This windmill is big. This windmill is big. As Bernard says, find the person in the first picture.
Expected output from one of these is 20 million kilo watt-hours per year, enough for 5,000+ (European) households. High of the hub is 442 feet (135m), the rotor diameter 416 feet (127m), tower base diameter 48 feet (14,5m).
PG&E has agreed to buy energy from Solaren, a venture hoping to launch power satellites by 2016. I talked about the solar from space idea a while back.
San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Electric said it was seeking approval from state regulators for an agreement to purchase power over a 15-year period from Solaren Corp., an 8-year-old company based in Manhattan Beach, Calif… Solaren would generate the power using solar panels in Earth orbit and convert it to radio-frequency transmissions that would be beamed down to a receiving station in Fresno…
It’s not often you get something useful from the mainstream media, but Time’s Top 10 Ideas issue was such.
- Jobs are the New Assets – a renewed focus on human capital…
- Recycling the Suburbs – they are indeed a write-off…
- The New Calvinism – religion about wealth…
- Reinstating the Interstate – another write-off…
- Amortality – their take is endless adolescence eg. Madonna, mine is the imminent arrival of practical immortality…
- Africa as Business Destination – the final frontier…
- The Rent-a-Country – long term sovereign agricultural leases…
- Biobanks – so your tissue samples are safe…
- Survival Stores – “low-cost, long-lasting durable goods”, who would have thought it…
- Ecological Intelligence – externality accounting…
The question of what an economy that is not relying on liquidating it’s resource endowment to survive would look like is asked at the LA Times.
The human population will consume at least twice as much food in 2050 as in 1995. Energy consumption will rise by approximately 76% between 2000 and 2030. The urban population will rise from 3.3 billion in 2007 to 5 billion in 2030 and further on to 6.4 billion in 2050. There will be an estimated 9.15 billion people on Earth in 2050, compared with 6.7 billion in early 2009, and they will all want to live decent lives… What does it mean to build an economy on sound ecological principles? It means that all forms of business and other human activity will be directed toward a truly cyclical use of resources, zero carbon emissions, and restoration and reinvestment in natural capital.
Historically a ton of ammonia cost about eighty bushels of wheat; $2.25 wheat, $200 ammonia, and this ratio held for forty years. Two years ago that long standing relationship broke down. Today wheat is $4.50 and ammonia is $1,000 – over two hundred bushels of wheat are required to purchase a ton of ammonia… The first effect of this has been a reduction in fertilization on wheat planted. Instead of 14% protein we’ll be seeing crops with protein closer to the 8% range. Instead of the seventy bushels per acre achieved with full fertilization we’ll see yields sliding off towards the twenty five bushels per acre unfertilized wheat yielded…
An interesting interview with Vinod Khosla, IT billionaire cum green tech VC.
There are “only” four main problems that need solving, according to Khosla — oil, coal, cement and steel. Between them they are responsible for 75% of greenhouse-gas emissions… Bio-fuels are the single most important tool we have so far for alleviating climate change…
Shai Agassi’s Better Place may be one of the most important initiatives in the world right now. The former SAP executive is installing a clean-energy electric-auto network world-wide, beginning in Israel, then Denmark, then Hawaii, then Australia. Pogue interviews (read the whole thing):
We started from the infrastructure. We came up with an electric car that would have two features that nobody had before. 1) The battery is removable. So if you wanted to go a long distance, you could switch your battery instead of waiting for it to charge for a very long time… And 2) It was cheaper than gasoline car, not more expensive. Because you didn’t buy the battery. You paid just for the miles and for the car… We sell miles, the way that AT&T sells you minutes… We buy batteries and clean electrons–we only buy electrons that come from renewable sources–and we translate that into miles.
The Economist points out that the introduction of electric bikes may well have more of a climate impact than electric cars.
an electric bicyle wins out handsomely in the emission competition with a petrol-driven car, as it is 15-20 times more efficient. Moreover, making an electric bicycle uses far less energy than making an electric car… Some 21m electric bicycles were sold in China in 2008… The figure has doubled since 2005. In Shanghai alone there are an estimated 1m electric bicycles. Some 800,000 are also sold each year in South East Asia… Typically, an electric bike can run for 30-50 kilometres (20-30 miles) between charges. Recharging a battery can take 5-8 hours, but costs only a few cents a day…
Piaggio Group Americas, a subsidiary of the Italian manufacturer known for the Vespa, has a highway legal plug-in hybrid scooter in the works that could be available in the U.S. for early 2010… The MP3 500 scooter in plug-in hybrid version will get about 140 mpg, have a range of 40 miles per charge when running on electric power alone, and be priced between $8,000 and $9,000…
I’ve noticed that the world’s scientists have gone curiously quiet lately, giving up on making any meaningful difference and presumably moving to higher ground.
Nicholas Stern, the economist who warned the government of the high cost of climate change… told a meeting of climate change scientists in Copenhagen that the effects of global warming would be worse than he predicted in his seminal 2006 report on the economics of the problem… many climate experts and officials say that the European target of limiting world temperature rise to 2C above pre-industrial levels is no longer realistic…
Atmospheric levels of the main greenhouse gas are hitting new highs, with no sign yet that the world economic downturn is curbing industrial emissions… Levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities, rose to 392 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere in Svalbard in December, a rise of 2-3 ppm from the same time a year earlier… Levels of carbon dioxide are around the highest in at least 800,000 years, and up by about a third since the Industrial Revolution.
…sea levels appear to be rising almost twice as rapidly as had been forecast by the United Nations just two years ago… The reason for the rapid change in the predicted rise in sea levels is a rapid increase in the information available… scientists now reckon that sea levels will rise by between 50cm and 100cm by 2100…
World fish production hit 143.6m tonnes in 2006, the highest since records began in 1950, according to a new biannual report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Just over 110m tonnes was eaten by people, with the rest used as animal feed or for other commercial uses. Some 47% of fish on dinner plates is now farmed, and this is likely to increase as the amount caught in the wild levels off. The catch in 2006 from marine and inland waters fell to 92m tonnes from 94.2m the previous year. China is the world’s biggest producer in both categories, landing 17.1m tonnes of fish from its waters, and farming 34.4m tonnes.
In the ‘dog barks’ department, it turns out that the big-oil anti-climate change lobby knew all along that they were lying about the science. Their own advisors had told them so.
For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming… a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted. “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
One less disaster to worry about. Methane releases during other warming episodes were not from clathrates, but from wetlands, thus not as susceptible to a rapid warming-release feedback loop.
Ice core research has revealed that a vast, potential source of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, is more stable in a warming world than previously thought… Massive quantities of methane are locked away in permafrost and in the ocean floors as methane clathrate – an ice-like material which can return to gas if temperatures increase or pressures drop. Just a 10 per cent release of methane would have the equivalent impact on global warming of a ten-fold increase in carbon dioxide concentration…