Economists Moving Beyond Carbon Pricing. Over at the Economist, Ryan Avent notes that economists are beginning to move beyond a simple reliance on carbon pricing as the sine qua non of climate policy: The typical baseline economist response to the problem of global warming is a very simple and straightforward one. Climate change is a negative externality, and the carbon emissions that generate it are easily targetable. The clear thing to do, then, is to place a tax on carbon emissions which will lead economic actors to internalise the cost of the warming they create with their decisions. This will discourage carbon-intensive activities and contribute to the development of clean alternative, reducing emissions and climate change.Easy enough.
Unfortunately, this strategy quickly runs into difficulty. One big problem is political. The authors of one recent paper on this subject presented at a great session on climate policy in Denver. As Avent concludes: Connect: Authored by: Jesse Jenkins Jesse has also been a Digital Strategy ... Presentation: "Where Good Technologies Come From"
Presentation: "Where Good Technologies Come From" [.pptx] This presentation was delivered by Jesse Jenkins (Director of Energy and Climate Policy, Breakthrough Institute) and Daniel Sarewitz (Director, Center for Science, Policy, and Outcomes, ASU; Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow) at the Energy Innovation 2010 Conference, December 15th, 2010. Apple, Amgen and General Electric. Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell. We are all familiar with these genius inventors and titans of industry. Yet most of us remain unaware of the almost constant presence of a silent partner in American innovation: the federal government. We might recall something about microchips and the space race, or know that the National Institutes of Health funds research into new drugs and treatments.
But most of us remain unaware of the depth and breadth of government support for technology innovation. Consider the iPhone. How many of you out there have an iPhone or other smart phone in your pocket? #10. On Energy Transition, US Military Leads. As Tom Friedman points out in his column yesterday, "the U.S. military loses one person, killed or wounded, for every 24 fuel convoys it runs in Afghanistan. " Soldiers and others are put in harm's way as part of convoys, hundreds and hundreds of them, needed to transport fuel to run air conditioners and diesel generators in remote bases all over that country. But what if the "U.S. Navy and Marines could replace those generators with renewable power and more energy efficient buildings, and run its ships on nuclear energy, biofuels and hybrid engines, and fly its jets with bio-fuels"? One out-come, Friedman argues, would be to "out-green the Taliban.
" The military is making a strategic move to alternative energy and energy efficiency, in part because it recognizes the national security issues associated with dependence on fossil fuel energy and the potential impacts of climate change. It should come as no surprise that the US military is becoming a leader in green tech innovation. Connect:
2008. Green. Energie. Energieprijzen. Policy. Henri Bontenbal over lagere energiebelasting voor duurzame energie « Krispy's Blog vol (on)gevraagde meningen. In het regeerakkoord van de VVD en de PvdA staat de volgende maatregel: “Het kleinschalig, duurzaam opwekken van (zonne-)energie waarvoor geen rijkssubsidie wordt ontvangen, wordt fiscaal gestimuleerd door invoering van een verlaagd tarief in de eerste schijf van de energiebelasting op elektriciteit die afkomstig is van coöperaties van particuliere kleinverbruikers, aan deze verbruikers geleverd wordt en in hun nabijheid is opgewekt.
Deze wordt lastenneutraal gefinancierd door een generieke verhoging van het reguliere tarief in de eerste schijf van de energiebelasting.” Waarom is deze maatregel, op deze wijze geformuleerd, lastig uitvoerbaar? 1) ‘lastenneutraal gefinancierd’ Wat zijn de financiële consequenties van deze maatregel voor huishoudens die er geen gebruik van maken? Deze huishoudens hebben misschien niet de middelen om te investeren in een aandeel in een energiecoöperatie.
Op het eerste gezicht lijkt dit niet veel geld. 2) ‘kleinschalig’ 3) ‘geen rijkssubsidie’ 8) looptijd?
Clean tech. Coal. Sodium Sulfur Batteries to be Used for Energy S. Xcel Energy, (NYSE: XEL)in partnership with the University of Minnesota, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Great Plains Institute, will soon begin testing a one-megawatt sodium-sulfur battery storage system to demonstrate its ability to store wind energy and dispatch it to the electricity grid when needed. Fully charged, the batteries could power 500 homes for six and one-half hours.
Xcel Energy will purchase the batteries from NGK Insulators, Ltd. that will be an integral part of the project. The sodium-sulfur battery is commercially available and versions of this technology are already being used in Japan and in a few US applications, but this is the first U.S. application of the battery as a direct wind energy storage device. The 50-kilowatt battery modules, 20 in total, will be roughly the size of two semi trailers and weigh approximately 60 tons. They will be able to store about 6.5 megawatt-hours of electricity, with a charge/discharge capacity of one megawatt. Power Innovations Energy Efficient Power Suppli. Did you realize that about 10% of household energy consumption is wasted in the standby mode of devices in your home, costing over $5 billion annually in the U.S? The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab estimates that a 75% reduction is possible in new equipment by replacing inefficient linear power supplies with smarter switch-mode power supplies, such as those made by Power Integrations.
Balu Balakrishnan, CEO of Power Integrations, Inc., (NASDAQ:POWI) appeared on CNBC's Street Signs, see video, today, marking the 10th anniversary of the companies founding. Their energy efficient power supply components are one of the items that receive little publicity, yet contribute significantly to the reduction of our power usage. Their integrated circuits with EcoSmart(r) technology are used in power supplies, which convert high-voltage AC power from a wall outlet into the low-voltage DC power needed by most electronic products.
This post was largely composed from information on the companies website. What Are The Top 10 Coal-Burning Countries on the Planet? Who's. Photo: Public domainTotal World Coal Consumption in 2008: 7,238,207,000 Short Tons! When it comes to global warming and air pollution, coal is enemy #1. We were curious to know which countries burned the most, so we compiled a list of the top 10 coal-burning countries in the world based on the latest statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). We chose not to use per capita numbers because the atmosphere doesn't care about that; in the end, all that matters is absolutely numbers. Do you know who's #1? Could you guess most of the list? #10 South-Korea 112,843 thousand short tons #9 Poland 149,333 thousand short tons #8 Australia 160,515 thousand short tons #7 South Africa: 193,654 thousand short tons #6 Japan: 203,979 thousand short tons #5 Russia: 269,684 thousand short tons #4 Germany: 269,892 thousand short tons #3 India: 637,522 thousand short tons #2 USA: 1,121,714 thousand short tons #1 China: 2,829,515 thousand short tons Danger!
According to the U.S. Wind's latest problem: it . . . makes pow. Posted by Jerome a Paris on May 1, 2010 - 10:20am in The Oil Drum: Europe Topic: Alternative energy Tags: wind [list all tags] Bloomberg has a somewhat confusing article about the newest complaint about wind power, but the gist of it is that wind power is an issue for the industry because it brings their revenues down: After years of getting government incentives to install windmills, operators in Europe may have become their own worst enemy, reducing the total price paid for electricity in Germany, Europe’s biggest power market, by as much as 5 billion euros some years, according to a study this week by Poeyry, a Helsinki-based industry consultant.
Implicit in the article, and the headline (which focuses on lower revenues for RWE) is the worry that wind power will bring down the stock market value of the big utilities - which is what the readers of Bloomberg et al. care about. The wind-energy boom in Europe and parts of Texas has begun to reduce bills for consumers. Fracking for shale gas gets green light in UK. The government has lifted restrictions on the controversial practice of fracking, a method of extracting gas from shale rock, giving a green light to drilling that could produce billions of pounds worth of gas. The first site is likely to be at Anna's Road in Lancashire, near three exploratory fracking wells that were closed after two minor earthquakes last year.
Cuadrilla Resources, the firm responsible for the operations, found that the quakes were probably caused by the fracking. Dozens more sites across the country could be licensed as ministers signalled their hope that shale gas would help to make up for the decline in North Sea supplies. The go-ahead will dismay environmental campaigners who argue that chemicals used in the drilling technology will contaminate water supplies and that extracting more gas will intensify climate change.
Estimates of how much shale gas there might be in the UK vary widely. There is also no guarantee that shale will bring down gas prices. Countries Start to Outline their Plans to Phase-out Fossil Fuel. The G20 has just wrapped up and the outcome on the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies is a mixed bag. The G20 didn’t include weakening language which would have signaled that the countries' commitments were “voluntary” (as it appeared last week in a leaked draft). A couple of countries brought forward specific commitments, plans, and timelines to phase-out some of their domestic incentives. Other countries didn’t outline their plans and the actual language in the Toronto G20 communiqué is unspecific on details for the phase-out. So here are the details. G20 fossil-fuel subsidy phase-out isn’t voluntary. “We welcome the work of Finance and Energy Ministers in delivering implementation strategies and timeframes, based on national circumstances, for the rationalization and phase out over the medium term of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption, taking into account vulnerable groups and their development needs.