The Peakist

· Analyst argues wind farms and biofuels are not green
· Report’s look at negative aspects aims to end ‘taboo’

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Wednesday July 25, 2007
The Guardian (more…)

Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets.

“The process is simple,” said lead researcher and author Somenath Mitra, PhD, professor and acting chair of NJIT’s Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences. “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.” (more…)

From Economist.com

Power generation: If people object to wind farms cluttering up the countryside, one answer might be to put them in the air.
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New Solar Cell Breaks the “40 Percent Efficient” Sunlight-to-Electricity Barrier

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Reduce CO2 from electricity generation by 70% by 2050 without nuclear, claims research group

TREC Press Release

A new report, commissioned by the German Government, shows in detail how Europe (including the UK and Ireland) can meet all its needs for electricity, cut emissions of CO2 from electricity generation by 70% by the year 2050, and phase out nuclear power at the same time.

The key to this revolution in electricity supply is the replacement of old polluting power plants that rely on dwindling supplies of fuel with a larger range of non-polluting sources of energy that will be good for thousands of years. (more…)

With the annoucement yesterday that Fidel Castro is handing power over to his brother, due to ill health, this is perhaps a good time to have a look at how Cuba coped with it’s own artificially enforced version of peak oil. When the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it Cuba’s supply of subsidised oil, Cube underwent an profound oil crisis that can provide some interesting lessons on how we might cope with the reality of peak oil. Today Hugo Chavez is supplying Cuba with oil and it would be interesting to know to what extent things have changed back to oil dependency.

Perhaps the most profound change caused by the Cuban oil crisis was the forced areplacement of centralised, industrial monocultural agriculture with a revolution in permaculture. The following piece, which first appeared in Permaculture Activist, Spring 2006 (www.permacultureactivist.net) was written by Megan Quinn, outreach director for The Community Solution ( www.communitysolution.org). (more…)

Big news!

1.  In a significant development this week, our experimental power cycle produced air conditioning and refrigeration temperatures! The refrigerated section attained a chilly 41o F (5oC). The energy source was simmering water at 159o F (71o C), typical of temperatures obtained from common, rooftop solar hot water collectors. This test was in preparation for demonstrating an air conditioner fueled by renewable energy sources. Our simple vapor cycle uses a venturi to produce the evaporation of refrigerant, and requires no compressor, no feedpump, & no absorption to cycle the process.
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The New Scientist looks at the carbon footprint of the large scale wind turbines:

“It started with Turbine 68. On 16 October 2003, following excavations for the 49-metre tower’s massive foundations, the peat bog above the village of Derrybrien in county Galway, Ireland, began to move. That night almost half a square kilometre of bog slid 2.5 kilometres down the hillside, engulfing an unoccupied farmhouse and blocking two roads. Journalists dubbed it the “bogalanche”, and speculated about what might have happened had the weather been wet. Two weeks later they found out. Heavy rains washed peat soup into the Abhainn Da Loilioch river, where the sludge killed 50,000 fish and affected 50,000 more. (more…)

Electricity-generating tidal lagoons located in the Severn Estuary could provide an economically attractive and environmentally acceptable way of supplying up to 7% of England and Wales’s electricity consumption with low-cost, low-carbon electricity.
There are a large range of potential environmental and economic benefits and disbenefits associated with siting lagoons or the proposed Severn Barrage in the Estuary. However, initial comparisons strongly suggest that lagoons could be significantly less extensive and environmentally damaging and more cost effective and powerful than the Barrage. Lagoons would not directly impound the ecologically highly valuable inter-tidal areas of the Estuary. (more…)

The Guardian reports “BP has joined forces with one of Europe’s biggest food groups to build what they claim will be Britain’s largest “green” petrol plant using sugar beet from East Anglia. The move, designed to kickstart a much larger programme involving hundreds of millions of pounds of investment, comes as environmental campaigners declare war on the UK’s largest traditional power plant, Drax.” (more…)

It’s interesting to note in the light of George Monbiot’s polemic that the Observer ‘Energy’ special report, headlined with ‘Earth at the tipping point’ was sponsored by Shell advertising, with www.shellspringboard.org offering funding to small businesses for ‘ideas that combat climate change’. Monbiot’s line “BP and Shell are to Exxon what New Labour is to the old Tories” is apposite. Interesting to see also, two pages before the Monbiot piece “Oil Price likely to fall, says [BP CEO] Browne”

“It is very likely that, in the medium term, prices will stand at about $40 on average. In the very long run, even $25 to $30 are possible,” he said in an interview with the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel.

Lord Browne accepted that it was unlikely prices would fall sharply in the short term but dismissed notions that the price could only go up as scarcity increased. Large oilfields were still being found, he said, and regions such as west Africa had more hydrocarbons that could be tapped.

He also noted that Canada’s oil sands could also be exploited profitably. Even though they were expensive to bring out of the ground, production costs remained well below world selling prices for crude.”

What are we to make of such optimism - perhaps little given BP’s role in maintaining the fiction of global oil abundance through the Statistical Review. “Chaos ahead, says Brown” would be unlikely to calm investors. But this is hardly ‘Beyond Petroleum’ is it?

And more to the point perhaps someone should tell Brown that the economic viability of tar sand production lies in $50 a barrel and up range, which is why Chavez is pushing OPEC to set this as a minimum barrell price should prices start falling. You can’t have it both ways, you’ve either got $25 a barrel crude or you’ve viable tar sand production and an investment climate open to deep sea exploration.

STAMFORD, Conn., BERKELEY, CA, and LISBON, PORTUGAL, APRIL 27, 2006 – GE Energy Financial Services, PowerLight Corporation and Catavento Lda announced today that they will build the world’s largest solar photovoltaic power project. The 11-megawatt solar power plant, comprising 52,000 photovoltaic modules, will be built at a single site in Serpa, Portugal, 200 kilometers (124 miles) southeast of Lisbon in one of Europe’s sunniest areas. (more…)

“We had hoped this climate review would inject an additional boost to offshore wind to ensure it joined onshore as a major provider of new power and carbon savings to hit our 2010 targets.  The Government’s failure to act in this review must be addressed in the forthcoming Energy Review.  Without a vibrant offshore wind sector it is hard to see how the Government’s 2010 climate targets can be met and how our 20% renewable aspirations by 2020 can become a working reality.”    Marcus Rand, BWEA’s Chief Executive

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Building new nuclear plants is not the answer to tackling climate change or securing Britain’s energy supply, a government advisory panel has reported.

The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) report says doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035. (more…)

Diderot has summarised Lovelock’s argument for nuclear energy for us. Perhaps the most contentious issue facing us today, whilst nuclear energy has always been the bete noire of environmentalists Lovelock has endorsed nuclear energy as the only practical solution to the twin crisis of global warming and energy supply. Diderot writes:

Lovelock devotes chapter 5 of his new book, “The Revenge of Gaia”, to a
discussion of our major energy options.  The background to the
discussion is Lovelock’s belief that the planet is poised to flip into a
new hotter stable state with average temperatures 8 degrees higher than
now.  It’s an equilibrium that Gaia has reached many times before, most
recently 55 million years ago when carbon dioxide was at a concentration
similar to the one we are currently creating.  No one knows when we’ll
flip but all known climate systems are now in positive feedback and we
can expect to move to ‘hot earth’ within the next century.  When we do
most parts of the planet will become uninhabitable, the sea will swallow
London.

With that in mind, Lovelock considers the energy options: (more…)