Technology Investment Dot Info

China will invest $15bn to increase wind power generation from 12kMW to 30kMW by 2010.

The world’s third-largest economy will increase its wind power capacity by fivefold to 100,000 megawatts by 2020… five megawatts is sufficient to power about 1,000 households in China on average…

Healthy competition on fuel standards (and autos).

Chinese officials have drafted automotive fuel economy standards that are even more stringent than those outlined by President Obama… The new plan would require automakers in China to improve fuel economy by an additional 18 percent by 2015… The average fuel economy of family vehicles in China is already higher than in the United States, mainly because cars in China tend to be considerably smaller… China was self-sufficient in oil until 1995, but soaring demand means that China now imports nearly three-fifths of its oil, much of it from potentially unstable countries along sea lanes controlled by the United States Navy.

Charging your devices with motion.

The nPower PEG (Personal Energy Generator) from a company called Tremont Electric harnesses personal kinetic energy as a person walks, transferring it into electricity to the portable electronic device plugged into it. Using this method, the PEG can charge the average portable device up to 80 percent in about an hour. The PEG is 9 inches by 1.5 inches, weighs about 9 ounces… has a standard USB 2.0 output, is compatible with 90 percent of portable electronic devices… carrying the PEG in a backpack, purse, or briefcase while walking provides the opportunity to harvest enough kinetic energy for the electricity.

Declines in energy investment will bite later, says IEA.

Declines in investment across industries for 2009:

• Global upstream oil and gas investment budgets down at least 21%
• Renewables down 38%
• Coal down 40%

Energy demand will rise 44% by 2030, with 70% of the demand increase coming from developing countries.

Investment question: what is the most resource-intensive to extract, yet least substitutable industrial commodity? (via SAR)

Oil, natural gas, and coal provide 86 percent of the world’s energy… At some point the amount of energy needed to bring low-grade deposits of oil, natural gas and coal to the surface and process and transport them will be more than the energy we get from these resources. At that point they will cease to be energy sources, and the vast, remaining ultra-low-grade deposits of these fuels will be useless to us except perhaps as feedstocks for chemicals… the total energy available to world society could begin to decline making resource extraction of all types progressively more expensive and difficult… If peaks in fossil fuel production are nearing, either society will have to learn to get along without many of its critical resources, or it will have to make the transition to alternative energy swiftly as part of an engineering and planning feat that would be unparalleled in human history.

More climate modelling, more bad news.

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees…

Not such a bad sign.

International Energy Agency is forecasting a 3.5% drop in electricity demand this year. Russia’s demand is set to drop 10%, OECD countries nearly 5% and China about 2%. This is the first decline ever in global electricity supply.

Good interactive graphic on power generation and distribution in the US.

A US military thinktank has concluded (74pp pdf) that energy shortage is the most pressing security problem, and recommends conserving liquid fuels for the use of aircraft and the military.

The U.S. consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil production, yet controls less than 3 percent of an increasingly tight supply… The DoD is the nation’s single largest consumer of energy…

Krugman points out the China emission problem.

China’s emissions, which come largely from its coal-burning electricity plants, doubled between 1996 and 2006… China now emits more carbon dioxide than the United States, even though its G.D.P. is only about half as large (and the United States, in turn, is an emissions hog compared with Europe or Japan)… It is unfair to expect China to live within constraints that we didn’t have to face when our own economy was on its way up… Historical injustice aside, the Chinese also insisted that they should not be held responsible for the greenhouse gases they emit when producing goods for foreign consumers. But they refused to accept the logical implication of this view — that the burden should fall on those foreign consumers instead, that shoppers who buy Chinese products should pay a “carbon tariff” that reflects the emissions associated with those goods’ production.

And comes out in favour of cap-and-trade, preferring the good to the perfect.

The legislation now on the table isn’t the bill we’d ideally want, but it’s the bill we can get — and it’s vastly better than no bill at all… In practice, cap and trade has some major advantages [over a carbon tax], especially for achieving effective international cooperation… in the first years of the program’s operation more than a third of the allocation of emission permits would be handed over at no charge to the power industry… Even when polluters get free permits, they still have an incentive to reduce their emissions, so that they can sell their excess permits to someone else… But handing out emission permits does, in effect, transfer wealth from taxpayers to industry.

The NYT reports that LED bulbs and fixtures dominated the lighting industry’s annual trade show.

Manufacturers displayed LEDs incorporated into large warehouse, garage and street-lighting fixtures, flexible light ribbons, and replacements for the halogen reflector lamps used in kitchens and offices… Osram, Lighting Science and Philips will introduce 25,000-hour LED lamps that look like traditional bulbs but use just 8 watts of electricity to produce the same amount of light as a 40-watt bulb… they will last 25,000 hours instead of 1,500 for an incandescent bulb… Cree, a leading maker of LEDs, showed a new version of its LED ceiling fixture that uses 6.5 watts, compared with 11 watts for last year’s model, to create the light of a standard 65-watt lamp.

Cyclical slump in photovoltaics, with prices down 50% to $2/watt.

World-wide shipments of solar cells to companies that install rooftop solar-power systems and build fields of solar panels for commercial energy production grew 85% to almost 6,000 megawatts in 2008, according to research firm Collins Stewart LLC. This year shipments are expected to fall to 5,575 megawatts. First-quarter sales at SunPower Corp. fell 22%, and the California solar-cell producer cut its revenue forecast for 2009 by 17%. Last month, Taiwan’s Motech Industries reported its worst quarter since 2003 with revenues down 15% and net income down 80% to $1.4 million.