Profiting from Investing in Solar & Wind. What about Jet Bio Fuel?

Solar and wind farm developer CBD
Energy is unique – it actually makes a profit from its core business producing
clean energy. If the forecasts are right and huge investments come to renewable
energy, making money out of clean energy will be commonplace. Maybe that’s one
good reason for GE to announce that it has joined Virgin Australia and a
consortium of other partners to research and develop commercial biofuel for the
aviation industry.

Giles Parkinson, Climate
Spectator (2 September 2011)

Solar and wind farm developer CBD
Energy is a company that stands unique among Australian listed stocks – it
actually makes a profit from its core business – clean energy.

If the forecasts are right about
the exponential growth of the green economy and the huge investments that will
be made in renewable energy in coming decades, making money out of clean energy
will be commonplace.

For the moment, however, the
listed clean energy sector is awash in losses as development and R&D costs
swamp the paltry revenues of emerging technologies, or earnings are overwhelmed
by hig debt levels, in the case of established wind farm developers such as
Infigen Energy.

That makes CBD’s results worth
analysing, as an island of black in a sea of red ink. In the last financial
year, the Sydney-based CBD returned net earnings of $5.1 million as its
revenues surged nearly four-fold to $165 million from $45 million earlier,
mostly courtesy of its eco-kinetics solar division and the rush to install
rooftop PV.

Operating profits were up 48 per
cent, and the net profit would have been greater had it not been for a tax
credit in the previous year.

The solar business has been the
engine room of its results, and gives at least some insight into the industry,
which remains largely opaque because of the lack of listed company involvement.
Clearly, many companies have been making money. So far, however, we have only
learned that Origin, now the biggest solar PV company in the country, had
revenue of more than $300 million in the last financial year, around a 10-fold
increase, and an unspecified profit from these activities.

CBD says eco-Kinetics – the solar
PV business it acquired for $13 million two years ago – lifted its revenue from
$28 million to $127 million, and profits from $9.7 million to $12.5 million.
CBD says the division has increased market share in the industry upheaval
created by policy uncertainty, but the results suggest a significant squeeze on
margins in doing that. Eco-Kinetics has completed the construction of its 8MW
solar PV project in Thailand, and is now working on solar projects in Italy.

The company’s newly established
premium solar brand, CBD Solar, which uses panels from the German maker Solon,
returned revenue of $14.5 million, and a maiden operating profit of $635,000.
Its solar businesses had $27 million of SRECs (small scale renewable energy
certificates) in hand as at June 30.

Its energy efficiency subsidiary,
Captech, returned a small profit, but this is expected to rise considerably
when its new solar inverter manufacturing facilities go into full swing this
year. Its air conditioning services unit, Parmac, also delivered a small
profit.

CBD, meanwhile, retains grand
plans to seize a major hold of the Australian wind industry through its
AusChina Energy joint venture with the Chinese energy heavyweights, Datang and
Hianwei, that was established in April.

AusChina hopes to acquire or
develop $6 billion of wind projects in Australia, and under a new agreement
unveiled on Thursday, CBD will take management control of the company in return
for a fee of 0.5 per cent. It holds a 23.75 per cent equity stake in the
venture, and can participate in developments via a loan from its partners.

The venture will be watched with
interest. As we wrote in April, it has the potential to have a dramatic impact
on the industry dynamics, courtesy of cheap Chinese finance, and cheaper
Chinese wind turbines. Still, there is a certain amount of scepticism in the
industry about what impact the venture will have, about the ability of the
venture to attract other financiers if the Chinese want to spread the risk, and
its ability to deliver on the projects. The company says project identification
and evaluation has continued, and it may make its first announcement in coming
weeks. “While there are lead times to estalishing wind projects, AusChina
offers a substantial opportunity for building long term recurring revenue
streams.”

CEO Gerry McGowan says the
overall results are just a pointer to the potential of the business, given its
emergenc as the only fully integrated solar equipment manufacturer in the
country, the AusChina joint venture, its diversification across wind, solar and
energy efficiency, and the growing opportunities in the international markets,
which he says will offset the policy uncertainty in Australia.

Still, CBD, like others in the
sector, has some work to do to convince investors. It may be the only clean
energy company that can deliver a profit, but its shares sit squarely with its
peers – right in the doldrums. They last traded at 11c, giving it a market
capitalisation of $49 million. Over the past year they have fallen 15 per cent,
despite their lift in revenues and profits, and are well down from a 2011 peak
of 18c reached soon after the AusChina venture was first unveiled.

Source: www.climatespectator.com.au

31 August 2011 GE joins
consortium to develop Australian aviation biofuel

Sydney, Australia – 1 September,
2011 – GE (NYSE:GE) today announced that it has joined Virgin Australia and a
consortium of other partners to research and develop commercial biofuel for the
aviation industry. The consortium will focus on pyrolytic conversion of biomass
from mallee eucalypt trees and intend to have a pilot biofuel production unit operating
in Australia by 2012.

The agreement comes as the
aviation industry puts added focus on carbon emissions as it becomes covered by
emissions trading schemes around the world. As part of GE’s ecomagination
initiative, the company is already leading the way in the development of fuel
efficient jet engines within its sustainable transport portfolio; the
development of biofuels is a natural extension of this.

Ben Waters, Director of
ecomagination, GE Australia and New Zealand said: “Innovation and creativity
will play enormous roles as part of the transition to a low carbon future. We
already invest a huge amount in the development of more efficient and
alternative energy sources in the aviation industry and beyond, and we hope to
bring a huge amount of knowledge to this partnership.”

A recent CSIRO report estimated
that the aviation industry could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 17%, generate
more than 12,000 jobs and reduce Australia’s reliance on aviation fuel imports
by $2 billion per annum over the next 20 years through the adoption of
biofuels.

The consortium includes Renewable
Oil Corporation, the Future Farm Industries CRC, and Canadian biofuels company
Dynamotive Energy Systems Corporation alongside Virgin Australia and now GE.

As well as the development of the
fuels, GE will assist with the certification process. Before being approved for
commercial use, new fuels undergo rigorous tests in laboratories, on engine
test rigs and then in carefully monitored non-commercial flights.

About GE

GE (NYSE: GE) is an advanced
technology, services and finance company taking on the world’s toughest challenges.
Dedicated to innovation in energy, health, transportation and infrastructure,
GE operates in more than 100 countries and employs about 300,000 people
worldwide. For more information, visit the company’s web site at www.ge.com/au.

About Virgin Australia

Virgin Australia group of
airlines (ASX: VBA), formerly the Virgin Blue group of airlines, was launched
in 2000 as the first sustainable low-fare airline in Australian skies. Today
the group employs over 7,000 people and includes multi-award winning domestic
airline Virgin Australia (formerly Virgin Blue); international long-haul
airline V Australia; international subsidiary airline Pacific Blue; and
Polynesian Blue, a joint venture airline with the Government of Samoa. Virgin
Australia is currently in the process of re-launching its domestic and
short-haul international product, and both V Australia and Pacific Blue
airlines will operate as Virgin Australia by the end of 2011.

About Dynamotive Energy Systems
Corporation

Dynamotive Energy Systems Corporation
is an energy solutions provider headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with
offices in the USA and Argentina. Its carbon/greenhouse gas neutral fast
pyrolysis technology uses medium temperatures and oxygen-less conditions to
turn dry, waste cellulosic biomass into BioOil for power and heat generation.
BioOil can be further converted into vehicle fuels and chemicals. Dynamotive
has currently a co-operation agreement with IFP Energies Nouvelles on upgrading
and the parties are in exclusive negotiations for the commercial development of
this process.

About Renewable Oil Corporation

Renewable Oil Corporation Pty Ltd
(ROC ) is an Australian company established to develop pyrolysis projects in
this region. It has an exclusive technology licensing agreement with Dynamotive
and works closely with Dynamotive and its partners. ROC’s board includes
award-winning Australian engineering personnel as well as the CEO of Dynamotive
and Australian experts in corporate governance and legal and financial issues.
ROC is a private company funded by Australian and overseas investors.  www.renoil.com.au

About Future Farm Industries
Co-operative Research Centre

Future Farm Industries is an
incorporated, national joint venture of southern Australia’s leading
agricultural R&D organisations which is working on a range of profitable
and sustainable farming systems and technologies to assist livestock and crop
producers adapt to climate change. Under its ‘energy tree cropping’ initiative,
it draws on the resources and expertise of the WA Departments of Environment
and Conservation, and Agriculture and Food, and CSIRO to undertake the
necessary R&D for on-farm mallee production. Toowoomba-based Biosystems
Engineering is FFI CRC’s partner developing the mallee harvester and biomass
supply chain technologies.

Source: www.futurefarmonline.com.au and www.ge.com/au

Tilting at Windmills? Blacksliding on Energy & Protectionism in Disguise

The Australian government will
spend up to A$36,000 a year on every steel worker in Australia through carbon
tax industry compensation, prompting claims of protectionism by independent
think tank the Grattan Institute, writes Tom Arup in the Age. While Paddy Manning
in Business Day says “What is galling is watching the clock turn back on state
policies designed to help tackle climate change. Backsliding on support for
renewable energy in Victoria and NSW is a foretaste of life under Tony Abbott.”

Carbon tax compensation a ‘return
to protectionism’

Tom Arup In The Age August 30,
2011

THE government will spend up to
$36,000 a year on every steel worker in Australia through carbon tax industry
compensation, prompting claims of protectionism by independent think tank the
Grattan Institute.

In a report released today, the
institute finds the steel industry will make a windfall per tonne of steel from
carbon tax compensation over the first four years of the scheme.

The institute also finds the
government’s commitment of free permits and a $300 million adjustment fund for
steel under the carbon price will cost it more than $320,000 per worker from
2012 to 2020, or on average $36,000 a year. The finding assumes a carbon price
of $40 a tonne by 2020 – higher than Treasury’s estimate – and that BlueScope
will close the Port Kembla number six furnace. ”The steel package effectively
protects the Australian industry not from a carbon price, but from structural
adjustments in the global steel industry,” the report says.

”This industry assistance cannot
be justified by reference to carbon pricing. It reverts to the protectionist
policies abandoned in the 1980s when Australia realised that boundaries and
tariff barriers reduce Australian productivity and living standards by inhibiting
the shift of resources into sectors that would generate greater value for
Australians.”

The report also reviews
assistance for coal mining and LNG industries, finding it difficult to foresee
large job losses in either industry even with a $40 a tonne carbon price and no
industry compensation.

Contrary to industry claims, the
institute finds only one coal mine – Tasman in NSW – would be under threat of
closure, with the rest buffeted by soaring global coal prices.

Coal miners will get $1.33
billion in compensation under the carbon tax.

A spokesman for Climate Change
Minister Greg Combet said the government made no apologies for ”supporting
Australian jobs and competitiveness as our economy makes the transition to a
clean energy future”.

Source: www.theage.com.au

Paddy Manning in Sydney Morning
Herald Business Day

September 3, 2011

The wheels of clean energy are turning in
ever-diminishing circles as politics hogs its place in the sun, writes Paddy
Manning.

PARTY-POLITICKING on the carbon
tax is to be expected. It would be scandalous if a Coalition state government
came out and backed the multiparty climate change committee’s ”clean energy
future” package.

What is galling is watching the
clock turn back on state policies designed to help tackle climate change.
Backsliding on support for renewable energy in Victoria and NSW is a foretaste
of life under Tony Abbott.

According to the Clean Energy
Council, Premier Ted Baillieu happily kissed goodbye to as much as $3 billion
in wind farm investment this week – a perverse outcome given Victoria’s
excellent wind resource.

What will that do for the state’s
competitiveness in clean energy, let alone for Australia’s response to climate
change? It seems Baillieu and his colleagues couldn’t care less.

On rooftop solar, things aren’t
as bad – at least on Thursday the government retained a 25¢/kWh feed-in-tariff
(down from 60¢/kWh) that will help the PV industry along to grid parity, which
in much of the state should arrive by 2014. A bigger problem than the reduced
tariff is the 75MW capacity cap – which on past experience may be met within
months, meaning the stop-start approach to solar policy will continue.

It’s equally dire in NSW where
Premier Barry O’Farrell has replaced the old Solar Bonus Scheme with (drum
roll) nothing at all, and where the premier casually told radio 2GB that his
government hadn’t approved any new wind farm applications ”and if I had my
way, we wouldn’t”.

In a Thursday speech, NSW Energy
Minister Chris Hartcher went so far as to warn against over-reliance on
renewable energy! With federal climate change minister Greg Combet flagging a
wind-back of renewable schemes when (or if) the carbon price comes in, it feels
like there’s a backlash on in Australia – strengthening even as renewables get
more competitive.

In a revealing interview on
Climate Spectator, Origin Energy chief executive Grant King argued for lowering
our renewable energy target. He complained about a group of people who have a
”very strong ideological view that we should be moving straight to renewable
energy”, who are seeking to ”demonise coal seam gas” and other fossil fuels.

King should go back to the
dictionary, or the history books. Liberalism, socialism … renewable-ism?
Hardly. Supporting renewables has nothing to do with ideology – it’s a
perfectly rational solution to our climate challenge. The cost of renewables is
coming down – ”relentlessly” in the case of solar PV, as King acknowledged in
the same interview – and the cost of everything else is going up.

King has been a consistent
supporter of pricing carbon and has invested heavily in renewables (sometimes
badly, in the case of geothermal). But King has championed starting early and
moving gradually – an eminently sensible position 10 or even five years ago,
which is becoming outdated as we square up to the task of getting global
emissions to peak by the end of this decade.

Part of the problem is that
Australia’s renewable energy industry is, by and large, a subset of the fossil
fuel industry. Origin, AGL and Truenergy have a stranglehold on electricity
markets and they want to decide the pace of our response to climate change.

This week International Energy
Agency researchers predicted solar PV and solar-thermal plants could produce
most of the world’s electricity by 2060 – and half of all energy needs – with
wind, hydropower and biomass plants supplying much of the rest. Renewable
energies are the only zero emission solution that we know will work, at scale -
and once a plant is built we get free fuel forever.

”Loony-tunes (sic)” (as one
columnist complained this week)? Tell that to the IEA.

Source: www.smh.com.au

Innovations & Environmental Sustainability from Ford, Toyota & BMW

Ford and Toyota would be joining forces, and
sharing costs, to develop a hybrid powertrain for rear-wheel-drive light trucks
and SUVs. “This is the kind of collaborative effort that is required to
address the big global challenges of energy independence and environmental
sustainability,” says Ford CEO Alan Mulally. And German carmaker BMW
launched the first phase of a US-based pilot program to “validate the
economic and technical feasibility of converting landfill gas into hydrogen”.
Sophie Vorrath reports in Climate Spectator

Sophie Vorrath in Climate
Spectator 29 Aug 2011

The announcement last week that
Ford and Toyota would be joining forces, and sharing costs, to develop a hybrid
powertrain for rear-wheel-drive light trucks and SUVs has generated a bit of
excitement in both the automotive and cleantech worlds.

“This is the kind of collaborative effort
that is required to address the big global challenges of energy independence
and environmental sustainability,” Ford CEO Alan Mulally said in a statement
about the joint venture. And while that’s possibly not as platitudinous as it
sounds, GreenTech Media’s Martin La Monica points out that it is also just
smart business.

“This deal is about sharing
resources, raising the bar for hybrid development, and getting it done as
quickly as possible,” he says. “Since both companies already have
front-wheel-drive hybrid systems, this new architecture… fills a hole in
their technology platforms.”

But La Monica says the deal also
signals “a clear endorsement of hybrid technology.” As opposed to
‘plug-in hybrids,’ hybrid vehicles are those that get most of their power from
their internal combustion engine but, when needed, can get an extra boost of
power from the electric motor. The power for the electric motor is generated
while the car is in motion and stored in the battery, so it doesn’t need to be
plugged in to be functional. The electric motor also acts as a generator,
converting energy from regenerative braking and storing it in the battery.
Generally, hybrids can use the two propulsion means separately or at the same
time. In the more advanced pure hybrids, cars move on electric power alone for
low speed driving and idling, allowing for reduced fuel consumption in city
driving.

“Combined with other
fuel-saving tricks, hybrids are poised to spread beyond niche status and bring
better fuel economy to a broader range of vehicles,” says La Monica. And
according to the joint press statement, that’s more-or-less the plan: the two
companies intend the new hybrid powertrain to “bring the full hybrid
experience of greater fuel efficiency to a new group of truck and SUV customers
without compromising the capability they require in their vehicles.”
Certainly, the timing couldn’t be better, with stringent new EPA fuel economy
standards announced by the Obama government last month. Plug-in vehicles still
have lots of advantages for consumers who want zero petrol consumption and to
have the most environmentally friendly car possible, says La Monica. “But
hybrids mitigate the big downside of plug-ins: battery costs. A lithium ion
battery pack for a sedan with a range of about 100 miles costs in the
neighborhood of $10,000. Those costs will come down with better technology and
manufacturing scale, but there’s no clear technical breakthrough which will
make EVs undercut fuel-efficient gas cars on purchase price alone.”

Bavarian Methane Works

German carmaker BMW last month
launched the first phase of a US-based pilot program to “validate the
economic and technical feasibility of converting landfill gas into
hydrogen.” The landfill gas is, of course, methane; the rough plan being
to convert the locally-sourced methane to hydrogen, and then to use this to
power the hydrogen fuel-cell-driven equipment in its 1.2 million-square-foot Spartanburg,
South Carolina, plant which produces the company’s new X3 Sports Activity
Vehicle. Last year, BMW installed a hydrogen storage and distribution area
within the existing Energy Center the plant. If successful, the automaker says
this new project will allow it to “transition from the pilot-scale system
into a full-scale system capable of supporting the largest single-site
deployment of fuel cell material handling equipment in the world.”

“This landfill
gas-to-hydrogen project at BMW will seek to demonstrate a first-of-its-kind
solution that will serve as a model for other private sector companies,” said
SCRA CEO Bill Mahoney. “I am confident that this solution to combine
renewably-generated hydrogen with clean, efficient fuel cell technology will improve
productivity, reduce environmental pollutants and relieve electrical power
demand from the grid and am optimistic that it will be replicated nationally.”
As Fast Company points out, BMW has not divulged the technology they will use
to convert the methane gas into hydrogen power. But the automaker is involved
in at least two projects with the US DOE to develop storage of hydrogen to
power future car models. “Collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory on a project to produce and store cryo-compressed hydrogen
is ongoing, as well as a DOE project to efficiently store hydrogen via a liquid
organic carrier,” the company said last month.

Flush with power

Converting waste-emitted methane
to hydrogen to power fuel cells is one thing, but how about fuel cells powered
by the direct conversion of organic matter to electricity using bacteria? This
is the new-ish method of renewable energy development, called microbial fuel
cells, that’s being developed by Penn State University environmental engineer
Bruce Logan. More specifically, the Penn State research team is working on
developing MFCs that can generate electricity while also treating waste water.

How do MFC’s work? Bacteria are
placed in the anode chamber of a specially-designed fuel cell that is free of
oxygen, and then attach to an electrode. Because they don’t have oxygen, they
transfer the electrons that they get from consumption (oxidation) of their food
to the electrode. In a MFC, these electrons go to the anode, while the counter
electrode (the cathode) is exposed to oxygen. At the cathode the electrons,
oxygen and protons combine to form only water. The electrons then move through
a circuit and produce power. Logan’s microbial fuel cells can produce both
electrical power and hydrogen, meaning the cells could one day be used to juice
up hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Logan’s team has also solved the
problem of the expensive and toxic chemicals that were previously needed to
make microbial fuel cells work. “In the early reactors, we used very
expensive graphite rods and expensive polymers and precious metals like
platinum. And we’ve now reached the point where we don’t have to use any
precious metals,” Logan explained to the National Science Foundation. And
while MFCs don’t yet produce enough power to be used in everyday life, Logan
estimates this will happen in the next five to 10 years, with MFCs producing
enough electricity to power waste-water treatment plants as well as
neighbouring towns, reports Fast Company. There may also be MFCs that use salt
water, while also desalinating it, using just the energy from the bacteria.

Source: www.climatespectator.com.au

Not Acts of God or Nature: World is Facing a Biodiversity Crisis

Of the six great mass extinctions
of species on Earth, five involved catastrophic events such as collisions with
huge meteorites, geological upheavals or the arrival of ice ages whose effects
lasted for millennia. The sixth mass extinction is occurring now, but it is the
behaviour of humans rather than nature that has resulted in the loss of
thousands of animal and plant species. And Australia has the worst extinction
record among all developed countries.

Geoff Maslen In The Age August
30, 2011

At risk

OF THE six great mass extinctions
of species on Earth, five involved catastrophic events such as collisions with
huge meteorites, geological upheavals or the arrival of ice ages whose effects
lasted for millennia. The sixth mass extinction is occurring now, but it is the
behaviour of humans over the past few hundred years rather than nature that has
resulted in the loss of thousands of animal and plant species.

Australia has the worst
extinction record among all developed countries. Today, more than 20 per cent
of the country’s mammals are under threat. Upwards of 700,000 species exist in
Australia, many found nowhere else in the world, but changes to the landscape
and native habitat as a result of human activity over the past 200 years have
put many of these species at risk while too many others have simply
disappeared.

“It will take more than a
million years for the world’s diversity of species to recover,” says Dr
Sarah Bekessy. “Organisations responsible for conserving and restoring the
environment need fundamental knowledge and tools to make the best use of their
resources, just as policy-makers need to know what resources are required and
how to distribute them wisely.”

Dr Bekessy, based at RMIT
University, is a chief investigator with the multi-university Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, whose
director is Professor Hugh Possingham at the University of Queensland. With a
$12 million, seven-year grant from the council, the centre has brought together
researchers from RMIT, the universities of Melbourne, Queensland, Western
Australia, the Australian National University, and others from universities in
Britain, Israel, Finland, Germany, South Africa and the US.

“Biodiversity underpins the
cultural and economic prosperity of Australia but our interventions to protect
this natural inheritance are proving inadequate,” Dr Bekessy says.
“Furthermore, our efforts to conserve biodiversity have not been managed
in such a way that allows us to learn from our investment decisions. The new
centre will generate the fundamental knowledge and tools needed to make the
best use of available resources for conservation and will provide new
techniques for assessing what resources are required and innovative ways for
learning from our investment decisions.”

The new centre builds on the work
of a Commonwealth Environmental Research Facility hub established with a
four-year grant in 2006 to develop tools and test methods to support
transparent decision-making for environmental management. The hub was headed by
Professor Possingham, who now also leads a new National Environmental Research
Program network that started this year with 26 primary researchers, 14 in
common with the ARC Centre of Excellence, and spread across the five Australian
universities and the CSIRO.

“We are a group of
researchers based here in Australia and overseas who share a common interest in
the science of environmental decision-making, and specifically decisions
surrounding the conservation of biodiversity,” Professor Possingham says.

“It includes some of the
world’s pre-eminent scientists working in this field and, if you look at the
publishing record of our members, it’s easy to justify the claim that we are
operating at the cutting edge. As well as those from the six overseas
universities, a total of 100 researchers and staff will be involved in our
work, all united by a deep and professional interest in arresting the
catastrophic declines we are witnessing in biodiversity both here and around
the world.”

He says the research questions
being explored have international significance: “For example: how can we
bend the emerging carbon markets to also deliver nature conservation outcomes?
What is the appropriate balance between resources spent monitoring actions and
the actions themselves?”

Dr Bekessy says the new ARC
centre is developing predictive models and decision-making approaches to
achieve better environmental results in the areas of habitat restoration,
spatial planning under rapid and uncertain environmental change, and adaptation
to threats, including climate change. She adds that new tools from mathematics,
statistics, economics and the social sciences are being devised, along with the
compilation of research data.

“The way we operate is to
form working groups on challenging environmental problems — it’s a very
collaborative approach. We try to keep things real with case studies, one of
which is centred on the urban fringes of Melbourne where we have been
investigating grasslands conservation with a PhD student who is looking
specifically at how landholders respond to incentive schemes. We’re using the
information derived from that study to prepare some models of landholder
behaviour that could potentially be of use elsewhere.”

Dr Bekessy says the goal is to
improve the way investment in the environment occurs, with biodiversity the
main focus. The world is facing a biodiversity crisis yet Australia invests too
little in protecting the environment or maintaining biodiversity — and when it
does, too often it is done poorly without monitoring the performance of those
investments.

She points to “debacles in
the past” such as the National Heritage Trust Fund, set up by the Howard
government in 1997 supposedly to help restore and conserve Australia’s
environment and natural resources. For the following decade, thousands of
community groups and organisations received tens of millions of dollars through
the trust for environmental and natural resource management projects.

Yet Dr Bekessy says very little
information was ever collected on how well the scheme worked or what Australia
had to show for the money spent.

“We don’t even know if it
was successful because it was poorly planned and the spending was very
inefficient. That is why our new centre is about doing that sort of thing more
efficiently, how to get more bang for the buck, monitoring so we learn about
systems, making sure that even if there is uncertainty about an investment,
that we learn from that to ensure next time we do things better.”

Source: www.theage.com.au

Geo-engineering Not the Answer. So what about Nitrogen?

A team of British academics will
undertake the world’s first major ‘geo-engineering’ field test in the next few
months. It’s atmospheric liposuction: a retrospective fix for planetary
over-indulgence, says George Monbiot.
Geo-engineering, which means either sucking carbon dioxide out of the
atmosphere or trying to shield the planet from the sun’s heat, is an admission
of failure, a failure to get to grips with climate change. But is nitrogen the
answer? Researchers have discovered that forest trees can tap into the nitrogen
found in rocks, boosting their growth and allowing them to take up more carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere.

George Monbiot

guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 September 2011

A team of British academics will
undertake the world’s first major ‘geo-engineering’ field test in the next few
months

It’s atmospheric liposuction: a
retrospective fix for planetary over-indulgence. Geo-engineering, which means
either sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or trying to shield the
planet from the sun’s heat, is an admission of failure, a failure to get to
grips with climate change. Is it time to admit defeat and check ourselves into
the clinic?

The question has arisen again
with the launch of a new experiment funded by Britain’s Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council, injecting particles (in this case water
droplets) into the atmosphere from a gigantic balloon attached to a hosepipe.
The eventual aim, if such experiments are deemed successful, is to squirt large
amounts of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere, to reduce global warming by
scattering sunlight back into space.

There are five issues affecting
all the proposed geo-engineering technologies. Are they effective? Are they
cheap? Are they safe? Do they solve the other problem associated with rising
greenhouse gas emissions: ocean acidification? Do they introduce moral hazard?
(This means the risk that you’ll behave more recklessly if you’re insulated
from the effects of your actions.)

Broadly speaking, the cheap and
effective options are dangerous; the safe options are expensive or useless.
This isn’t always the case. Seeding the oceans with iron filings, for example,
is probably both useless and dangerous. The intention is to stimulate a bloom
of algae which absorbs carbon dioxide then sinks to the ocean bed. Not only is
little of the gas removed from surface waters by this method; but, because the
iron mops up oxygen, it stimulates the production of methane, a potent greenhouse
gas. The technique is likely both to damage life in the oceans and cause more
global warming than it cures.

There are dozens of proposed
techniques. Here’s a small sample: Sucking CO2 out of the air using artificial
trees. Safe. Effective. Fantastically expensive.

Growing biomass then burying it
or dumping it in the sea. Ecologically damaging. Likely to exacerbate famine.
Ineffective (because it can’t be scaled up sufficiently). Fairly cheap.

Dumping lime or calcium or
magnesium silicates into the sea, where they react with carbon dioxide. Fairly
safe. Effective. Expensive. Has the advantage of potentially reversing ocean
acidification, but the amount of quarrying required to produce enough ground-up
rock is likely to be prohibitive.

Painting buildings white to
ensure that the earth absorbs less of the sun’s heat. Safe. Useless. Expensive.

Whitening clouds to reflect more
sunlight, most feasibly by spraying salt water into the air. Middling
dangerous. Middling useless. Middling cheap.

Shooting mirrors into space. Not
very dangerous. Effective. Staggeringly expensive.

You can read more detailed
summaries of these options in a report published by the Royal Society.

But of all techniques, it’s the
notion of injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere – the technique
the balloon and hosepipe experiment is designed to test – that has received
most attention. There’s an obvious reason for this: it is both cheap and
effective. It is also extremely dangerous.

The reason seems almost as
incredible as the proposed technologies, but it’s rooted in solid science. In
fact we’ve already tested the method at a very large scale, with catastrophic
results. Unfortunately no one realised we were running the experiment until
three decades after it began.

It wasn’t until 2002 that a paper
was published linking the great famines of the 1970s and 1980s with atmospheric
sulphate particles produced in the northern hemisphere. But the link, which has
now been made in a number of papers, listed below, seems to be conclusive:

LD Rotstayn and U Lohmann, 1
August 2002. Tropical Rainfall Trends and the Indirect Aerosol Effect. Journal
of Climate, vol 15, pp2103-2116

IM Held, TL Delworth, J Lu, KL
Findell, and TR Knutson, 13 December 2005. Simulation of Sahel drought in the
20th and 21st centuries. PNAS, vol 102, no 50, pp17891-17896. DOI:
10.1073/pnas.0509057102

M Biasutti and A Giannini, 8 June
2006. Robust Sahel drying in response to late 20th century forcings.
Geophysical Research Letters, vol 33, no 11. DOI: 10.1029/2006GL026067

JE Kristjansson et al, 23
December 2005. Response of the climate system to aerosol direct and indirect
forcing: Role of cloud feedbacks. Journal of Geophysical Research –
Atmospheres, vol 110, no D24

By reducing the size of the
droplets in clouds, thereby ensuring that they reflected more light (which is
the desired outcome of the current experiment), the sulphate particles lowered
the temperature of the sea’s surface in the northern hemisphere. The result was
to shift the Intertropical Convergence Zone – a region close to the equator in
which moist air rises and condenses into rain – southwards. The Sahel, which
covers countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and
Senegal, is at the northern limits of the zone. As the rain belt was pushed
south, the Sahel was left high and dry. As a result of the clean air acts,
between 1970 and 1996 sulphur emissions in the US fell by 39%. This appears to
have helped the North Atlantic to warm, allowing the rains to return to the
Sahel in the 1990s.

The balloon and hosepipe
experiment is a complete waste of time. The hazardous effects of injecting
particles into the atmosphere are unlikely to make themselves known until the
technique is deployed on a very large scale and for several years. The impacts
of small-scale tests will be lost in the noise of global weather. A full-scale
experiment would be, to say the least, unethical.

As a recent paper in Nature
Geoscience points out, it is “physically not feasible” to stabilise
global rainfall and temperature by means of this technique while greenhouse gas
emissions are still rising. The effects of shooting particles into the
atmosphere will vary dramatically in different parts of the world, helping
some, harming others. It’s impossible to see how the countries likely to be
harmed by this technique would agree to it. If it were imposed on them it would
lead to the mother of all conflicts – and the mother of all lawsuits.

It is so obvious that this
approach is a non-starter that the £1.6m the UK government is spending on the
experiment would be better used to investigate those age-old questions of how
to turn lead into gold or extract sunshine from cucumbers.

This is not to suggest that we
should dismiss all geo-engineering techniques out of hand. But, like liposuction,
none of those being proposed are simultaneously safer, cheaper and more
effective than addressing the problem at source. This means reducing our
greenhouse gases. A good diet and plenty of exercise are better than the knife.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Posted on September 1, 2011 -
03:53 by Emma Woollacott in TG Daily

Researchers have discovered that
forest trees can tap into the nitrogen found in rocks, boosting their growth
and allowing them to take up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The nitrogen in rocks could
therefore significantly affect how rapidly the Earth warms in future, says the
University of California, Davis team.

“We were really shocked;
everything we’ve ever thought about the nitrogen cycle and all of the textbook
theories have been turned on their heads by these data,” says
biogeochemist Professor Benjamin Houlton.

“Findings from this study
suggest that our climate-change models should not only consider the importance
of nitrogen from the atmosphere, but now we also have to start thinking about
how rocks may affect climate change.”

It was previously believed that
nitrogen could only enter ecosystems from the atmosphere – either dissolved in
rainwater or biologically ‘fixed’ by specialized groups of plants and other
organisms.

However, says the team, there’s
enough nitrogen contained in one inch of the rocks at the study site to
completely support the growth of a typical coniferous forest for about 25
years.

“This nitrogen is released
slowly over time and helps to maintain the long-term fertility of many
California forests,” says biogeochemist
Professor Randy Dahlgren.

In fact, forests growing on
nitrogen-rich rock were about 50 percent more productive than those growing on
nitrogen-poor rocks throughout Northern California and into Oregon.

The researchers found that the
nitrogen isotopes in the rock matched those of the soils and trees, confirming
that the nitrogen was coming from the rocks.

“It was like a fingerprint;
we found the culprit, and it was the nitrogen in the rocks,” says graduate
student Scott Morford.

Since nitrogen tends to be
highest in sedimentary rocks – which cover roughly 75 percent of the Earth’s
land surface – the discovery has tremendous global significance, says the team.

“The stunning finding that
forests can also feed on nitrogen in rocks has the potential to change all
projections related to climate change,” says Houlton.

“This discovery may also
help explain several other studies that have found that the nitrogen ‘budgets’
of forests are out of balance, the nitrogen accumulation in their soil and
plants being substantially greater than the apparent nitrogen inputs.”

Researchers now include nitrogen
in their climate-change models, and some indicate that it could cause an
additional increase in global temperatures of up to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, as
it limits the amount of carbon dioxide that plants can extract from the
atmosphere.

If more nitrogen is available
than predicted from the traditional nitrogen-cycling pathways, as the UC Davis
study suggests, it could lead to more carbon storage on land and less carbon
remaining in the atmosphere.

Source: www.tgdaily.com

Time and Tide Waits No Longer: Tidal Energy in Scotland & Wales

Scotland’s first commercial-scale
tidal turbine has been connected to the electricity grid off the Orkney coast
and begun generating power. Atlantis Resources gigantic 1MW machine, which
resembles an underwater wind turbine, weighs 1,500 tonnes and stands 70 feet
off the seabed. It will generate enough electricity annually to power about
1,000 homes. And the UK’s Carbon Trust has offered a grant of up to £390k
through its Entrepreneurs Fast Track service to Cardiff-based Tidal Energy Ltd.

By Jenny Fyall  Environment Correspondent  Scotsman.com (11 August 2011):

SCOTLAND’S first commercial-scale
tidal turbine has been connected to the electricity grid off the Orkney coast
and begun generating power.

The gigantic machine which
resembles an underwater wind turbine weighs 1,500 tonnes and stands 70 feet off
the seabed.

Atlantis Resources Corporation
hopes the 1MW device, known as AR1000, will generate enough electricity
annually to power about 1,000 homes.

If the project proves successful,
within the next decade, the company is hoping to install hundreds of the
machines in the turbulent waters of the Pentland Firth off Scotland’s north
coast.

The machine was lowered into the
sea at the European Marine Energy Centre (Emec) off Orkney and will undergo a
further two years of tests. Atlantis chief executive Tim Cornelius said that he
was proud of the achievement of the team that successfully installed the
machine.

“By connecting a 1MW single
rotor device in Scottish waters to the national grid, they have achieved
something that has never been done before,” he said.

He added that he was “very
confident” the turbine would work effectively as it is monitored over the
next two years. We will measure success by showing that we can match
theoretical output with actual output,” he said.

The AR1000 device was built using
expertise from across the UK, with the parts being constructed in Poole,
Newcastle, Invergordon, Scunthorpe and Bedford. Professional divers were
provided by Leask Marine in Orkney and site surveyors came from Edinburgh.

Mr Cornelius told The Scotsman it
was an exciting time for the tidal turbine sector and added that they had been
shown “overwhelming support” locally for helping to kick-start new
employment and industry in the region.

Atlantis Resources is part of
MeyGen Ltd, which has a lease from the Crown Estate to develop part of the
seabed in the Pentland Firth, known as the Inner Sound tidal site. The joint
venture, one of the biggest of its kind, aims to build up to 400 of the
turbines in the Inner Sound tidal site in the Pentland Firth, behind the island
of Stroma and the mainland, starting in 2013. This would provide enough
electricity for about 400,000 homes.

Tidal turbines harness the energy
provided by the movement of the tides and supporters say they will provide a
predictable, reliable source of green electricity.

However, questions remain about
whether the technology will be effective, the impact of tidal renewable energy
on marine life and some concerns have been raised by shipping and fishing
groups. And the scheme to install 400 turbines will require planning permission
before it can go ahead.

Neil Kermode, managing director
of Emec, said: “It is wonderful to see this commercial-scale tidal turbine
connect to the grid from Orkney waters.

“The marine energy industry
in Scotland continues to gather pace and is working towards world-leading
targets in terms of deployment and generation of renewable energy.”

Dozens of wave and tidal
companies are developing machines to try to harness the power of the sea. They
include Pelamis, an Edinburgh-based firm that has created its “sea
snake” wave device that sits on the surface of the water, and Aquamarine
Power, also based in Scotland’s capital creators of the Oyster.

Source: www.news.scotsman.com and www.atlantisresourcescorporation.com

19 August 2011

The Carbon Trust

Environmental impact assessment
to benefit wider marine energy industry

The Carbon Trust has offered a
grant of up to £390k through its Entrepreneurs Fast Track service to
Cardiff-based Tidal Energy Ltd. The grant represents up to 60% of the funding
needed to monitor the environmental impacts associated with the deployment of
Wales’s first tidal stream renewable energy device at Ramsey Sound, off the
Pembrokeshire coast. The findings will then be publically disseminated for the
benefit of the wider marine energy industry.

The Carbon Trust Entrepreneurs
Fast Track has been supporting Tidal Energy Ltd, a tidal energy device
developer, with advice on commercialising its technology since February 2011.
Earlier this year, Tidal Energy obtained consent from the Welsh Government (WG)
and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to install its 1.2MW
DeltaStream device in Welsh waters.

Benj Sykes, Director of
Innovation at the Carbon Trust, said:

“The UK’s marine energy industry
is world-leading and generating energy from the tides could be a major driver
of green growth for us. This grant should provide essential insight into the
effects of tidal turbines in sensitive marine environments and, as the findings
will be made publicly available, benefit the entire industry.

“Through our Entrepreneurs Fast
Track programme we accelerate the UK’s best early stage clean technologies
towards commercialisation and the companies behind them from start-up to
attractive investment proposition.”

Chris Williams, development
director at Tidal Energy Limited, said:

“We were accepted onto the Carbon
Trust’s Entrepreneurs Fast Track programme earlier this year, in order to
obtain the commercial advice and support we needed to take our renewable tidal
technology to market. We have benefited from the Carbon Trust’s considerable
expertise and are now delighted to have been awarded up to 60% of the funding
we require to conduct environmental assessments for our Ramsey Sound project.

“Tidal Energy Ltd and its majority
shareholder Eco2 will make environmental monitoring data available to the
market and are pleased to work with the Carbon Trust for the benefit of the
whole industry.”

The grant, matched by a
contribution from Tidal Energy Ltd., will enable underwater monitoring
techniques and study of the interaction of the tidal energy device with the
surrounding marine environment.

Analysis released earlier this
year by the Carbon Trust shows the UK could capture just under a quarter of the
global marine energy market. Equivalent to up to £76bn to the UK economy by
2050, this growing sector could also generate over 68,000 UK jobs if the
technology is successfully developed and deployed internationally and the UK
builds on its existing lead.

The Carbon Trust is a not-for-profit
company with the mission to accelerate the move to a low carbon economy,
providing specialist support to business and the public sector to help cut
carbon emissions, save energy and commercialise low carbon technologies. By
stimulating low carbon action we contribute to key UK goals of lower carbon
emissions, the development of low carbon businesses, increased energy security
and associated jobs.

Source: www.carbontrust.co.uk

Is it Worth it? Gargantuan Tools Needed to Make Use of the Sea’s Energy

Wringing electricity from the sea
is no small task. But as firms start to test their wave-energy harvesters in
the open ocean that could be about to change. Heaving water holds 40 times more
energy than air moving at the same speed, and sea states change more slowly
than breezes, making it easier for utilities to predict the availability of
energy. New Scientist reports on developments. Meanwhile, new in-depth analysis
by the Carbon Trust shows the UK’s best marine energy sites could generate electricity
at costs comparable with nuclear and onshore wind.

26 August 2011 by Phil McKenna

New Scientist

An explosion of designs for
harvesting wave energy could make the process competitive at last – and they’re
heading out to the ocean for testing

WRINGING electricity from the sea
is no small task. But as firms start to test their wave-energy harvesters in
the open ocean that could be about to change.

Heaving water holds 40 times more
energy than air moving at the same speed, and sea states change more slowly
than breezes, making it easier for utilities to predict the availability of
energy. Yet the tools needed to make use of the sea’s energy are gargantuan.

Pelamis Wave Power’s wave energy
device, P2, is a case in point. Currently stored at the Leith Docks in
Edinburgh, UK, it uses spools of steel cable several times human height, and
floats that are as big as a car. But this is just window dressing for the
machine itself: a red rig that looks like a 180-metre-long subway train.

Pelamis and Aquamarine Power,
also based in Edinburgh, are the big players in what remains a small industry
of generating energy from waves. Each is now fielding full-scale prototypes
that could make wave energy competitive in terms of cost with other renewable
energy sources, such as offshore wind.

Alongside them are dozens of
smaller competitors, building a menagerie of strange devices that they hope
will leapfrog ahead of existing machines in the race to provide inexpensive
power from the sea. “Wave energy has been talked about for hundreds of
years,” says Neil Kermode, managing director of the European Union-funded
European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC). “Now it’s actually starting to
happen.”

In the UK, the waters around the
Orkney Islands off northern Scotland, home to some of the world’s cruellest
weather, are used as EMEC’s proving grounds, as they offer a stiff test for
wave-energy devices. As Kermode puts it: “This is the playground for the
big boys.”

For all its impressive size, on
the inside the P2 looks more like a data centre than a ship’s hull. Duplicate
server racks, fibre-optic communication systems and emergency power supplies
allow programmers to upload software on the fly without interrupting power
production.

The P2 generates energy when its
large floating tubes, connected by hinged joints, bob in the waves, moving
hydraulic rams that pump high-pressure fluid to drive turbine. And while the
hardware has been upgraded from previous prototypes, it is the algorithm
controlling them that makes the difference. By decreasing resistance in the
rams when waves are small and increasing it when they are larger, the algorithm
maximises energy production in any sea state. As a result, the P2 produces 750
kilowatts of electricity – twice as much as prior prototypes.

“It’s the active control of
these algorithms that allows us to tune the machine to be in resonance
regardless of wave conditions,” says Pelamis engineer Ross Henderson.

Last month, Aquamarine Power
finished the construction of its second full-scale wave power device, the
Oyster 800. This consists of a hinged flap that sticks out of the water and is
pushed shut with each passing wave. When the flap moves, it drives hydraulic
pistons that deliver high-pressure water via a pipeline to an onshore turbine.
With an output of 800 kilowatts, the device is built to be 2.5 times as
powerful as its predecessor (see “The ocean is your oyster”).

“If you can get that sort of
level of performance improvement then the economics suddenly start to look a
lot more favourable,” says Stephen Wyatt, head of technology acceleration
at The Carbon Trust, a UK-government-funded organisation charged with
catalysing a low-carbon economy.

A study published by The Carbon
Trust in July estimated the cost of energy harvested from waves at 43 pence per
kilowatt-hour, or almost three times the cost of offshore wind. To become cost
competitive with other sources of renewable energy, companies will have to find
ways to squeeze more power out of their devices, says Wyatt.

Meanwhile, a host of start-up
companies are heading for EMEC’s “nursery” – a test facility built in
sheltered waters for designs that are not yet ready for the open ocean – each
hoping their device will be the next game changer.

One of the most promising,
according to a three-year study by The Carbon Trust, is Anaconda by Checkmate
Seaenergy, based in Sheerness, UK. This is a snake-like rubber tube filled with
water that floats just below the surface. As waves hit the front of the device
they squeeze the tube, creating a bulge of water that travels along it. When
the bulge reaches the end, the pressurised water drives a turbine.

An 8-metre long prototype has
been tested, but the firm says it will be several years before its full-scale
1-megawatt device, which would be 150 metres long, is ready.

An equally unusual machine, the
1600-tonne Penguin, will soon begin testing at EMEC. Built by Finnish company
Wello, the 500-kilowatt rig has an asymmetrically shaped hull that causes it to
roll, heave and pitch – much like the stilted stride of a penguin – with each
passing wave. The movement spins a flywheel inside the hull, driving a
generator.

With such devices arriving with
increasing frequency, it’s too early to tell which technology will win out in
the end. “That is part of the excitement,” Kermode says. “It may
be something completely new or variations on something we have already
seen.”

Source: www.newscientist.com

11 July 2011

Major three-year Carbon Trust
marine energy R&D programme sets course for future growth

New in-depth analysis published
today by the Carbon Trust shows the UK’s best marine energy sites could
generate electricity at costs comparable with nuclear and onshore wind1.  With continued and targeted innovation this
could be as soon as 2025, once cost reductions from deploying the first
gigawatt of energy devices have kicked-in.
In the future marine energy could provide a fifth of the UK’s
electricity needs.

Through its Marine Energy
Accelerator programme, the Carbon Trust has established that the costs for the
first wave and tidal energy farms will be around 30-40p/Kwh which is high,
relative to today’s more established low carbon technologies, such as offshore
wind.  These costs are broadly as
expected given the early stage of the technologies’ development.  Importantly the report concludes how with
continued and targeted innovation aggressive reductions in costs can be
achieved in the next ten years.  The
report also quantifies the amount of energy that can realistically be tapped
and sets out the actions now needed to set the industry on a path to commercial
success.

The analysis shows that wave
energy could generate 50 Terra Watt hours (TWh) of electricity per year,
equivalent to 13% of the UK’s power needs, and tidal stream 20.6 TWh per year
or 5% of UK power needs.  Between them
wave and tidal stream could generate more electricity than 12 large coal-fired
power stations.  The fast flowing tides
of the deeper areas of the Pentland Firth between the Scottish mainland and the
Orkneys alone could ultimately generate almost one third of all tidal stream
energy (6 TWh/year) and at an equivalent cost to nuclear and onshore wind.

Technology innovation will be
vital to tackle the harsher conditions which are encountered in the deeper
areas of the Pentland Firth.  With
targeted innovation energy generation costs for both wave and tidal stream
technologies could reduce to an average of 15 pence per kilowatt hour by 2025 -
equivalent to today’s cost of offshore wind energy.

The £3.5m Marine Energy
Accelerator has already driven innovation in key areas including device
deployment and mooring.  Just one of
these innovations, developed with Pelamis Wave Power, has projected savings of
£15m a year by 2020 through faster installation and connection of the device in
rougher weather conditions.

Benj Sykes, Director of
Innovations at Carbon Trust, said:

“Marine energy is one of the UK’s
most exciting green growth sectors and one where we have a real lead.  Wave and tidal stream could provide a fifth
of our electricity needs and be a major ‘made in Britain’ success.  The key players must now pull together to
tackle the next set of challenges and innovate to drive down costs.  Our Marine Energy Accelerator, working with
key industry players and Government, has shown that savings of tens of millions
of pounds are possible.”

Separate Carbon Trust analysis
has shown that the UK could capture just under a quarter of the global marine
energy market.  Equivalent to up to £76bn
to the UK economy by 2050, this growing sector could also generate over 68,000
UK jobs.

The latest analysis from the
Marine Energy Accelerator highlighted the following key areas for action:

Targeted innovation is needed to
drive cost reduction and de-risk the industry.
Project developers should engage in non-competitive R&D efforts to
tackle challenges and costs associated with array deployment, foundations and
electrical connections.

Government needs to provide a
stable revenue support framework and legislative backing through Strategic
Environmental Assessments to streamline the planning process for wave and tidal
energy farms.

Utilities and project developers
must continue to be more heavily involved in the industry which will generate
wider investor confidence.

Supply chain partners should look
to invest now to create market-leading positions.

Plans for grid connections to
areas of marine energy need to be expanded, specifically for the Pentland
Firth.

By working with device developers
and other key players, the Marine Energy Accelerator has successfully driven
forward innovation in the following areas to speed cost reductions:

Optimising the design of tidal
turbine blades which might otherwise be significantly over-engineered

Developing nylon (instead of
steel) ropes and gravity bag anchors for mooring devices

Developing novel ‘linear generators’
which would replace hydraulics meaning fewer moving parts and less maintenance

Developing new techniques to
enable the generating equipment in floating wave devices to be disconnected
from the main structure

Developing a unique technology
for connecting and disconnecting the Pelamis P2 from its mooring enabling
maintenance in rougher seas

Taking forward the engineering
and commercial development of two ‘next generation’ concepts (Minesto’s Deep
Green tidal energy device and Checkmate Sea Energy’s Anaconda wave energy
device) which hold potential for game changing reductions in the cost of
energy.

British companies such as
Pelamis, Aquamarine Power and Marine Current Turbines are leading the way in
deploying their technologies in UK waters, with six out of the eight full scale
prototypes in the world being installed here.
Almost half of Europe’s wave resources and over a quarter of its tidal
energy resources are to be found off the British coastline.

Source: www.carbontrust.co.uk

CSR & IPRS Sustainability Focus: Global Leaders On Stage

This month in Singapore there is
more than one opportunity for locals and visitors alike to catch sight of, and
meet, some of 100 Global Sustain Ability Leaders.  Five of them, including Esther An, Thomas
Thomas, Simon Tay, Harveen Narula and Wayne Visser will be at the CSR Summit
5/6   September. But don’t miss the IPRS
event on 21 September, when Ken Hickson will lead a panel on “The Sustainability
Megatrend for Business” featuring Howard Shaw, Jessica Cheam and Esher An. Read
More

Singapore Compact and the SR
Summit

The upcoming International
Singapore Compact CSR Summit 2011, themed “Corporate Social
Responsibility: Values for Sustainability”, will feature key international
experts in CSR and sustainability strategy, in response to the growing
awareness of sustainability as the next business megatrend for companies to
stay abreast of the curve. Rather than a “dreamer”, “loser”
or “defender”, as the Harvard Business Review has analysed, CSR
leadership experts from various industries will impart strategies and provide
tools to enable a “winner” in the coming decades.

In an economic environment
rattled by consequences of the economic crisis since 2008, trade uncertainty
incurred from recent uprisings in the Middle East and natural disasters in
various parts of the world, regional economies have seen tightening measures
worldwide. Investors, communities and civil society question companies’ behaviour
and responsibility for the environment; and stock exchanges across Asia
increasingly serve as regulators or institutional advocates of requirements for
sustainability reporting. In addition, the intersection of interests has meant
more cross-organizational collaboration and a need to understand perspectives
across stakeholders.

Plenaries and workshops during
the 2-day conference will explore CSR with regard to investor and shareholder
relations, the environment and human capital, while providing in-depth
perspectives on CSR in the region and across sectors. As an extension of the
past two years’ Summits, thought leaders will share their research and
findings, addressing different stakeholder groups in business and imparting
strategies for implementation.

The second International
Singapore Compact CSR Summit held last year marked key events including the
launch of the ASEAN CSR network and the inaugural Singapore Compact CSR Awards,
which recognised outstanding efforts by companies in various aspects of CSR.
Drawing almost 400 delegates and attendees at the 2010 opening ceremony, this
year’s International Singapore Compact CSR Summit is expected to attract
dignitaries and delegates from the top of their fields and at all levels of
business operations across sectors to the Grande Copthorne Waterfront Hotel,
Singapore, on the 5-6 September.

For the full programme go to: www.csrsingapore.org

Sustainability is described as the
“Megtrend of the 21st century”. Are you on board?

How green is your business? Are
you able to build on your strengths with green and sustainable products and
services to get greater attention in the marketplace and in the media?

On 21 September the Institute of Public
Relations Singapore (IPRS) is bringing together four acknowledged experts in
the field of sustainability and the greening of business, particularly from the
standpoint of corporate communication and media.

A panel discussion with be
chaired by sustainability consultant and PR guru Ken Hickson, with Straits
Times Jessica Cheam, CDL’s Esther An and Halcyon’s Howard Shaw.

Esther An

Esther An joined City
Developments Limited (CDL) in 1995 to set up the company’s Corporate
Communication Department and subsequently the CSR portfolio.  She has been instrumental in building up CDL
as a forerunner in CSR.

The company’s relentless efforts
in embracing sustainability for business excellence have won many international
and local accolades such as the prestigious Global 100 Most Sustainable
Companies, Asian CSR Awards and BCA Built Environment Leadership Award, just to
name a few.

CDL is honored to be the only
Singapore developer listed on the London FTSE4Good Index since 2002.  Its Sustainability Report was the first
amongst Singapore companies to achieve GRI checked status in 2008. In the 2010
Asian Sustainability Rating, CDL was again ranked top in Singapore and top
amongst all listed developers in Asia.
Sitting on board the Singapore Compact for CSR Management Committee,
Esther has been active in advocating CSR amongst businesses and students.

Jessica Cheam

Jessica Cheam is a correspondent
at The Straits Times who reports on housing, development issues, environment,
energy and climate change. She joined the newspaper full-time in 2006 after
being awarded a scholarship by the Singapore Press Holdings to study a Masters
in Journalism at London’s Goldsmith College where her work was nominated for a
PTC Journalist Award (UK).

Her first degree was in Film and
English at the University of Warwick. She has also written for London-based publications
such as The Independent, The Times and The Ecologist.

Jessica is the founder and editor
of the website eco-business.com, which is a leading provider of news and views
for Asia Pacific’s sustainable business community.

She has won a global journalism
award at the Earth Journalism Awards, which was held in Copenhagen in December
2009 by Internews and the World Bank. In March 2010, she was named Young
Journalist of the Year by Singapore Press Holdings at its annual English and
Malay Newspaper Division awards. In February 2011, her stories on
sustainability won her the first Asean Green Technology Journalism Award by
Siemens.

Howard Shaw

Howard Shaw, Senior Vice
President, Corporate Social Responsibility, HALCYON Group, was formerly the
executive director of the Singapore Environment Council (SEC). Howard was
actively involved in driving the environmental movement since 1995,
contributing towards shaping national environmental policies and programs.

He was responsible for the
development and administration of the Singapore Environmental Achievement
Awards, as well as the Singapore Green Labelling Scheme, which recognize
excellence in environmental management and green products, respectively.

Howard represented the NGO
community on various national groups, including the Water Network, Singapore
Packaging Agreement, and Public Hygiene Council. He was also a Focus Group
member for the National Preparatory Process leading up to the World Summit on
Sustainable Development 2002.

Ken Hickson

Ken Hickson is an
eco-entrepreneur, writer, lecturer, coach, consultant and communicator,
including 17 years based in Singapore (1983 to end 2000), where he managed a
leading communications consultancy Hickson Public Relations, which became
Fleishman Hillard.  He returned to
Singapore last year as Founder Chairman and CEO of Sustain Ability Showcase
Asia.

He has introduced a number of
products and services in the clean tech sector (green buildings, clean energy
efficiency, waste and water management) into Singapore from overseas and acts
as an advisor to the Singapore Environment Council and National Environment
Agency (NEA), as well as some clean tech start-ups, including GreenPost.

For the past ten years he has
lived and worked in Australia where he
is acknowledged as a leading climate change and sustainability
communicator, speaking at conferences, producing a book – “The ABC of Carbon”
-  editing a fortnightly e-newsletter –
abc carbon express – and acting as advisor to businesses and organisations on
awareness and action to deal with issues and opportunities.

He was appointed the honorary
representative for WWF International and was instrumental in getting the World
Wide Fund for Nature established in Singapore, where its Asia Pacific office is
now located. He has attended and spoken at WWF events in Asia and Europe and
was involved in fund-raising and event management for WWF Australia, where he
continues to serve as a Governor of the organisation.

He is a Fellow of IPRS and former
President. Just recently he took over the management of Professional Public
Relations Singapore, also known as Racepoint.

For more information and to book
go to the IPRS website.

Source: www.iprs.org.sg

“The Oil Price”: It might be fiction, but it’s deadly serious

Among the 100 Global Sustain
Ability Leaders are many authors, of mostly non-fiction and mostly serious
tomes. One of them is new author, Guy Lane, a Sustainability Consultant
from Townsville, Queensland, Australia. His first published book is a novel
just out “The Oil Price” with a strong environmental theme, but it also a
thriller in the James Bond. And it’s deadly serious.  Read More

Ken Hickson has read ‘The Oil
Price” and highly recommends it as a great read. It is racy, action packed and
shows that the author not only understands the subject well – the oil industry and
the environmental impact of unsustainable development – but also creates some very
believable characters and locations. It is deadly and it is serious. And shows
you take your sustainable consultants seriously too!

All about “The Oil Price”

Lala is a Fiji island that is
home to endangered sea birds, marine turtles and coconut crabs.

Pity poor Lala Island, it is
located over an unexploited oil field. And where there’s oil there’s blood, the
real oil price.

Brad Moore, Dubai-based Chief
Executive of Peking Petroleum, wants to turn Lala into an oil production
facility and bury the turtle nests under concrete.

But there is another plan for
Lala – a bright green plan.

Brad Moore knows that to make a
brain omlette you have to crack a few skulls, so he brings to Dubai two
hard-hitters from Storm Front, an Iraq Security Contracting firm.

He brings Teck, the emotionally
challenged body-guard, to kill the man who is competing for Lala.

And he hires Madeline Obst,
corporate spin-doctor, the Liar for Hire, to make sure the truth is completely
misrepresented.

But Brad Moore doesn’t know that
in between the car bombs and death squads of Iraq, Teck and Madeline have
developed some history together.

Neither does he know that Bren
Hannan is heir-apparent to the sustainable Lala project and has just met Danny
Lexion, a man who cares about  nothing
more than doing okay and looking good.

- Is Danny Lexion more than just
a dabbler in environmental affairs?

- Will Brad Moore turn the turtle
nests of Lala into a concrete parking lot for oil trucks?

- Or will Bren Hannan, the
Climate Cop, find a way to stop him?

- And why did Bren chew off a
man’s ear for leaving on a bathroom light?

Find out the answers to these
questions by reading The Oil Price

For more information and how to
get the book, go to:

www.guylane.com
or www.seao2.com

Just to show that Guy Lane is not
just all about fiction, here’s a story about just one of his projects:

Save the Maldives

By Hayley Simpson

JCNN is produced by students of the Bachelor of Multimedia Journalism at
James Cook University

Planning an escape to the
Maldives? Better pack your swimmers – and not for the reason you think. The
Maldives are sinking courtesy of global warming, according to environmental
activist Guy Lane. But he is hot on the case to save them…

The Maldives will be the first
country to disappear underwater due to the rising sea levels caused by global
warming, warns environmental activist Guy Lane, who heads up sustainability
consulting firm SEA 02. To put it in perspective, the highest point on the
Maldives is 2.4 metres above sea level, while Townsville is 16.3 metres above.

So what’s being done about it?
Well, Guy got involved with the dilemma a few years ago. He’d been busy
coordinating a Townsville workshop on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC)
technology and put information from the event on his website. He never could
have imagined how far-reaching it would be – all the way to Southern Utilities
in the Maldives, as fate would have it. Southern Utilities operates the power
generation facilities for the southern province of the Maldives and they wanted
to know whether OTEC technology could help them provide 20 megawatts of
renewable energy to their island group.

“The Maldives want to be carbon
neutral by 2020, so I spoke with them at great length about the various ways it
could power the islands with renewable energy to achieve this,” Mr Lane said.
“These include solar energy, OTEC technology, wind turbines, wave energy and
tidal energy.”

Mr Lane then posted his research
into renewable energy opportunities for the Maldives on his website to make it
available to the public. Another motivation for doing this was to help raise
funds. Although technological solutions are available to the Maldives, they’re
costly. Mr Lane thought his My Clean Sky initiative, which he established in
2006, could be the answer.

“I hoped that my carbon offset brand might be
able to help, so I made a plan for island nations that have tourism industries
to raise capital for renewable energy projects by charging a carbon offset fee
for air travel to the island,” Mr Lane said. “You could think of the fee as
similar to an environmental tax, but one that’s based on the carbon footprint
of tourists’ trips to the Maldives.”

Mr Lane has calculated that the
600,000 people who visit the Maldives every year produce about one million
tonnes of carbon dioxide. “If we took about $20 per tonne for carbon tax, that
would provide $20 million per annum to fund the transition to sustainable
energy on the islands,” he said. “The money could go towards studies, the
implementation of energy efficient improvements and the appropriate renewable
energy technologies.”

Mr Lane is still in preliminary
discussions with Southern Utilities about adopting this strategy, but said any
island with a tourism industry could employ the same system.

In his spare time, Guy is working
on scripts for a movie and television series. He is writing a trilogy of movie
scripts – the first called The Oil Price – which he categorises as a thriller.
“It’s about a local hero, Danny Lexion, who is fighting an evil oil man, Brad
Moore, in Dubai and then Townsville,” Mr Lane said.

“And my TV series, Hommus:
Smartest Apes in the Galaxy, is a drama about aliens who crash land on The
Strand, bringing an important message to save humanity from itself.”

Watch this space for developments
on these projects. In the meantime, you can help save the Maldives by finding
out more about Mr Lane’s initiative at www.mycleansky.com.au.

“Climate change is with us for
good,” Mr Lane said. “The sooner we swap oil and coal for sustainable energy,
the better the future for the human race.”

On our digital media platform, JCNN, you will read stories that no-one
else covers. While we cannot cover every news angle as we don’t have the
resources of mainstream media organisations, we work hard to offer you unique
coverage you won’t get anywhere else.

Source: www.public.jcu.edu.au

New Energy Management Standard & Urban Farming for Singapore

Supplier scorecards from large
companies such as Kaiser Permanente and Walmart, along with global carbon
registries such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), have driven a marked
increase in the number of companies reporting sustainability and environmental
data. Large organizations and the CDP should now add ISO 50001, the new energy
management standard, as driving its adoption will lead to energy savings,
reduced carbon emissions and more efficient supply chains. Meanwhile, word has
it that Singapore’s highly urbanised population could be turned into an
advantage by pursuing urban farming. It could leverage on its dense population
to find unique, urban solutions to food security.

The Energy Management Standard
Walmart Should Add to Its Scorecard

By Paul Baier

Published August 30, 2011

GreenBiz

Supplier scorecards from large
companies such as Kaiser Permanente and Walmart, along with global carbon
registries such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), have driven a marked
increase in the number of companies reporting sustainability and environmental
data. Large organizations and the CDP should now add ISO 50001, the new energy
management standard, to their company scorecards and questionnaire. Driving
adoption of ISO 50001 will lead to energy savings, reduced carbon emissions and
more efficient supply chains.

What is ISO 50001?

ISO 50001 is the new ISO
certification that implements a foundation process for energy management. ISO
standards enhance the business process and have been around for decades. Many
companies throughout the world have adopted these standards for quality (9001)
and environmental management (14001).

ISO certification requires
third-party verification. This certification increases consumer confidence and
improves the company’s brand image. More than a million companies are now
certified with the ISO quality standard (9001), and some even have ISO 9001
signs and banners touting this achievement on the front lawn of their
facilities.

Key elements of the ISO 50001
energy management standard include establishing an energy baseline, energy goals,
monitoring metrics, and management oversight.
Particularly important is that the standard focuses on ongoing
monitoring and improvement, not just being a snapshot in time of a facility or
operations.

When standards are not based on
continuous improvement and monitoring, performance can lag, which can lead to a
false sense of confidence. We already see this with some new buildings that
were as LEED-certified as new builds but became out of spec and, in some cases,
below code over time because management’s attention to operations waned after
achieving certification.

The ISO 50001 standard can be
applied to a single facility or multiple facilities.

Who is using it?

Leading organizations are already
adopting 50001, including Delta Electronics in China, Schneider Electric of
France, Dahanu Thermal Power in India, AU Optronics of Taiwan, The Province of
China, and Bad Eisenkappel in Australia. Other companies such as Alcoa, 3M,
Eaton and Nissan are becoming ISO 50001 certified in conjunction with the Department
of Energy’s Superior Energy Performance program.

Why is it promising?

The 50001 standard directly helps
companies save money. In addition, with improvement of the energy management
process being tied with company goals, third-party verification directly
enables companies along the supply chain to differentiate, and purchasing
companies have more confidence in their supply chain.

Why do we need another
certification standard?

It’s certainly true that the
world is flooded with product- and company-level certifications.
Ecolabelling.org lists 424 of them, and companies should be very cautious about
expanding their supplier criteria. Organizations, however, should adopt
standards that have a proven ability to save money and provide competitive
differentiation. ISO 50001 promises to be one of these standards.

Adopting ISO 50001 is
advantageous because the ISO framework is already a well-accepted global
standard that is supported by hundreds of ISO practitioners and is also
familiar to senior management. Some organizations already certified with 9001
and 14001 are currently considering 50001.

The contents of company and
supplier scorecards matter. The questions asked on scorecards, CDP submittals
and other rating systems matter. When LEED award points for bike racks for its
green building certification, hundreds of building owners added bike racks,
even if there was no clear, safe way to use bikes.

When Walmart added a question
about carbon footprint to its sustainability scorecards, thousands of suppliers
decided to calculate their company’s carbon footprint for the first time.

Such companies as Walmart and IBM
will improve the competitiveness of their supply chain by asking their
suppliers if key facilities are ISO 50001 certified. We’ve seen that business
benefits from a more systematic focus on quality and environmental management,
and a similar opportunity exists with a more methodological focus on energy
management.

Although scorecards don’t
actually need more questions, ISO 50001 questions should be added to some of
the less-effective ones. This allows for more focus on energy reduction, where
the best financial and environmental returns reside.

Paul Baier is vice president of
sustainability consulting at Groom Energy and a senior contributor at
GreenBiz.com.

Read more from Paul Baier

Source: www.greenbiz.com

Yang Razali Kassim, For The
Straits Times 24 Aug 11;

FOOD security is an emerging
global concern. Certain realities define food security planning for Singapore:
It is not an agricultural country, has not much land to grow its own food, and
is almost totally dependent on food imports.

As such, Singapore may be viewed
as being just a passive food importer – perpetually subject to the vagaries of
external forces when it comes to feeding its own people.

Such a reading, however, could
change.

There are indications of a
fundamental rethink in Singapore’s food security strategy. Indeed, a mental map
of a multi- pronged strategy, spearheaded by research and development, is
emerging on Singapore’s food security front that could turn old limitations
into new strengths.

The clearest indication came out
of the inaugural International Conference on Asian Food Security on Aug 10-12,
held here and initiated by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

Senior Parliamentary Secretary
for Defence and National Development Mohamad Maliki Osman spelt out how
Singapore is moving to become a contributing player to support the global quest
for a more stable global food system amid volatile supplies and prices.

There are four prongs to this
strategy. The first is research and development. Singapore will leverage on its
excellent infrastructure, intellectual property regime, a pro-enterprise tax
structure and a financial ecosystem that supports both publicly and privately
funded research.

Its National Research Foundation
recently awarded a US$8.2 million (S$9.9 million) grant to a joint project
between the National University of Singapore, the Temasek Life Sciences
Laboratory and the International Rice Research Institute, to address pressing
food concerns such as the need to develop rice strains that can adapt to
climate change. The potential benefits extend beyond Singapore.

The second strategy, related to
the first, is to grow Singapore into an agribusiness hub. The Economic
Development Board is encouraging big players to set up their operational
headquarters and trading operations, as well as engage in upstream research, in
Singapore.

Two examples are Syngenta and
Bayer CropScience, whose research laboratories aim to develop ‘elite’ crop
varieties for the region.

The third strategy is to turn
Singapore’s own domestic market into a ‘test lab’ of sorts, especially for
urban agriculture.

Singapore’s highly urbanised
population could be turned into an advantage by pursuing urban farming. Indeed,
Singapore could leverage on its dense population to find unique, urban
solutions to food security.

Agricultural production can be
creatively brought within the city space, such as through ‘rooftop farming’,
thus reducing Singapore’s reliance on food imports.

The success of urban farming can
eventually be shared and replicated in other cities, said Dr Maliki. One pilot
project on rooftop farming was started last year when the Agri-Food and
Veterinary Authority engaged a local company, SkyGreens, to do a commercial
‘vertical farming’ prototype.

Singapore’s potential in urban
farming has attracted quiet international attention. The Urban Agriculture
Network (UAN) set up under the auspices of the United Nations Development
Programme once declared Singapore a possible world leader in some aspects of
urban agriculture – food production from its residential and commercial
rooftops.

In other words, the rooftops of
thousands of HDB blocks can potentially be turned into urban farmland. New
economic opportunity for Singapore could come from two particular techniques -
aeroponics (growing plants without soil and water) and aquaponics (growing plants
using recycled fish waste).

According to the UAN’s Western
Pacific offshoot in Australia, these two technology spin-offs from hydroponics
and aquaculture could make Singapore a world leader in rooftop production of
fresh vegetables, fruit and flowers; certain types of seafood in specially
designed containers; and a greener, cleaner cityscape that contributes less to
global warming and therefore climate change.

A fourth, but no less important,
strategy is the shift towards greater local production of three key food items
- eggs, leafy vegetables and fish. A $20 million Food Fund, launched in
December 2009, is in place to incentivise farms to explore new farming
technologies to ensure Singapore’s food supply resilience.

Singapore’s multi-pronged
strategy fits in with the search for holistic solutions to solve food security
issues. It dovetails with at least three fronts in the global action to tackle
food security: Asean, through the Asean Integrated Food Security Framework; the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum through measures to enhance food
security within the Asia-Pacific region; and the Group of 20 which aims to
tackle food price volatility through international coordination.

In a nutshell, Singapore’s
overall strategy is to seek win-win partnerships locally, regionally and
globally as food security issues transcend national boundaries.

By taking care of its own needs
while being useful to the world, Singapore is now playing its part in tackling
the global food security problem.

The writer is a Senior Fellow
with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological

Source: www.wildsingaporenews.blogspot.com