Some Basic Energy Information

Since the middle of the last century there has been an enormous rise in energy demand. This demand keeps on rising especially due to the Grow lands like Russia, China, and India.
More then 90% of the energy that is spent this day comes from non-renewable sources. The main reasons why people use non-renewable sources are because they don’t know the alternatives or the alternatives are too expensive.
So let’s highlight some of the renewable energy sources:

Hydropower:

Energy can be produced by channelling the flow of rivers or by storing water in reservoirs behind dams and directing it through turbines. This doesn’t cause any pollution, Hydropower is clean and renewable, yet it supplies less than 20 percent of the world's electricity.
But not everything is good about Hydropower, dams disrupt river ecosystems. It affects many habitats and can make it impossible for certain fish such as salmon to travel upstream to spawn. Fortunately technology doesn’t stand still and in the article about “Ending a dammed nuisance” you can read how they are trying to get rid of this.

Solar Energy:

Since centuries people use sunlight to cook food, heat water and homes. Today, solar energy is used for more then just those purposes. For example it’s used to provide hot water for industries such as laundries. Also well known are the solar panels, in sunlight these panels generate electricity. This is also clean/renewable energy, but the cost of solar panels is still too high.

Wind Energy:

This is now one of the fastest-growing energy sources worldwide. The tall wind turbines make use of the wind to generate electricity. The problem with wind mills is that they may cause environmental concerns. However it’s also a clean and renewable energy source.

Geothermal Energy:

Geothermal energy is probably not very well known. It comes from intense heat within the Earth, which also produces hot springs, geysers, and volcanoes.
The only widely used type of geothermal energy is hydrothermal, this is produced when subsurface water contacts hot rock and turns to steam, which is piped to the surface. In a geothermal electric plant, steam is piped to a turbine to power an electrical generator.
This type of energy doesn’t produce pollution when used, but to generate this energy there’s a lot of oil and gas needed especially for getting this energy above the ground.

Bio fuels:

Crops can be fermented to produce liquid bio fuels, the most common of which are ethanol and methanol. Today these alcohols are relatively high-cost but with the extremely high oil prices of today this can make them a good alternative. The air pollution savings from the increased use of ethanol are significant.


Source

Air pollution from electricity-generating large combustion plants

Courtesy of European Environment Agency (EEA)
May 2008

The Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive (IPPC) did a study that assesses the potential to reduce air emissions. The results occurred that the best techniques were described in the large combustion plant reference document, introduced in electricity-generating large combustion plants within the European Union in 2004. The study reveals that more than 70% of the emissions are included in EPER for the LCP sector.

Several issues have not been considered to be within the scope of the study. These include consideration of ongoing changes that have occurred in the sector since 2004.

Due to the implementation of IPPC legislation (even if not considering such factors as fuel mix changes, closures or economic growth), emission reductions can be reached in the practice. Because of that, there can’t be drawn conclusions concerning compliance with legal requirements. The study can be viewed as a what-if study that wants to show how we can reduce the emissions. We can do it by using the techniques that are now identified in the large combustion plants. This is the best available technique in the large combustion plants sector as it was done in 2004.

Source: http://energy.environmental-expert.com

Double or nothing

The uncertain future of emissions trading.



Emission traders visited last week "the Carbon Expo". This annual jamboree says a lot about the peculiar state of the business of fighting global warming.
Projects that would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, financing for and auditing of such projects, and advice about how this whole burgeoning new business works. All this kind of wares you could find there.

And this new business realy works! In 2007, emissions trading grew into a $60 billion business. Ofcourse the European Union has a lot the do with this. It capped the emissions of big factories and power plants, but allows firms that exceed their allocation to buy unused pollution rights from those that have some to spare.
Also the "Clean Development Mechanism" has a big part in that $60 billion.

The crowd who visited this jamboree was resolutely international. Which is again another aspect that shows that the emissions trading business is a subject where a lot of people give attention to.
Maybe interesting to say is that the most visitors were bankers and not development types. This new form to invest will certainly be a popular and good business to spend your money.

But it's not all positive news that comes from the jamboree.
At this moment there are allready enough projects underway to provide all the offsets needed by the rich countries under the Kyoto treaty, which expires in 2012. So the market for voluntary offsets is growing fast but still remains small.
Also there is no guarantee that the world will agree on a replacement to Kyoto, or that a new deal will preserve the CDM.

Conclusion, the future of emissions trading can be very rosy or none at all...

SOURCE

Backing greens with greenbacks

May 8th 2008
It takes patience and guts to invest in the environment





Illustration by Satoshi Kambayashi

AL GORE, well known from his movies about climate changes, has also other things to do. He has also a fund-management firm, Generation Investment Management. It has just raised $683m for a fund that will have climate solutions. He hopes that these principles will produce strong profits.

So far, environmental investors should feel green with nausea. The Impax ET50, index of leading environmental shares peaked at the end of 2007 and then plunged by only a forth in January. However, it’s still down 10% on the year, in spite of a recovery.

People think that most green companies just consist of some geeks and a website, but the reality isn’t like that. They have to invest billions of dollars for building a wind farm, new technologies such as cellulosic ethanol or thin-film solar panels. With big investments, they don’t even know for sure if they will make profits. It can take many years and maybe there even won’t be a profit what means that it’s certainly not simple to invest in environmental companies.

The Bush administrations, whose drive for energy independence is big, invested a lot in bio fuels. Investors got disillusioned because there are a lot of doubts about the green credentials of bio fuels. Now, they hope that there will be a new generation of bio fuels that’s better than the current, who are still far away from perfection.

Source: the economist

Labour pains

A talent shortage hits green start-ups

A couple of venture-capital firms out off New England have set up an executive-education program about renewable energy. The idea after the course is to teach the participants about how they can make use of renewable energy. Renewable energy is popular at the moment, last year global investment in renewable-energy businesses alone rose by 60%, to $148.4 billion, according to New Energy Finance (NEF), a research firm.

The most participants don’t have any experience in renewable energy, but the fact that the course is going to learn them about saving money using renewable energy while helping the planet makes this course very popular.

But starting with clean-technology isn’t cheap, that’s way the course also contains sessions on project finance and government regulations. Because it’s difficult to keep up with all the new technologies and inventions on green energy they also give an overview of the latest scientific research.
At the moment all over the world there’s a battle for engineers and scientists. It’s hard for firms to found qualified engineers who can help them saving money on the energy issues. A lot of companies use headhunters to find their engineers and/or scientists. But companies also want that they have some international experience.

Source

Priming the pump

All three candidates promise to lower petrol prices.

A poll organized by Public Agenda and Foreign Affairs says that six out of ten Americans think that the national security "a great deal" could be helped by reducing energy dependence. Although global warming is a "hot" item these days, the Americans are most worried about putting cheap petrol in their cars.
This means that the immediate political imperative is to get the petrol price down.

From the three president candidates, Hilary Clinton came with the biggest promises.
She wants to suspend the federal petrol tax even as she wants to ban petrol-price “gouging” and go after “speculators” because she thinks that they are driving prices up. Another promise of Clinton is to haul OPEC before the WTO for anti-competitive behaviour.
It is now ofcourse unclear whether much of that is going on anyway. And, if it is, what effect it is having on the oil price.
So the most obvious thing the government could do is to get the petrol taxes down.
On the other hand, when you cut the petrol taxes people will drive more. And when people drive more, they pollute the environment and send more profits to the oil companies.



It seems that the recent "high" petrol prices are not the problem, but the cheap oil price in the past is the problem. People think that those prices were normal prices, but in fact, those prices were very low. The prices of today and tomorrow are quite normal prices. Ofcourse it will be difficult to explain this to the Americans...

SOURCE

Candidates' views on oil and the climate

Apr 30th 2008 | NEW YORK

The race to be president



I wonder if voters worry about the climate change, America’s dependence on oil or the cost of filling their petrol tanks? A poll released that he cost of filling their petrol tanks will cause the most concerns. The president of OPEC (Chakib Khelil) raised the prices of a barrel of oil.

Of course, the president candidates try to use these concerns in their advantage. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, both say that they will work on the climate change and energy security. Not only them, but also John Mcain, the Republican, says that he will do something about it. Foreign policy types worry about America’s reliance on oil from the Middle East.

The ways the candidates want to work on it are new fuels and greener cars. They also would cap carbon emissions and for the introduction of a system for trading carbon permits.

They also give examples of solutions for the cost of petrol. Mrs Clinton gave a lot of ideas on Monday. She wants to suspend the federal petrol tax for the summer driving season. A windfall-tax on oil companies should be paying this. Exxon wants to announce bumper profits on Tuesday. She would like to ban the gouging of the gasoline-prices and she would go after speculators who drive up prices.

It’s typical that the president candidates make all kind of promises, but let’s hope that this time, they will make their promises true, because it’s about the world and its environment now. It’s something you can’t just let go on.

Source: Economist.com