The Ecuadorian Library

Bruce Sterling has popped up at Medium with a great essay (following up on an older one called "The Blast Shack") on Manning, Assange and Snowden - The Ecuadorian Library.

First let’s consider Bradley Manning, who is not at all close to the NSA. Bradley was a bored and upset minor military technician who burned a zillion US documents onto a DVD, and labeled that “Lady Gaga.”

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.

Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed. There’s terror all over the sands now, terror from Mali to Xinjiang, and a billion tender-hearted Bradleys couldn’t stop that bleeding, no matter how much they leak.

Thanks to the modern miracle of fracking, though, the mayhem in the oil patch means a lot less to K Street. Someday, Bradley Manning will be as forgotten to them as Monica Lewinsky is. Then they’ll yield to the hornet-like, persistent buzz of the leftie peaceniks, and let Bradley go. He’s not dangerous. Bradley Manning will never do anything of similar consequence again. He’s not a power player. He’s a prisoner of conscience.

However, unlike poor Monica Lewinsky, Bradley Manning will never lack for passionate adherents who admire him and love him. Before Bradley went into his ugly maelstrom, he didn’t have that. Nowadays, he does. Maybe it’s worth it.

Then there’s Julian Assange. Yeah, him, the silver-haired devil, the Mycroft Holmes of the Ecuadorian Embassy. Bradley Manning’s not at all NSA material, he’s just a leaky clerk with a thumb-drive. But Julian’s quite a lot closer to the NSA — because he’s a career cypherpunk.

If you’re a typical NSA geek, and you stare in all due horror at Julian, it’s impossible not to recognize him as one of your own breed. He’s got the math fixation, the stilted speech, the thousand-yard-stare, and even the private idiolect that somehow allows NSA guys to make up their own vocabulary whenever addressing Congress (who don’t matter) and haranguing black-hat hacker security conventions (who obviously do).

Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.

There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department. House arrest has also helped Julian with this obscure struggle he has, not to fling himself headlong onto Swedish feminists. The ruthless confinement has calmed him; it’s helped him to focus. He’s grown and matured through ardent political struggle.

Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.

More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.

Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks. This valiant service came from Julian Assange, a dude who can’t even pack his own suitcase without having a fit. ...

While Julian Assange, to do him credit, has the street smarts to behave as if he’s in a situation of feral realpolitik. Because he is. And how.

However, Assange now knows that. He’s a hardened veteran of it. And he’s gonna stay imperiled for the immediate future, because the upshot of this is pretty easy to see.

The inconvenient truth about the NSA is lying there on a table in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as stark as a poisoned crow. But it’ll join our planet’s many other inconvenient truths.

Snowden told the truth to the public — but then again, so did Solzhenitsyn, and even Al Gore lets on sometimes. The truth doesn’t do the trick for anybody, the truth is just a complicating factor. The present geopolitical situation is absolutely cluttered with amazing lies that didn’t work out for their owners.

The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction never existed. Climate change does exist, and could drown Wall Street any day now. The abject state of global finance is obvious, yet it makes no difference to the ongoing depredations. Drones are stark assassination machines, and they don’t stay classified. Anyone could go on.

And, yeah, by the way, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Google et al, they are all the blood brothers of Huawei in China — because they are intelligence assets posing as commercial operations. They are surveillance marketers. They give you free stuff in order to spy on you and pass that info along the value chain. Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

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A Texan tragedy: ample oil, no water

The Guardian has an article on the unfortunate intersection of the Texas drought and shale oil boom - A Texan tragedy: ample oil, no water.

Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

"The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes," she said, blinking back tears. "I went: 'dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind."

Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.

Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry's outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.

In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart's case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking.

The town — a gas station, a community hall and a taco truck – sits in the midst of the great Texan oil rush, on the eastern edge of the Permian basin.

A few years ago, it seemed like a place on the way out. Now McGuire said she can see nine oil wells from her back porch, and there are dozens of RVs parked outside town, full of oil workers.

But soon after the first frack trucks pulled up two years ago, the well on McGuire's property ran dry.

No-one in Barnhart paid much attention at the time, and McGuire hooked up to the town's central water supply. "Everyone just said: 'too bad'. Well now it's all going dry," McGuire said.

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The Third Carbon Age ?

Michael Klare has a depressing article at TomDispatch arguing that the investment in unconventional fossil fuel development still dwarfs that going to renewable energy - The Third Carbon Age.

When it comes to energy and economics in the climate-change era, nothing is what it seems. Most of us believe (or want to believe) that the second carbon era, the Age of Oil, will soon be superseded by the Age of Renewables, just as oil had long since superseded the Age of Coal. President Obama offered exactly this vision in a much-praised June address on climate change. True, fossil fuels will be needed a little bit longer, he indicated, but soon enough they will be overtaken by renewable forms of energy.

Many other experts share this view, assuring us that increased reliance on “clean” natural gas combined with expanded investments in wind and solar power will permit a smooth transition to a green energy future in which humanity will no longer be pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. All this sounds promising indeed. There is only one fly in the ointment: it is not, in fact, the path we are presently headed down. The energy industry is not investing in any significant way in renewables. Instead, it is pouring its historic profits into new fossil-fuel projects, mainly involving the exploitation of what are called “unconventional” oil and gas reserves.

The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables. Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas.

That we are embarking on a new carbon era is increasingly evident and should unnerve us all. Hydro-fracking -- the use of high-pressure water columns to shatter underground shale formations and liberate the oil and natural gas supplies trapped within them -- is being undertaken in ever more regions of the United States and in a growing number of foreign countries. In the meantime, the exploitation of carbon-dirty heavy oil and tar sands formations is accelerating in Canada, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

It’s true that ever more wind farms and solar arrays are being built, but here’s the kicker: investment in unconventional fossil-fuel extraction and distribution is now expected to outpace spending on renewables by a ratio of at least three-to-one in the decades ahead.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an inter-governmental research organization based in Paris, cumulative worldwide investment in new fossil-fuel extraction and processing will total an estimated $22.87 trillion between 2012 and 2035, while investment in renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy will amount to only $7.32 trillion. In these years, investment in oil alone, at an estimated $10.32 trillion, is expected to exceed spending on wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, hydro, nuclear, and every other form of renewable energy combined.

In addition, as the IEA explains, an ever-increasing share of that staggering investment in fossil fuels will be devoted to unconventional forms of oil and gas: Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy crude, shale oil and gas, Arctic and deep-offshore energy deposits, and other hydrocarbons derived from previously inaccessible reserves of energy. The explanation for this is simple enough. The world’s supply of conventional oil and gas -- fuels derived from easily accessible reservoirs and requiring a minimum of processing -- is rapidly disappearing. With global demand for fossil fuels expected to rise by 26% between now and 2035, more and more of the world’s energy supply will have to be provided by unconventional fuels.

In such a world, one thing is guaranteed: global carbon emissions will soar far beyond our current worst-case assumptions, meaning intense heat waves will become commonplace and our few remaining wilderness areas will be eviscerated. Planet Earth will be a far -- possibly unimaginably -- harsher and more blistering place. In that light, it’s worth exploring in greater depth just how we ended up in such a predicament, one carbon age at a time.

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Elon Musk unveils his plans for the Hyperloop

TE has a post on Elon Musk's unveiling of the "hyperloop" concept - Elon Musk unveils his plans for the Hyperloop.

Just now ... Elon Musk unveiled more details of his much-discussed blue-sky idea: the Hyperloop, a system to carry passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco, 382 miles or 615 km, in about 35 minutes — less than half the time it takes to fly between the two cities. While early rumors suggested the Hyperloop might connect Los Angeles and New York, and even New York and China, the alpha plans of the highly speculative system are focused in California, as a provocative response to a $68.4 billion high-speed rail plan to connect the state’s two largest coastal cities. As specced, that high-speed rail system would be only slightly cheaper than flying — and would take about twice as long, at 2 hours, 40 minutes. (Of course, right now, the train between Oakland and Los Angeles takes a cool 12 hours, 10 minutes.)

Musk’s Hyperloop is an aboveground system — long tubes set atop pylons — that could run alongside highways. The system would run capsules that hold 28 passengers each through the tubes, departing every two minutes. These capsules contain compressor fans in their nose that form a cushion of air underneath them.

“Wheels don’t work very well at [700 mph], but a cushion of air does,” the plans read. “Air bearings, which use the same basic principle as an air hockey table, have been demonstrated to work at speeds of Mach 1.1 with very low friction.”

Building the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion — a fraction of the proposed high-speed rail system. A ticket on the Hyperloop would cost $20, far trumping both airfare and the price of gas for the same car trip.

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A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap”

Technology Review has an article on solar power research at UNSW - A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap”.

A new type of solar cell, made from a material that is dramatically cheaper to obtain and use than silicon, could generate as much power as today’s commodity solar cells.

Researchers developing the technology say that it could lead to solar panels that cost just 10 to 20 cents per watt. Solar panels now typically cost about 75 cents a watt, and the U.S. Department of Energy says 50 cents per watt will allow solar power to compete with fossil fuel.

In the past, solar researchers have been divided into two camps in their pursuit of cheaper solar power. Some have sought solar cells that can be made very cheaply but that have the downside of being relatively inefficient. Lately, more researchers have focused on developing very high efficiency cells, even if they require more expensive manufacturing techniques.

The new material may make it possible to get the best of both worlds—solar cells that are highly efficient but also cheap to make.

One of the world’s top solar researchers, Martin Green of the University of New South Wales, Australia, says the rapid progress has been surprising. Solar cells that use the material “can be made with very simple and potentially very cheap technology, and the efficiency is rising very dramatically,” he says.

Perovskites have been known for over a century, but no one thought to try them in solar cells until relatively recently. The particular material the researchers are using is very good at absorbing light. While conventional silicon solar panels use materials that are about 180 micrometers thick, the new solar cells use less than one micrometer of material to capture the same amount of sunlight. The pigment is a semiconductor that is also good at transporting the electric charge created when light hits it.

“The material is dirt cheap,” says Michael Grätzel, who is famous within the solar industry for inventing a type of solar cell that bears his name. His group has produced the most efficient perovskite solar cells so far—they convert 15 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, far more than other cheap-to-make solar cells. Based on its performance so far, and on its known light-conversion properties, researchers say its efficiency could easily rise as high as 20 to 25 percent, which is as good as the record efficiencies (typically achieved in labs) of the most common types of solar cells today. The efficiencies of mass-produced solar cells may be lower. But it makes sense to compare the lab efficiencies of the perovskite cells with the lab records for other materials. Grätzel says that perovskite in solar cells will likely prove to be a “forgiving” material that retains high efficiencies in mass production, since the manufacturing processes are simple.

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A Farewell To The Oil Drum

I started blogging (at Peak Energy) about peak oil in late 2004, having become interested in the topic over a period of years. I'd first started thinking about oil depletion when working on systems for collecting and managing large volumes of oil exploration data in the mid 1990's. Not long afterward I worked for Woodside Energy at a time when their main development project was the Laminaria / Corallina floating oil production facility in the Timor sea. A few years later production from this project had dropped below 50,000 barrels per day from an early peak of 180,000 bpd. Around the same time I came across the writing of Colin Campbell and Ken Deffeyes and began to consider what the global oil depletion picture looked like (the war in Iraq and the steadily rising oil price also added to the interest factor).

2004 was the year where blogging exploded in popularity and a vast range of writers emerged from obscurity. A number of these began mentioning peak oil and a loosely knit community of bloggers quickly formed around the topic. At the time the traditional observers of the topic were mostly retired geologists from the oil industry and academia following in the footsteps of M King Hubbert (such as Jean Laherrerre, Walter Youngquist and Ali Samsam Bakhtiari as well as Campbell and Deffeyes), along with some writers such as Richard Heinberg and a vibrant (albeit wildly pessimistic) online community of neo-malthusians hanging out at forums such as the "Running On Empty" groups, "Energy Resources" and "Alas Babylon" - usually heavily influenced by Jay Hanson's infamous "dieoff.org" site - and various fringe websites like Mike Ruppert's "From The Wilderness" and Mark Robinowicz's "Oil Empire". There were also 2 news aggregation sites focusing on the topic that had started up - Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org) and PeakOil.com - both of which assembled a steady stream of news on peak oil and related topics.

In 2005 The Oil Drum appeared, with Prof Goose (Kyle) and Heading Out (Dave) quickly building a large following that eclipsed that of the other sites commenting on the subject. I was pleased to be invited to join as a contributor in 2007 and spent a very enjoyable 3+ years writing for the site on a regular basis and co-editing the TOD ANZ site with Phil Hart.

After a time I found a combination of factors led me to become less active and eventually stop writing original work for TOD - in no particular order a couple of changes of job, moving house twice, getting divorced, having a couple of kids who required more of my time and a general depletion of interest caused by writing on the same broad topic for more than 5 years.

It has been disappointing to see some of the commentary about TOD's closure claiming that it indicates "fracking has killed peak oil". Personally I've been amazed TOD has lasted as long as it has, which has been a credit to the editors and staff, especially with so many contributors drifting away over the years.

If I look back to when I first started, none of the peak oil blogs around at the time are still publishing - the ones that come immediately to mind include Past Peak, Mobjectivist, Peak Energy (US), The Energy Blog, Jeff Vail's A Theory Of Power, Peak Oil Optimist, Life After The Oil Crash, Karavans and a myriad of temporary blogs created by a guy calling himself the "Flying Talking Donkey" - all of which ceased for the reasons cited by the TOD board (or due to ill health on the part of the author). This isn't a phenomenon unique to peak oil blogs - none of my favourite blogs from 2004 still exist today - the best sustainability blog of the time, WorldChanging, closed down several years ago, Bruce Sterling's "Viridian Design" did the same as did Billmon's "Whiskey Bar" and Jeff Well's "Rigorous Intuition".

So from that point of view TOD has done remarkably well to have lasted for more than 8 years.

The decision to narrow the focus of the site some years back didn't help in my view but I suspect the end result would have been the same regardless - though I tend to think allowing all of the "Limits To Growth" to be analysed may have kept the energy levels of the contributors up for longer and perhaps encouraged a wider range of contributors to participate.

It is true, however, that global oil production has not declined in the way that many (if not all) of the peak oil writers of 10 years ago predicted. While the predictions can be qualified ("conventional oil production has peaked" or "oil production per capita has peaked") the "total liquids" number clearly hasn't yet and this is the important one along with the oil price.

There are 4 obvious avenues open for dealing with peaking conventional oil production:

• 1. Find more conventional oil
• 2. Exploit unconventional oil sources
• 3. Become more efficient in our use of oil
• 4. Switch to alternatives

Over the years a lot of peak oil analysis has tended to focus on how far the first item can be pushed and what could happen once the limit is reached, with short shrift being given to the other 3 avenues (unless "powerdown" counts as "more efficient use of oil") - and even the amount of conventional oil available being somewhat underestimated (Iraq being the example I always used).

The ability of the oil industry to expand unconventional oil production (the shale oil boom being the obvious example though production of tar sands and heavy oil deposits are also increasing) has been the key factor in pushing the date of the peak out further into the future (I liked Stuart Staniford's quip that this could possibly be characterised as the "frantic scraping of the bottom of the barrel").

The dawning of the "gas age" has also kept fossil fuels in the picture for time being, with substantial unexploited conventional natural gas reserves being developed and unconventional gas production growing strongly.

While these developments have thus far dashed the hopes of the doomer community the fact remains that even if the whole world was made of oil, there would still be a finite supply of it - and thus at some point we will need to transition to alternative sources of energy, assuming the temperature of the planet hasn't risen to a point that makes it uninhabitable in the meantime.

It's this transition to alternative energy which captured most of my attention when writing - and which I'll make the topic of my second parting post for TOD - "Our Clean Energy Future" - which I hope to have ready soon.

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How a White or Green Roof Can Keep Your Building Up to 84% Cooler This Summer

Inhabitat has a look at the effect habving a white or green roof can have on urban temperatures - How a White or Green Roof Can Keep Your Building Up to 84% Cooler This Summer

The benefits of white and green roofs are nothing new to us, but a recent study by two top NYC universities has shed light on just how effective these non-traditional roofs can be at lowering building temperatures. Non-reflective dark roofs are known to exacerbate the urban heat island effect and do absolutely nothing to reduce storm water runoff, which is why New York City sewers overflow almost every time it rains. But a recent study released by Columbia University and City University of New York has found that greening NYC rooftops or adding a few coats of white paint can reduce temperatures by as much as 84%! ...

In order to ascertain the real benefits of greening or whitewashing city rooftops, researchers studied three different roof surface treatments at the Con Edison Learning Center in Queens: a green roof, a dark roof and a white roof. Measurements on each one showed that on average the white roof was about 30 degrees fahrenheit cooler than the dark roof, while the planted sedum roof was a whopping 60 degrees cooler! NYC is working towards applying white paint to one million square feet of rooftop a year in order to reduce those draining summertime highs, but city dwellers can do their part by taking the initiative as well.

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Peak oil researcher says shale profits proving ephemeral

FuelFix has a post on Shell's recent profit decline and asset writedowns, driven by poor performance from their North American shale oil assets - Peak oil researcher says shale profits proving ephemeral. The post points to an article by Art Berman, continuing his long line of analysis questioning the longevity and financial basis of the shale oil boom - Shale boom profits bypass big oil. Even the Wall Street Journal was prompted to ask "So why has Shell just wiped $2 billion off the value of some shale assets supposedly rich in the hydrocarbon liquids that everyone craves?". They couldn't come up with an answer.

A prominent proponent of peak oil theory — the idea that global petroleum production will peak and then begin dropping off permanently — says that recent Big Oil profit drops show that profits from shale are more elusive than commonly expected.

Many of the oil industry’s big players wrote down the value of their shale assets for second quarter — a move that indicates the continuing challenge of making many of the shale plays financially viable, according to Art Berman, a petroleum geologist and director of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. Berman, a Houston-area geologist, has been questioning the economics of shale gas for years, particularly in terms of the potential reserves.

Last week, Shell reported a 20 percent profit drop for second quarter, which it partially attributed to write-offs of some of its shale positions rich in natural gas liquids and oil, according to Simon Henry, Shell’s chief financial officer, at the second quarter earnings call.

“Recent revelations and write-downs of shale assets in North America by Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron support our research that big companies cannot make money on low rate-low volume shale wells,” wrote Art Berman in an article on Petroleum Truth Report. Berman said that when ExxonMobil purchased XTO Energy in 2010, it began the acceptance of shale reserves as a potential income driver, and optimistic estimates were made about the potential production of many of these wells. But falling oil and gas production helped push earnings down 57 percent for the second quarter.

Berman predicts that the companies will begin to move out of the shale plays because of the difficulty in making them profitable. “I believe that we are seeing the slow liquidation of these organizations but they cannot let the investment public know that this is what is occurring,” Berman wrote. “Hence the cornucopian rhetoric about the shale revolution and North American becoming the next Saudi Arabia –pure poppycock, of course.”

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Commentary: Is Peak Oil Dead?

Resilience.org has a post by Steve Andrews of ASPO USA - Commentary: Is Peak Oil Dead?.

Q: So, in your opinion, M. King Hubbert more or less had it right, at least in the big picture, not down at the granular level?

A: Some have mentioned that, “well Hubbert….back in the 1950s and 1960s he didn’t have access to the concept of unconventional oil or shale oil plays. He did good work, but it was only applicable to the conventional oil he knew about.” I would propose that it doesn’t really matter and that in hindsight, after a couple of more years, it will be more evident that effectively he did take unconventional oil into account because the unconventional oils are not easy oils.

Conventional oil--which was found in huge quantities, in giant fields in the 40's and 50's - well those giant fields had huge reserves and high porosities and permeabilities - meaning they would flow at very high rates for decades. This is in contrast to a relative few shale oil plays which have very low porosity and perm and which must be hydraulically fractured to flow. Conventional oil is just a different animal than unconventional oil; some unconventional oil wells have high initial rates of production, but all of these wells have high decline rates. Yet it’s essential that we produce this oil. Without unconventional oil, what we wind up with is essentially Hubbert’s cliff instead of a Hubbert’s rounded peak.

I think Hubbert anticipated a lot of incremental efforts by the industry to make the right-hand or decline side of his curve a more gradual curve rather than a sharp drop. He was thinking about secondary recovery, though perhaps it was too early for him to think about tertiary recovery, but those are the types of incremental efforts that he would have anticipated. Likewise, I would say that unconventional oil is another incremental type of recovery, at least compared to conventional oil.

Q: So the peak oil problem isn’t dead yet, as has been shouted in a few headlines?

A: Our bottom-line problem here is that if we ignore peak oil as a result of these plays, we ignore it at our peril. This is no time for complacency.

Peak oil is still a looming transportation problem—a huge one. I would suggest that we’ve made some progress…some things have been done. We’ve made several years worth of efforts collectively, whether it is more movement towards electric cars, mass transit, scaling down our vehicle purchases, or driving less due to price signals. But we’ve only just begun and we have a long ways to go in order to deal with the still-looming Hubbert’s peak, in order to not deal with the severe consequences that Bob Hirsch wrote about in his 2005 research for DOE.

The big problem is that it’s hard to be proactive when there’s no current crisis. We’re a country of optimists. That’s helped us do what we do, including the development of new technologies to create, innovate and develop better than anyone else in the world. I think it’s imperative to maintain a positive outlook. At the same time, peak oil is something unique. Peak Oil is not reflective of optimism or pessimism, or positive or negative; it’s just the result of the finite volume of oil the Earth was endowed with, and the rate at which that oil can be produced. Some way or another we’ve got to get to where we can be proactive, and we’ve got to work together.

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Big nuclear power company decides renewables are a better bet in the U.S.

Grist reports that french nuclear power company EDF has decided that it is better to pursue renewable energy in the US rather than bating a dead horse - Big nuke company decides renewables are a better bet in the U.S..

The world’s largest operator of nuclear power plants is dumping its stake in American reactors, turning its focus instead to wind and solar power. French utility company EDF announced this week that it will sell its stake in Constellation Energy Nuclear Group (CENG), which operates five nuclear reactors in New York and Maryland.

EDF cited cheap power produced by fracked natural gas as the big reason why it’s abandoning its American nuclear facilities. But the company said it will now focus its American business strategy not on fossil fuels but on renewable energy.

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Oslo On The Hunt For Rubbish To Burn

The NYT has a report on the increasing competition to find rubbish to burn in Europe - A City That Turns Garbage Into Energy Copes With a Shortage. Its not exactly the cradle to cradle manufacturing economy that we should be aspiring to but I guess its better than landfill.

This is a city that imports garbage. Some comes from England, some from Ireland. Some is from neighboring Sweden. It even has designs on the American market.

“I’d like to take some from the United States,” said Pal Mikkelsen, in his office at a huge plant on the edge of town that turns garbage into heat and electricity. “Sea transport is cheap.”

Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.

The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply. “Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mr. Mikkelsen, 50, a mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.

Yet the fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle more than 700 million tons. “And the Swedes continue to build” more plants, he said, a look of exasperation on his face, “as do Austria and Germany.”

Stockholm, to the east, has become such a competitor that it has even managed to persuade some Norwegian municipalities to deliver their waste there. By ship and by truck, countless tons of garbage make their way from regions that have an excess to others that have the capacity to burn it and produce energy.

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Port Augusta to finally get solar thermal power – for a greenhouse

RenewEconomy reports that Port Augusta has finally landed a solar thermal power plant - Port Augusta to finally get solar thermal power – for a greenhouse.

The South Australia city of Port Augusta may be a long way from getting the solar thermal power station it craves, but it may soon host a world-leading technology that uses solar thermal energy to power a huge greenhouse to grow food in the desert.

Sundrop Farms, which has built a pilot station (we wrote about it here) featuring its unique technology that uses solar thermal energy to desalinate water for irrigation, and for heating and cooling, has secured finance from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to build a 20 hectare commercial greenhouse around 10kms south of the city.

The massive greenhouse will feature concentrated solar power technology – most likely a parabolic trough array that will deliver around 36MWth (megawatt thermal) of energy. This will make it the largest stand alone CSP arrays in the country. The overall project cost has not been revealed but is believed to be at least $100 million. It will employ more than 200 people.

Port Augusta has been fighting to have its ageing and polluting coal-fired power stations replaced by concentrated solar thermal technologies to produce electricity.

The 20-hectare greenhouse facility will produce over 15,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year for metropolitan markets across Australia, and the company hopes it will be the fore-runner of many more projects in Australia and other desert regions, particularly in the Middle East and north Africa.

The technology is similar to that featured in another project in Qatar that RenewEconomy reported on last year. Indeed, SunDrop advised on that technology. But while that Qatari project was funded with development funds from Norway, the Port Augusta project will be funded on a commercial basis.

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Meet the New Meat

Artificial meat was in the news this week as the results of one of Sergey Brin's alternative investments was unveiled. The Economist has a look at the environmental benefits of artificial meat (quoting a 45% energy saving for meat produced in this way) as well as an interesting quote from long ago - Appetising prospects.

“THE war is won,” declared Winston Churchill in 1931. The victory in question was not military, but technological. Developments in tissue engineering prompted the future British prime minister to enthuse that soon “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing”. The optimism proved premature. But now, eight decades later, scientists have finally come close to realising his dream. On August 5th they cooked the world’s first hamburger made of meat grown from scratch in a laboratory.

The historic patty was not exactly a Porterhouse steak—and a bit bland, according to two volunteer tasters. At the same time it cost a juicy €250,000 ($330,000), so India and Brazil, the world’s biggest exporters of beef, need not tremble in their cowboy boots anytime soon. But it is nonetheless a welcome addition to the world’s menu.

People have, pace vegetarians, evolved to love meat, which contains many necessary nutrients, and especially protein, in higher concentrations than plants do. The rub is that livestock, the main purpose of which is to pack goodies found in flora into a more condensed form, does not do the job very efficiently. Only about 15% of plant nutrients find their way into muscle. That makes animal husbandry extremely resource-intensive. It already takes up 30% of the world’s ice-free land—and a whopping 70% of its arable land. It also produces 18% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, more than transport (cattle are notorious sources of methane, a greenhouse-gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide).

Meanwhile, as poor countries grow richer, so does their appetite for flesh. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation forecasts global demand for meat to increase by three-quarters over the next 40 years. This is unsustainable. In contrast, growing meat in factories—or, one day, in your home—is estimated to use up to 45% less energy, 99% less land and 96% less water than farming, as well as to spew out 78-96% fewer greenhouse gases.

The NYT's Dot Earth blog has a post on the "Frankenburger" which included an interesting graph of the benefits that may await.

TED has a talk by the creator of the meat, Mark Post - Meet the new meat: Mark Post at TEDxHaarlem.

The Independent's article on the topic had a look at some of Brin's other investments - 'Close to meat': Foodies underwhelmed by first synthetic beef burger to be eaten in public.

With a personal wealth of $20bn, Sergey Brin isn’t afraid to take a punt on outlandish business ventures. As well as the first lab-grown burger, the Google co-founder has backed asteroid mining and driverless cars.

In 2008, Brin invested $4.5m in Space Adventures, a Virginia-based space tourism company, which is selling trips to the Moon for $100m (£65m). Last year, Brin joined the film director James Cameron by investing in Planetary Resources, a new company set up to exploit the precious metals contained in asteroids, seen as a potential alternative to the Earth’s depleted supply of natural resources.

Brin is an evangelist for driverless “robot cars”. He invested in Tesla Motors, developer of the Roadster, an electric vehicle with a range of 244 miles. Google has put its prototype self-driving cars through 300,000 miles of testing. Brin believes robot cars will be available to the public by 2017.

Philanthropic ventures play an important role in the Brin portfolio. He created Passerelle Investment Company, which buys property in Los Altos, a Silicon Valley town, and rents them at below-market rates. Brin also has an interest in a genetic testing start-up 23andMe, co-founded by his wife, Anne Wojcicki, which gives people data about their ancestry.

Another billionaire who is making some interesting investments (albeit not in the same league as Sergey or Elon Musk) is Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who was in the press this week for his purchase of The Washington Post - Crikey has a look at some of his other investments in the future - What’s a dot-com genius going to do with The Washington Post?.

Big clock

This isn’t as much of an investment as it is a pet project, but a couple of years ago Bezos spent $US42 million of his own cash on a 10,000-year clock in the middle of the Texas desert.

3D printing

This new craze has taken tech-heads by storm, and Bezos is right at the forefront of the revolution — he has a modest investment in Makerbot, a manufacturer of 3D printing machines.

Rocket wreckage

This is a strange one. Bezos founded a wreckage recovery business, which is all about finding discarded parts of rockets and spaceships that have fallen into the ocean as part of the Apollo program, way back in the 1970s. Last month he even wrote a blog post from a ship on a mission to find lost parts.

Quantum computing

At least this is related to technology. Last year, Bezos joined the CIA in pumping cash into quantum computing firm In-Q-Tel.

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Renewable Energy Prices Continue to Fall

RenewEconomy has some interesting graphs from BNEF showing how competitive solar and wind power has become over time - Bugger the utilities: wind and solar will be built anyway.

But as the electricity incumbents continue to circle the wagons around their threatened business models, the renewable energy industry may be able to take comfort in some good news: Australia may be able to meet its 20 per cent renewable energy target by 2020, and go beyond that, simply because renewables will represent the cheapest option as the electricity industry looks for new generation and is forced to replace ageing and redundant capacity.

Kobad Bhavnagri, the Australia head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told the Clean Energy Week conference on Wednesday that renewables could supply 46 per cent of Australia’s electricity by 2030, compared to around 12 per cent now, and the official target of a minimum 20 per cent target by 2020.

How would this be achieved? Well, according to BNEF, large-scale solar – mostly PV – will account for around 17GW (17,000MW) of installed capacity. That compares to just 10MW now. This does not include at least 10GW of rooftop solar – compared to around 2.5GW now. BNEF expects wind energy to account for around 12.5GW, although it expects wind’s share in new investment to diminish rapidly from around 2017 as it is overtaken by solar PV.

Costs are the critical part of the equation, because most of Australia’s existing capacity will need to replaced in coming decades, and the choice will be based around which technology is the cheapest to build new plant. The incumbent generators are concerned because they know that wind and solar make poor bedfellows with inflexible fossil fuel generators, and that an increased penetration of renewables will force many coal generators to close early.

BNEF notes – as can be seen in the first graph – that gas generation will also be too expensive, and its share of the electricity generation capacity will actually fall, as there is already enough capacity to deal with the variability and intermittency of renewables. And in any case, Bhavnagri says, developments in battery technology means “storage is coming faster than most people would think.”

BNEF says solar modules will continue to fall in price by 25 per cent for every doubling in global capacity, while wind generation will fall around 14 per cent for every doubling in capacity. The conclusions are an extension to their earlier study, which noted that wind is already cheaper than new coal and gas, and solar will be there soon.

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Supermajordämmerung

The Economist has declared "The day of the huge integrated international oil company is drawing to a close" - Supermajordämmerung. Of course, they once declared that oil was heading for $5 per barrel, so I wouldn't necessarily happen on this betting any time soon. In the long run however, they are undoubtedly dead, as the product they are selling has a finite supply...

Poor choices and increased competition may explain deteriorations in the supermajors’ reserve replacement ratios (RRRs), a measure of the amount of oil discovered compared with production. In 2012 total hydrocarbon replacement (including gas) at Shell was a slender 44%. BP’s was 85% and Total’s 93%; that means reserves at all three are shrinking. Exxon’s RRR, which has not fallen under 100% for decades, was a more comforting 115%, and Chevron’s was 112%. But of Exxon’s 1.8 billion barrels, high-cost shale oil from the Woodford and Bakken fields in America accounted for almost 750m. Around 50% of Exxon’s reserves are now in heavy, unconventional or deep-water oil, compared with 17% in the early 2000s.

The supermajors are now spending $100 billion a year between them on exploration and production. But this level of effort has not impressed investors; their share prices (with the exception of Chevron’s) have been flat for years. Nor has it yielded net new oil; their output fell by 2% between 2006 and 2011. What it has delivered is greater gas production, a likely harbinger of things to come. The supermajors are finding themselves increasingly in the gas business. For most of them gas is currently more than 40% of their production—for Shell and Exxon it is more than 50%.

Oil and gas differ in several respects, none of them very good news for the supermajors. Because it requires the construction of expensive pipelines or liquefaction plants, gas is less profitable. It also needs to be marketed, with customers secured upfront to finance the vast cost of extraction at scale. And it could be susceptible to a steep worldwide drop in prices. The era in which most gas is sold at prices indexed to that of oil is coming to an end. Fields currently under development could provide a glut of gas in the second half of the decade which might put paid to indexation altogether.

What can the supermajors do about these threats? Spending heavily on replacing reserves to keep investors happy is not working. Selling off bits of the firms that no longer make sense, such as refineries, can help; ConocoPhillips hived off its upstream exploration and production from refining in 2011. But it hardly counts as a long-term growth strategy. Reviving unique in-house technology might help.

It will be an unhappy thought to many, but BP’s travails in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico disaster may be guide to the supermajors’ future. Forced to sell assets to raise cash to pay fines, it has found that those sales are often followed by a rise in the company’s share price. This suggests that investors like the idea of smaller, fitter oil firms. Rather than push towards ever more esoteric frontiers, the supermajors might do better to slim down and turn away from the oil that they prize so highly but that the world may no longer want ever more of—and that others can exploit equally well. They will find this hard, though. “Oil supermajor” has a much better ring to it than “fairly large gas producer”.

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The great de-electricifation of Australia

The Conversation has a post on dropping electricity demand in Australia - caused by a combination of rising power prices, the demise of large manufacturing users (courtesy of the dutch disease) and the success of the government's roof insulation program and various rooftop solar PV schemes - Electricity demand: The great de-electricifation of Australia’s grid

One of the certainties in the energy business used to be the regular year-in, year-out rise in demand for electricity [1].

Up until about 6 years ago, demand growth could be counted on with metronomic precision. Across our National Electricity Market – the NEM – electricity demand grew at about 2% annually.

That all stopped in 2008. On the basis of the numbers for June and July this year, we are on the verge of our twelfth straight season where demand has reduced on the year before.

Over the last 3 years, the annualised demand reduction has been about 500 megawatts – or about 2.2%. And since the peak in 2008, average demand has reduced by about 2 gigawatts or about 8%.

On these figures, Australia is clearly undergoing a profound de-electrification. If it continues for a few more years then, by analogy with economics, it will be worthy of the appellation the great de-electrification.

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The CIA Wants To Control the Climate!!!!

Jamais at Open The Future has a look at the recent Mother Jones report on geoengineering funding - The CIA Wants To Control the Climate!!!!11!.

This is an entirely appropriate use of a very small amount of money (in government terms) and the resources of the intelligence services. As I've gone into multiple times, the global political risks around geoengineering are massive, likely greater than the environmental risks. A better understanding of an emerging complex geopolitical issue is precisely what I'd want an intelligence service to be doing. It's a lot better than operating killer drones and reading our email.

This is an entirely appropriate use of a very small amount of money (in government terms) and the resources of the intelligence services. As I've gone into multiple times, the global political risks around geoengineering are massive, likely greater than the environmental risks. A better understanding of an emerging complex geopolitical issue is precisely what I'd want an intelligence service to be doing. It's a lot better than operating killer drones and reading our email. People who don't want to see geoengineering happen should be glad that the US government is taking this seriously as a potential issue. I had an opportunity a couple of years ago to participate in a "wargame" project run by the CIA Center on Climate Change and National Security -- see souvenir above -- and watched as a climate-focused exercise turned into a geoengineering-focused game. As far as I could tell, this was not the designer's intent, but an organic result of player actions. And over the course of the game it came very close to leading to armed conflict between the US and China, a conflict over uncertain (and unsettling) consequences of a geoengineering effort. [The CIA Center on CCNS is now closed, in part due to climate issues being integrated across the spectrum of CIA research, and in part because House Republicans cut funding. Can't have the government studying climate change as if it were a real thing, you know.]

There's no question that geoengineering needs to be thought of as a potential global political risk. I'm glad to see a project like this. And I hope that the intelligence and strategic risk analysis services of other governments around the world are doing the exact same thing. ...

People who don't want to see geoengineering happen should be glad that the US government is taking this seriously as a potential issue. I had an opportunity a couple of years ago to participate in a "wargame" project run by the CIA Center on Climate Change and National Security -- see souvenir above -- and watched as a climate-focused exercise turned into a geoengineering-focused game. As far as I could tell, this was not the designer's intent, but an organic result of player actions. And over the course of the game it came very close to leading to armed conflict between the US and China, a conflict over uncertain (and unsettling) consequences of a geoengineering effort.

[The CIA Center on CCNS is now closed, in part due to climate issues being integrated across the spectrum of CIA research, and in part because House Republicans cut funding. Can't have the government studying climate change as if it were a real thing, you know.] There's no question that geoengineering needs to be thought of as a potential global political risk. I'm glad to see a project like this. And I hope that the intelligence and strategic risk analysis services of other governments around the world are doing the exact same thing.

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Methane Hydrates Could Be Disastrous For The Planet

Climate Progress has a look at methane hydrates, which are seeing a fairly continuous stream of interest over the years - ‘Fire Ice’: Buried Under The Sea Floor, This New Fossil Fuel Source Could Be Disastrous For The Planet

Methane is a potent carbon-based greenhouse gas that is emitted from decaying organic matter (i.e. landfills, cow digestion, and melting permafrost). The natural gas industry has been harvesting methane buried deep underground for decades to supply their product, despite persistent climate and safety concerns. Yet there’s an even more dangerous collection of methane hidden at the bottom of the sea. Though it’s somewhat easy to forget about it, a potentially enormous source of carbon pollution: methane hydrate.

Fossil fuel companies have not forgotten and they are extremely interested in finding an economical way to extract it from the sea floor. The reason is that the latest estimates put the amount of methane hydrate at 700,000 trillion cubic feet, or more energy than all oil and gas that has ever been discovered. It’s extremely hard to extract, and all known methods are very risky.

Also known as methane clathrate, or “fire ice,” methane hydrate is created when decaying organic matter under the ocean floor emits methane. This seeps up and mixes with seawater at the bottom of the ocean. It forms a cement-like icy compound within and on top of the ocean sediment, which actually stops more methane from seeping into the ocean. If the water above it gets warmer, some of the methane hydrate melts as methane, which bubbles up through the water column. In shallow water, it bubbles straight to the atmosphere but in deeper waters, the methane bubbles bond with the dissolved oxygen and water, creating carbon dioxide which bubbles to the surface, or stays in the water and makes the already-acidifying ocean more acidic.

But new research suggests that slow melting is not the only fate of methane hydrate. A study published in Nature Geoscience on Sunday found that undersea earthquakes could speed up this process. The researchers suggested that seismic activity fractures the seafloor, causing the methane below the surface to bubble up and get trapped within methane hydrates and sediment on the ocean floor. An earthquake could also cause methane to percolate through the water, either oxidizing in shallow water or escaping the ocean as methane emissions. ...

Earlier this year, Japanese researchers successfully tested a new process that extracted methane hydrate from the ocean floor for the first time. The director of Japan’s Agency for Natural Resources compared this to the way shale gas was viewed a decade ago — too expensive for commercialization — but concluded “now it’s commercialized.” This process does have similarities to fracking, but instead of pumping fracking fluid into the earth and exploding the rock, it drills down to the seabed, relieves pressure on the hydrates, and dissolves the crystals into gas and water for collection.

However, harvesting methane hydrates poses the same risks faced by offshore oil drillers — pressure, drilling at depth, and the catastrophic ramifications of failure. If the drilling causes an underwater landslide, the methane could erupt to the surface all at once, a scenario called the “methane gun hypothesis.” This could release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, dealing a serious blow to cutting carbon emissions.

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Growth of Global Solar and Wind Energy Continues to Outpace Other Technologies

Renewable Energy Focus has a look at this year's Worldwatch report on renewable energy - Solar and wind dominate world market.

According to “Growth of Global Solar and Wind Energy Continues to Outpace Other Technologies”, published by Worldwatch, global solar power consumption increased by 58 percent to 93 terrawatt-hours (TWh), and the use of wind power increased by 18 percent to 521 TWh. Although hydropower remains the world's leading renewable energy, solar and wind continue to dominate investment in new renewable capacity and are quickly becoming the highest-profile renewable energy sources.

This was despite the fact that new investments in these energy sources actually declined during 2012. Global investment in solar energy in 2012 was US$140.4 billion, an 11 percent decline from 2011, and wind investment was down 10 percent, to US$80.3 billion. But due to lower costs for both technologies, total installed capacities grew sharply.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) installed capacity grew by 41 percent in 2012, reaching 100 gigawatts (GW). Over the past five years alone, installed PV capacity grew by a massive 900 percent, from 10 GW in 2007. The countries with the most installed PV capacity today are Germany (32.4 GW), Italy (16.4 GW), the United States (7.2 GW), and China (7.0 GW). Installed capacity for concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) reached 2.55 GW, with 970 megawatts (MW) alone added in 2012.

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Duke Energy shelves major nuclear project in Florida

Reuters reports that another nuclear power project has been halted - Duke Energy shelves major nuclear project in Florida.

Duke Energy Corp said on Thursday it will not proceed with a $24 billion nuclear power project in central Florida because of licensing delays and doubts about cost recovery ... The announcement was the latest blow to nuclear power investment in the Sunshine State and reflected the boom in natural gas development nationwide.

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Fracking Could Help Geothermal Become a Power Player ?

Scientific American has an article on the use of fracking to develop geothermal power projects - Fracking Could Help Geothermal Become a Power Player.

Here's another use for fracking: expanding access to hot rocks deep beneath Earth’s surface for energy production. In April Ormat Technologies hooked up the first such project—known in the lingo as an enhanced geothermal system, or EGS—to the nation's electric grid near Reno, Nev.

"The big prize is EGS," enthuses Douglas Hollett, director of the Geothermal Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). "The key is learning how to do it in a reliable way, in a responsible way."

By some estimates, the U.S. could tap as much as 2,000 times the nation’s current annual energy use of roughly 100 exajoules (an exajoule equals a quintillion, or 1018 joules) via enhanced geothermal technologies. With respect to electricity, the DoE concludes at least 500 gigawatts of electric capacity could be harvested from such EGS systems. Even better, hot rocks underlie every part of the country and the rest of the world. Australia's first enhanced geothermal system, spicily named Habanero, began producing power in May, and Europe has brought three such power plants online.

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Flying a kite for aerial wind power

The Guardian has an article on airborne wind turbines - Flying a kite for aerial wind power.

According to Schmehl, airborne energy production can be cleaner, cheaper and more effective than conventional wind power generation. "It's now clear that the world needs more energy from renewables. And we need the progress to be faster. Wind is an important resource that so far has been limited, because conventional wind turbines just scratch off the bottom layer of what is actually available in the atmosphere."

While a normal wind turbine is up to 200 metres tall, a kite can catch much higher currents. "We operate between 100 and 300 metres but kites can in fact fly much higher. So far, the altitude record is 9,740 metres," says Schmehl.

Kite wind generation overcomes the problem of intermittent power, typical of conventional wind technologies, for one simple reason: the higher you go, the more constantly the wind blows. Airborne wind turbines provide a more stable energy flow, and they are much cheaper as they need less material than a wind turbine. Instead of a steel tower, you have a system that looks and works like a yo-yo.

"You have a cable going into the sky with a flying harvesting device. Our group has focused on kite power, and specifically the pumping kite power system. We use the traction power of a kite sail to pull a cable from a drum that drives a generator on the ground.

Once the cable has completely unwound it needs to be reeled in again, which requires a certain amount of energy. "You have to design the pumping cycle so as to have a traction and a retraction phase," says Schmehl. He and his team came up with a solution to minimise energy losses. "We rotate the kite into the wind as we pull it back, so essentially the airstream does part of the work for us. This way, we need less energy to reel in the cable."

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World's Biggest Offshore Wind Farm Switched On in Britain

IEEE SPectrum reports that the long awaited London Array wind farm has commenced operation offshore England - World's Biggest Offshore Wind Farm Switched On in Britain.

Around a year and a half ago, the Walney wind farm in the Irish Sea started spinning and prepared to relish the title of being "biggest in the world." It ended up enjoying that status a bit longer than expected, but the London Array, off the coast of Kent, now leaves Walney and its 367 megawatts in the dust.

Some numbers: 175 turbines. 630 megawatts. Half a million homes. 100 square kilometers. 450 kilometers of offshore cabling.

In other words, it's pretty big. The speed at which these enormous projects are popping around in the waters around the U.K. is impressive, especially considering the ongoing difficulties with getting even a single offshore turbine up and running in the U.S. (Cape Wind might have one by next year! Maybe!) There are now around 20 distinct offshore wind farms around the U.K., generating enough power for 2.3 million homes; when all offshore turbines that are spinning, in construction, or planned are combined, they total 15 gigawatts of capacity—about a quarter of the entire U.S. onshore wind power capabilities.

The London Array, owned by DONG Energy, E.ON, and the U.A.E.'s Masdar, looks to keep it's world's-biggest title for a bit longer than Walney held out, thanks to its already massive size and a phase 2 plan to bring it up to a full gigawatt. And some of the other big projects underway in the region won't be able to compete with that sort of girth: West of Duddon Sands farm will get to 389 MW, for example, while the Gwynt y Mor farm off the coast of Wales will reach 576 MW.

ReNews also has a report on a new 1.2GW wind farm planned for offshore the east coast of England - Hornsea enters the fray.

Smart Wind has submitted its application for the 1.2GW Hornsea phase one wind farm off the east coast of England. ... Hornsea Project One formally consists of the 600MW Njord and the 600MW Heron project. Offshore construction on both projects could start as early as 2016.

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Massive Solar Thermal Power Plant A Stepping Stone For Future Projects

NPR has a report on the looming completion of the 377 MW Ivanpah solar thermal power project in California - Massive Solar Plant A Stepping Stone For Future Projects.

The largest solar power plant of its kind is about to turn on in California's Mojave Desert.

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System will power about 140,000 homes and will be a boon to the state's renewable energy goals, but it was no slam dunk. Now, California is trying to bring conservationists and energy companies together to create a smoother path for future projects.

To get the best view of the Ivanpah solar project, you have to go up to the top of a 400-foot concrete tower. Below, close to 200,000 mirrors shimmer across a dry, dusty valley. "It's very exciting," says Dave Beaudoin, the construction manager for the $2 billion project located about an hour southwest of Las Vegas. Each mirror is about the size of a garage door, and it's mounted on a pole so it can be pointed at the tower. "We can keep the sun's energy — the rays of the sun — targeted back to the solar tower," Beaudoin says.

All of those mirrors generate about a thousand degrees of heat. It isn't the solar technology most of us think of: dark panels on rooftops. These mirrors heat a giant boiler on top of the tower, where water turns into steam. Beaudoin says that steam powers a turbine that generates electricity.

Greentech Media reports that Brightsource has needed to get some additional funding to complete the plant and is now looking to sell the technology in future rather than build projects - BrightSource Raises Another $35M for Ivanpah and CSP.

BrightSource Energy just collected $15 million of a modest $35 million tranche of venture funding. (It's modest relative to the hundreds of millions the company has raised over the last decade.) ...

Woolard's resignation came on the heels of a BrightSource press release that described the company "evolving from being a U.S. project developer to becoming a global technology provider that also offers development support as well as engineering and operational services." That's tough language to decode, but forgoing project development to become a "technology provider" is reminiscent of a startup's transition to a licensing model -- not always a good sign for a startup. ...

Several months ago, we reported that BrightSource's giant Ivanpah solar thermal project in the Mojave Desert was 92 percent complete. The 377-megawatt project consists of three 459-foot-tall towers encircled by arrays of garage-door-sized heliostats. A total of 173,500 computer-controlled heliostats will eventually reflect the sun onto the receiving towers, heating water to create steam that will drive turbines that produce electricity. Future projects from BrightSource will include thermal energy storage as per Solar Reserve's projects. Another CSP vendor, GlassPoint, directs its steam toward enhanced oil recovery, rather than electrical power. Two BrightSource Energy projects have recently been shelved due to permitting issues. BSE terminated power purchase agreements for the proposed Hidden Hills and Rio Mesa CSP solar power tower projects....

Former CEO Woolard said, "The problem we're trying to solve is [... how to] decarbonize the power supply and maintain system reliability at the lowest total cost to customers." Woolard noted that each picture-window-sized heliostat mirror, installed at the rate of one per minute at the $2.2 billion Ivanpah project, is capable of providing power to approximately one home, without the "hidden integration costs to the consumer" that come with wind and solar.

Since BrightSource was founded, its competition -- natural gas and solar photovoltaics -- has gone through disruptive price drops. CSP has not yet had the opportunity to scale like those two technologies.

RenewEconomy has an article on a new mirror design that could dramatically increase the efficiency of solar thermal plants - ‘Perfect’ mirror could lead to concentrated solar breakthrough.

Researchers at MIT in the US have stumbled upon a new method to trap light that could lead to a wide variety of applications, not least of all a vast improvement in the efficiency of concentrated solar power generation.

The breakthrough involves what is being described as a kind of “perfect” mirror, which works in a way that deviates from known scientific laws, pitting light waves against light waves, and setting up two waves that have the same wavelength, but exactly opposite phases — where one wave has a peak, the other has a trough — so that the waves cancel each other out. Meanwhile, light of other wavelengths (or colors) can pass through freely.

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AGL unveils Australia's biggest solar energy plants

The SMH reports on 2 large scale thin film solar power plants to be built in outback NSW using First Solar panels - AGL unveils Australia's biggest solar energy plants.

Australia’s biggest solar energy plants have been given the funding go-ahead, clearing the way for the installation of 2 million photovoltaic panels at two sites in the NSW outback.Power company AGL on Wednesday committed to proceed with the $450 million investment in the plants which will supply 50,000 homes with electricity and potentially pave the way for more such ventures.

Nyngan, north-west of Dubbo, will host the larger of the two plants, with a 102-megawatt capacity, while a 53-megawatt plant will be built near Broken Hill. Both should be supplying power to the eastern Australian grid by the end of 2015.

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Ontario Phases Out Coal-Fired Power

Scientific American has an article on Ontario's plans to phase out coal fired power entirely - Ontario Phases Out Coal-Fired Power.

By the end of the year, Ontario will become the first jurisdiction in North America to shut down almost its entire coal fleet. Yesterday, the province announced that its last two large coal units will close before 2014, making more than 99 percent of the province's electricity generated from non-coal sources. It is a major shift for Ontario, which fired 25 percent of its grid from coal a decade ago.

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Deep Water Wind Energy Could Power EU 4 Times Over

Energy Matters has an article on a new report from the European Wind Energy Association - Deep Water Wind Energy Could Power EU (And Then Some).

A new report from the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) states the power produced from turbines in deep waters in the North Sea alone could meet the EU’s electricity consumption - four times over.

"Offshore wind in Europe could be providing 145 million households with renewable electricity and employing 318,000 people by 2030, while providing energy security, technology exports, and no greenhouse gases," says the EWEA.

'Deep Water' in relation to wind turbines is considered to be depths of 50 metres or more. While the technology is still reasonably new, floating wind turbine designs are competitive in terms of the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) with bottom-fixed foundations in depths exceeding 50 metres.

Of all Europe’s grid connected offshore wind turbines currently in service, only two are not reliant on fixed foundations.

Acknowledging that the sector must overcome significant technical, economic and political challenges in order to properly tap deep water wind resources; the EWEA says if the challenges are overcome, the first deep offshore wind farms could be up and running by 2017.

Even at the shallow end of the pool, offshore wind power in the EU is a very big business. At the end of last year, 1,662 turbines totalling 5 GW capacity were operating in 55 wind farms in 10 European countries; producing 18 TWh of electricity - enough to power almost five million households.

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Drilling Fast To Stay On A Plateau In the Bakken

Rune Likvern has a very long look at shale oil production statistics for the Bakken in North Dakota at The Oil Drum - Will the Bakken “Red Queen” Have to Run Faster?.

This post is an update and continued expansion to my previous posts about tight/shale oil in Bakken/Three Forks in North Dakota (ND):

* Is Shale Oil Production from Bakken Headed for a Run with “The Red Queen”? * Is the Typical NDIC Bakken Tight Oil Well a Sales Pitch?

This post documents:

* At present oil prices Bakken tight oil has the overall prospects of being profitable. * Between 70-75% of the studied wells (well cost @9Million and oil price @$90/bbl) were found to have a prognosis for being at or above breakeven (being profitable). * If (or rather when) average well productivity declines further, this will add a new meaning to the term tight oil. * Developments in average well productivity.

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Africanized Killer Bees Attack People In Texas

(Another off topic post) As a kid I remember reading a book called "The Swarm" which was a highly exaggerated look at what might happen to the US if African bees made it to north America - apparently this has happened now - Bee Attack — Africanized Killer Bees Attack People In Texas, Kill Their Horses.

Two dead horses, five dead hens, and their owner with a couple hundred bee stings — that’s the end result of a recent bee attack in Texas. The bees in question initiated the attack on Kristen Beauregard and her animals shortly after she had finished exercising the two horses on Wednesday afternoon — according to Beauregard, the attack was completely unprovoked, her and her animals were nowhere near the hive at the time.

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Peak oil ? What peak oil ?

Ugo at Cassandra's Legacy has an interesting graph (part of an article by John Laherrere at The Oil Drum) showing global oil production per capita - Peak oil? What peak oil?. Its certainly one peak of oil production that couldn't be argued with...

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ARENA-funded tool to calculate viability of solar thermal power projects

RenewEconomy has an article on some online tools for assessing the financial viability of solar thermal power projects in Australia - ARENA-funded tool to calculate viability of solar thermal projects.

Hot on the heels of ARENA’s decision against supporting Alinta’s development of solar thermal power generation in Port Augusta, the federal government has launched an set of online tools, funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, aimed at helping researchers, developers and financiers assess the commercial prospects of Concentrating Solar Thermal power projects in Australia.

Originally developed by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the concentrating solar thermal System Advisor Model (SAM) has been adapted for Australian conditions by the Australian Solar Thermal Energy Association (AUSTELA) through a $73,500 ARENA investment.

According to AUSTELA, the adapted SAM model is “general purpose and can predict hourly, monthly and annual output of CSP, Concentrating PV, flat plate PV and a range of other renewable energy systems” – but there has been an extensive body of work around its application to CSP systems in particular.

“Concentrating solar thermal systems have the potential to play a significant role in future electricity networks as they can store energy, which means clean energy can be dispatched to homes and businesses at anytime of the day or night,” said federal resources and energy minister Gary Gray.

“These new tools – which will optimise an industry-leading United States model for Australian conditions – will make it easier for developers and financiers to assess the commercial viability of concentrating solar thermal projects.”

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Beyond the Coming Age Of Networked Matter

Boing Boing has a new (and totally off topic) short story from Bruce Sterling - patron saint of Peak Energy - BEYOND THE COMING AGE OF NETWORKED MATTER.

Bee brains lacked much processing power. Just enough hardware in there to run a high-level bee-dance language where the bees could clue each other in about tasty matter resources. Adrienne had mocked this system up on a whiteboard with boxes and arrows. Julio had coded it with open-source modules.

Then they’d created these 3Dprinted plastic “bee puppets.” Their fake plastic Maker bees were, like, awesomely effective at bee dancing. Their robot bees, set dancing by Arduino, were basically Trojan Bees. They had gotten root in the hive. They had powned the hive colony superorganism. Those bees would do whatever the hackers wanted.

“Their bee-swarm pitch is out of this world!” I told Crawferd. “I can’t believe I haven’t seen this idea before!”

The Maker kids ramped up to their triumphant climax. Being new to California, they’d noticed all the window-box marijuana plants. They’d hacked their bees to go out to forage for dope pollen.

They showed the camera their existence proof: a double fistful of honey-drenched Silicon Valley hashish.

Then little Adrienne and Julio modestly asked the public for twenty grand to go 3Dprint some beehives, so they could issue some royal-jelly marijuana prescriptions. A business-model screwup that was total facepalm. Of course their Kickstarter had exploded. Just gone ballistic. It had blown past twelve million USD in capital and was heading north at high speed.

“You have created a monster,” I told Crawferd. “I can see why you’re so upset now. This is not even funny. Where are those crazy kids? They’re gonna need to lawyer up.”

“They’re no longer with me,” muttered Crawferd. “That’s the bad part. That’s why I’m hiding in here.”

“So where’d they run off to?”

Crawferd toyed guiltily with the hopelessly tangled power cord of his phablet. “It’s worse than that.”

“It’s worse than drugs? They’re busted?”

“Sort of. Worse!”

“They’re kidnapped? Mexican marijuana mob? Paramilitary? Body bags, they’re hanging from an overpass?”

“Lots worse. Totally worse than that. That’s kid stuff compared to what happened.”

“Knock it off with the eldritch, nebulous hints, Crawferd! Put it in words of one syllable!”

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Fukushima Decontamination and Cleanup Will Cost $50 Billion

The Diplomat has a look at the cost of cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear disaster - Fukushima Decontamination and Cleanup Will Cost $50 Billion. Presumably this isn't included in most levelised cost of energy numbers disseminated by nuclear power promoters...

In another blow to recovery efforts in the prefecture hit hardest by the 3/11 tsunami and nuclear meltdown, Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have estimated the cost of decontamination and cleanup to be more than $50 billion. The central Japanese government has earmarked only $11 billion in aid to the struggling region.

“The group has estimated that the decontamination in the no-entry zones will be at around $20 billion, while the other surrounding areas will cost another $31 billion,” said the Japan Daily Press. “The estimates are based on the unit costs that the government provided as well as information collected from the affected municipalities. It also includes the expenses that will be incurred in the removal, transportation and storage of radioactive waste like the contaminated soil and water.”

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Sadoway’s MIT Liquid Metal Battery Startup Adds $15M and Khosla Ventures as Investor

Greentech Media reports that the liquid metal battery company I mentioned recently has received a round of venture capital funding - Sadoway’s MIT Liquid Metal Battery Startup Adds $15M and Khosla Ventures as Investor.

It's almost a cliche that the missing piece of a renewable energy future is low-cost energy storage.

"Until we find a technology that is low-cost, highly scalable, and long-lasting, ubiquitous grid storage won't be possible. The all-liquid battery's elegant materials design and simple assembly process makes it the best chemical option we've seen for storing the grid at massive scale."

That's Khosla Ventures partner Andrew Chung's comment on Liquid Metal Battery Corporation (LMBC). He's now on the board of the firm; he funded founder Don Sadoway's research at MIT before the firm won the top ARPA-E award back in 2009. LMBC just announced that it raised an additional $15 million in funding in its Round B from Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates and energy company Total

We spoke with Phil Giudice, the CEO of LMBC, as well. He said, "Our Liquid Metal Battery technology is tremendously exciting because it has the potential to dramatically change the electric power system everywhere," in a release. The CEO told GTM that the company had passed the R&D stage and was moving into commercializing the technology for large-scale grid applications.

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Could Natural Gas Fuel a Trucking Revolution ?

The Energy Collective has a post from Geoffrey Styles on the growth of natural gas fuelled road transport - Could Natural Gas Fuel a Trucking Revolution ?. might as well use that transition fuel up as fast as possible...

The International Energy Agency (IEA) released its latest Medium-Term Gas Market Report in St. Petersburg, Russia last month. Although the IEA sees the growth of gas in the power sector slowing, they also cite its emergence as "a significant transportation fuel." What really caught my eye was their projection that gas over the next five years would have "a bigger impact on oil demand than biofuels and electric cars combined," in light of the US shale gas revolution and tougher pollution rules in China.

That's quite an assertion, considering oil's longstanding dominance in transportation energy. As I noted in March, Italy, Pakistan and several other countries already have well-established demand for compressed natural gas (CNG) for passenger cars. Despite these hot spots only 3% of gas is currently used in transportation, globally, based on analysis from Citigroup. The IEA is forecasting that transportation growth will consume 10% of the projected global gas production increase of roughly 20 trillion cubic feet (TCF) per year by 2018. That's 2 TCF per year of additional natural gas demand in the transport sector, equivalent to 1 million barrels per day of diesel fuel.

I'd be more skeptical about that figure if I hadn't seen a presentation from Dr. Michael Gallagher of Westport Innovations at the Energy Information Administration's annual energy conference in Washington, DC last Monday. Westport specializes in natural gas engine technology for heavy-duty trucks and played a major role in implementing the LNG vision of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, CA a few years ago.

Dr. Gallagher made a strong case for gas in heavy-duty trucking, starting with the low cost of US natural gas compared to oil and its products. Initial growth rates in several segments look encouraging, including transit buses and new trash trucks, for which natural gas now has around half the market. Growth in China has apparently been even faster, with LNG vehicles increasing at over 100% per year (from a small base) and natural gas refueling stations growing at 33% per year since 2003.

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Halliburton Admits It Destroyed Gulf Spill Evidence

ZeroHedge has a post on the punishment meted out to Halliburton for its part in the Macondo oil spill - Halliburton Admits It Destroyed Gulf Spill Evidence, Pays 0.0007% of Revenue Fine

With regard to the disastrous Macondo oil well rupture that ended in 11 deaths and triggered the largest US offshore oil spill of all time (and uncountable ongoing ecological impacts), Halliburton has 'graciously' decided to plead guilty to destroying evidence. 'Guilty?' we hear you ask? When has any large US corporation not just settled in order to not be forced to admit guilt? Well, as Reuters reports, "their willingness to plead to this may also indicate that they'd like to settle up with the federal government on the civil penalties." The maximum statutory fine for this apparent midemeanour? $200,000! Or 0.0007% of expected revenues for 2013. Well, that'll teach 'em for sure - they won't be destroying evidence again, eh?

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World changing technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the air

PhysOrg has an article on an ingenious technique known as N-fix that could enable us to reduce our dependency on ammonia based fertilisers - World changing technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the air.

A major new technology has been developed by The University of Nottingham, which enables all of the world's crops to take nitrogen from the air rather than expensive and environmentally damaging fertilisers.

Nitrogen fixation, the process by which nitrogen is converted to ammonia, is vital for plants to survive and grow. However, only a very small number of plants, most notably legumes (such as peas, beans and lentils) have the ability to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere with the help of nitrogen fixing bacteria. The vast majority of plants have to obtain nitrogen from the soil, and for most crops currently being grown across the world, this also means a reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.

Professor Edward Cocking, Director of The University of Nottingham's Centre for Crop Nitrogen Fixation, has developed a unique method of putting nitrogen-fixing bacteria into the cells of plant roots. His major breakthrough came when he found a specific strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in sugar-cane which he discovered could intracellularly colonise all major crop plants. This ground-breaking development potentially provides every cell in the plant with the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen. The implications for agriculture are enormous as this new technology can provide much of the plant's nitrogen needs.

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Solar, wind could replace all fossil fuels in Australia by 2040

RenewEconomy has an article on an ANU study of growth in renewable power generation in Australia - Solar, wind could replace all fossil fuels in Australia by 2040.

Solar and wind energy could replace all fossil fuels in Australia by 2040 if their recent rate of deployment is maintained and slightly increased over the next 27 years – delivering the country with a 100% renewable electricity grid “by default” as early as 2040.

The stunning conclusions come from research from Andrew Blakers, the director of the Australian National University’s Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems. It notes that nearly all new electricity generation capacity in recent years has been wind and solar photovoltaics (PV), and demand has also ben falling since 2008.

Blakers says that if this situation continues then Australia will achieve renewable electricity system by 2040, as existing fossil fuel power stations retire at the end of their service lives and are replaced with renewables.

And the cost will be no greater than having fossil fuels because, as Bloomberg New Energy Finance notes, wind is already cheaper than new coal or gas-fired generation and solar soon will be. These are the critical points – because renewables are often painted as expensive when compared to fully-depreciated, 40 years fossil fuel plants. But not compared with the new capacity required to replace ageing fossil fuel fleet.

Blakers says his scenario works even using the more conservative technology cost forecasts prepared by the Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics. These forecasts are being updated, but they came to similar conclusions as BNEF on technology cost trends, just not quite as quickly.

The 100% by 2040 scenario is probably not that much different in scope to current trends. Australia was sitting at around 10 per cent renewables in 2010, and will probably end up with at least 25 per cent by 2020, given current trends on rooftop solar and the fixed 41,000GWh target for large scale renewables.

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Wind Now Cost Competitive With Coal in India

IEEE Spectrum has an article on wind power in India, which has become more competitive with coal fired power due to water scarcity - Wind Now Cost Competitive With Coal in India.

Wind power is now cost competitive with new coal-fired generation in India, according to a report from HSBC [pdf]. Falling costs are just one reason for the increased interest in wind. For the first time, India has identified water as a scare natural resource in its most recent five-year plan. Nearly 90 percent of India’s industrial water demand comes from thermal power plants, according to the HSBC report.

The appeal of some renewables, such as wind and solar photovoltaic, is that they use far less water than coal, nuclear, or natural gas power plants. Across the globe, water stress is growing within the energy industry and power plants have to partially shut down when there isn’t enough water for cooling. In India, water shortages just before monsoon season in 2012 forced hydro generation and thermal power plants to partially close.

India needs all the power it can get. Last July, a sweeping power outage left about 700 million people without power. Outages are a daily occurrence in India, although usually not at that scale, because of a dearth of generation coupled with an outdated grid. The Central Electricity Authority estimates India has a peak deficit of 12 gigawatts.

The latest five-year plan calls for a doubling of renewable energy from the previous plan, including 15 gigawatts of wind, 10 gigawatts of solar, 2 gigawatts of small hydro and nearly 3 gigawatts of biomass. Individual Indian states have also instituted solar and wind installation targets.

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