy technology are inappropriate here, as the introduction of oxygen to the gasification of wood that has been waterproofed with copper compounds or creosote creates a carcinogenic slag. Also, no matter how you presort the materials, you’ll wind up with a non-negligible amount of the guts of ballasts from fluorescent lights, which contains PBCs. (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

I accidentally came across a high-priced Deutsche Bank report on the future of electric transportation, sold to hedge fund managers and other heavyweight investors willing to pay big bucks for solid, well-researched advice. When I opened the piece, I expected to find what I do in the mainstream news: the systematic downplay of the importance of EVs based largely on erroneous calculations on their environmental impact, news about possible shortages of lithium, demagoguery on the “socialist” agenda of the Obama administration, etc.

But this piece was much more in line with reality as I see it, predicting steep declines in the cost of batteries, and the consequent rapid adoption of EVs by a public anxious to cut its spending on gasoline. The predictions were far more bullish than what most people are reading, and suggested impressive EV sales volumes in the coming decade — even if federal and state government subsidies go away. 

It certainly served as another reminder of the adage popular a century ago, “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.”

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