World in Serious Trouble on Food Front

Lester R. Brown

In the early spring of 2012, U.S. farmers were on their way to planting some 96 million acres in corn, the most in 75 years. A warm early spring got the crop off to a great start. Analysts were predicting the largest corn harvest on record.

The United States is the leading producer and exporter of corn, the world's feedgrain. At home, corn accounts for four-fifths of the U.S. grain harvest. Internationally, the U.S. corn crop exceeds China's rice and wheat harvests combined. Among the big three grains – corn, wheat, and rice – corn is now the leader, with production well above that of wheat and nearly double that of rice.

The corn plant is as sensitive as it is productive. Thirsty and fast-growing, it is vulnerable to both extreme heat and drought. At elevated temperatures, the corn plant, which is normally so productive, goes into thermal shock.

As spring turned into summer, the thermometer began to rise across the Corn Belt. In St. Louis, Missouri, in the southern Corn Belt, the temperature in late June and early July climbed to 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher 10 days in a row. For the past several weeks, the Corn Belt has been blanketed with dehydrating heat.

Weekly drought maps published by the University of Nebraska show the drought-stricken area spreading across more and more of the country until, by mid-July, it engulfed virtually the entire Corn Belt. Soil moisture readings in the Corn Belt are now among the lowest ever recorded.

While temperature, rainfall, and drought serve as indirect indicators of crop growing conditions, each week the U.S. Department of Agriculture releases a report on the actual state of the corn crop. This year the early reports were promising. On May 21st, 77 percent of the U.S. corn crop was rated as good to excellent. The following week the share of the crop in this category dropped to 72 percent. Over the next eight weeks, it dropped to 26 percent, one of the lowest ratings on record. The other 74 percent is rated very poor to fair. And the crop is still deteriorating.

Over a span of weeks, we have seen how the more extreme weather events that come with climate change can affect food security. Since the beginning of June, corn prices have increased by nearly one half, reaching an all-time high on July 19th.

Although the world was hoping for a good U.S. harvest to replenish dangerously low grain stocks, this is no longer in the cards. World carryover stocks of grain will fall further at the end of this crop year, making the food situation even more precarious. Food prices, already elevated, will follow the price of corn upward, quite possibly to record highs.

Not only is the current food situation deteriorating, but so is the global food system itself. We saw early signs of the unraveling in 2008 following an abrupt doubling of world grain prices. As world food prices climbed, exporting countries began restricting grain exports to keep their domestic food prices down. In response, governments of importing countries panicked. Some of them turned to buying or leasing land in other countries on which to produce food for themselves.

Welcome to the new geopolitics of food scarcity. As food supplies tighten, we are moving into a new food era, one in which it is every country for itself.

The world is in serious trouble on the food front. But there is little evidence that political leaders have yet grasped the magnitude of what is happening. The progress in reducing hunger in recent decades has been reversed. Unless we move quickly to adopt new population, energy, and water policies, the goal of eradicating hunger will remain just that.

Time is running out. The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage – replete with soaring food prices, spreading food unrest, and ultimately political instability– than most people realize.


Lester R. Brown is President of Earth Policy Institute and author of Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, due to be published in October 2012.

Copyright © 2012 Earth Policy Institute

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Reposted from Planet Thoughts The future of nuclear power now hangs on a single decision by President Obama---and us. His Office of Management and Budget could cave to the unsustainable demands of reactor builders who cannot handle the standard terms of a loan agreement. Or he could defend basic financial procedures and stand up for the future of the American economy. You can help make this decision, which will come soon. It's about a proposed $8.33 billion nuke power loan guarantee package for two reactors being built at Georgia's Vogtle. Obama anointed it last year for the Southern Company, parent to Georgia Power. Two other reactors sporadically operate there. Southern just ravaged the new construction side of the site, stripping virtually all vegetation. It's also stripped Georgia ratepayers of ever-more millions of dollars, soon to become billions. This project is in the Peach State for its law forcing the public to pay for reactor construction in advance. When the project fails, or the reactors melt, the public still must pay. A taste of what's coming has emerged in shocking defects in poured concrete at the site which will cost millions to correct and months of delay on a project whose construction has barely begun ( http://nukefree.org/nc-warn-vogtle-already-hit-major-design-flaw-delay ) . Nonetheless, Southern runs virtually no financial risk. It actually has an interest in never finishing. Florida is now in turmoil, trying to rid itself of a similar Construction Work in Progress law ( http://nukefree.org/florida-legislators-sue-stop-nuke-bailouts-advance ). Worldwide estimated reactor costs have jumped from $3-5 billion each a few short years ago to $10 billion or more, and rising. Uranium prices are set to soar as the supply of Russian weapons-based fuel is about done. And renewables have long since outstripped atomic energy as being cheaper, faster to build, cleaner, safer, more reliable and open to community ownership. There are virtually no private investors willing to back new reactor construction. There are no private insurers willing to take the risk on operating reactors. There is no place to store the radioactive wastes they generate. Operating reactors in Vermont ( http://nukefree.org/vermonters-tell-vermont-yankee-get-out ), New York, California ( http://nukefree.org/nrc-chair-jazcko-says-san-onofre-be-shut-indefinitely ) and elsewhere now face ferocious public uprisings to get them shut. They are being joined by Governors, US Senators and entire legislatures. Peter Shumlin, Governor of Vermont, has appeared at a major public rally to shut Yankee. The legislature long ago voted (26-4) the same way. Shumlin was joined by US Senator Bernie Sanders, who has issued a stunning denunciation of the loan guarantees ( http://nukefree.org/sen-bernie-sanders-ryan-alexander-stop-nuclear-subsidies ) . US Senator Ron Wyden of Orgeon has published a serious warning about the on-going dangers of Fukushima, which he recently visited ( http://nukefree.org/sen-wyden-warns-situation-fukushima-worse-believed ). Once the public kills one of these elderly reactors, a tsunami of shutdowns among the 104 currently licensed in the US will follow. Germany and much of the rest of Europe have abandoned the technology ( http://nukefree.org/europes-war-over-nuclear-financing ). Bulgaria has just scrapped plans for two proposed generators. Major banking institutions have warned potential investors in Britain's planned reactors that if they proceed, they will lose their financial standing. Mexico has also said it won't build new nukes. In Asia, only one of Japan's 54 licensed reactors now operates, and it may soon shut. Huge demonstrations and hunger strikes are raging against a proposed project at Koodankulam, India. The Philippines says it won't build any reactors at all ( http://nukefree.org/philippines-says-no-new-nukes ). China, the last bastion of any apparent large-scale interest in multiple nukes, seems to be wavering, in part because of the rise of a No Nukes movement there. Here, two reactors barely beginning construction in South Carolina are also in deep trouble. Their builders need massive rate hikes in North Carolina to proceed, and the opposition there is fierce ( http://nukefree.org/ncwarn-north-carolina-can-kill-south-carolina-nuke-project ). But the lynchpin is Vogtle. The construction loan guarantee program got $18.5 billion from George W. Bush in 2005. With the industry in deepening chaos, it took until last year for a president to designate less than half that money. For the first time in years, there is no Executive or Congressional request to put more money into the fund. The French National Utility EDF did step forward to get funding for Maryland's proposed Calvert Cliffs project. But haggling over terms contributed to its demise. Now Southern faces the same abyss. It refuses what the mortgage community would consider a normal 20% downpayment on its taxpayer-funded loan. Southern wants to put virtually none of its own money into the project, leaving the radioactive gamble totally to the public. But the Office of Management and Budget is apparently demanding something more reasonable ( http://nukefree.org/vogtle-loan-guarantee-not-yet-done-deal ). Because the OMB is a White House agency, Obama holds the key. It's our job to make him turn it in a green direction. A short while ago, this package was considered a done deal. But the GOP uproar over the failed $535 million loan to the solar company Solyndra changed to context. Initiated by Bush, Republicans have made Solyndra the poster child for bad federal loans. Vogtle involves some 15 times Solyndra's liability. And it's all Obama's. At least three petitions are circulating against the package.( http://nukefree.org/please-do-sign-petition-stop-new-nuke-loan-guarantees ). There are many ways to finally shut down what has been the most expensive technological failure in human history. Fukushima and the killing power of radiation, the unsolved problem of radioactive waste, the campaigns against failing reactors such as Vermont Yankee, Indian Point, San Onofre and Davis-Besse---all are key. This weekend, a conference convened by the Sierra Club in Washington, DC ( http://action.sierraclub.org/site/DocServer/no_Nukes_Flyer2.pdf?docID=9701 ), will weigh the various strategies. But killing this loan guarantee package could finally kill the prospect of new reactors in the US. The astonishing rise of Solartopian green technologies has far outstripped atomic energy in the marketplace. Every delay deeply diminishes the possibility of building more of these profoundly uneconomic anachronisms. In the long run, Vogtle, Summer and any other new nukes that seem to slip through in the short term will almost certainly be stopped by what has become one of the most powerful non-violent social movements in human history. But right now, it's up to Obama---and us. Does he really want an atomic Solyndra on his hands? Will we really let this happen? Let's relieve the President of this radioactive burden. Let's kill these reactors before they kill us, and take the most significant leap of all toward a green-powered Earth.

Good News~!

Incredible Edible Todmorden from haymedia on Vimeo.

A Coal Region's Quest to Switch to Renewables

By Frank Dohmen and Barbara Schmid

Germany's bituminous coal mines are soon to lose their subsidies. But one Ruhr Valley company is looking to transform its mines into sources of renewable energy. Along the way, they could solve one of Germany's largest challenges as it attempts to switch over to green energy.

Shortly before 2 p.m., tiny, twinkling lights become visible at the end of the long, dark tunnel on the seventh level of the Prosper-Haniel mine in Bottrop, a city in west-central Germany. The lights slowly begin to take shape, as miners with mine lamps on their white helmets make their way back to the surface. It has been a difficult shift, and the men have covered several kilometers through an intricate labyrinth of tunnels and shafts.

In just a few years' time, an entirely different scenario could be unfolding in the mine, one that has little to do with Ruhrkohle AG's classic coal-mining business. But it is one which could very well have a promising future.

The German government and the European Commission passed a resolution in 2010 that by 2018, the billions in subsidies which have kept the coal mining industry in Germany's Saarland and Ruhr regions afloat over the past few decades will expire. When that happens, the last mines belonging to Ruhrkohle AG (RAG) will be closed for good. "Every day takes us a little closer to saying goodbye," a miner says bitterly.

But on level seven in Bottrop, a small revolution is underway, one that remains largely invisible to the miners. There, at exactly 1,159 meters (3,802 feet) beneath the surface of the earth, in giant transfer halls directly in front of the mine's steep shaft, RAG plans to generate large amounts of environmentally friendly power in the future.

It may sound utopian, but the plan is not all that far-fetched. The underground chambers are large enough to easily accommodate one or two large, hydroelectric turbines. Through giant pipes placed in the mineshaft, water is to plunge up to 1,000 meters from the surface into the mine, where it would then power the turbine rotors.

A Serious Challenge

The machines could eventually generate about 600 megawatts of electricity, which -- in theory -- is enough to supply a medium-sized city with clean energy. More importantly, the turbines fit perfectly into Germany's new energy strategy. They would be an elementary building block of the country's planned clean-energy -- and nuclear-free -- future.

In the wake of the disastrous accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan in March of this year, the German government decided to shut down eight of the country's 17 nuclear reactors immediately, and to massively expand renewable sources of energy, like wind and solar.

Germany now plans to derive 35 percent of its power supply from renewable energy sources by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050. But this also presents a serious challenge: The wind and the sun are extremely unreliable as sources of energy in Germany. Under certain conditions -- a cloudy day with no wind -- the production of green energy could sink to almost zero. On days that are sunny and windy, on the other hand, the facilities already installed today are sometimes capable of covering Germany's entire electricity needs.

Sometimes -- for hours or even days at a time -- there is even a surplus. With a lack of sufficient storage capacity, however, some of the expensive green energy is simply given away to neighboring European countries.

This will change in the future, once energy storage systems have been built throughout Germany. Many different technologies, such as storing energy with the help of compressed air, gas or hydrogen, are being tested. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants, like the ones RAG plans to build in its Ruhr region coalmines, would seem to be the most promising for storing large amounts of energy.

Significant Intervention

The principle is simple. When a large amount of wind and solar energy is available, it is used to pump water out of the mine tunnels into an artificial lake on the former mine grounds. When there is an electricity shortfall or if the energy supply begins to fluctuate, the floodgates are opened and the water drops through the giant pipes to drive the turbines 1,000 meters below the surface. The entire output becomes available to the grid within a very short amount of time.

These types of systems have long required significant intervention in nature. In facilities like the Schluchsee plant in the Black Forest, operated by utilities EnBW and RWE, pumped-storage systems normally take advantage of differences in altitude in mountainous regions. Installing power lines and turbines often requires expensive blasting, while new reservoirs need to be created at high altitudes.

At RAG, the engineers say enthusiastically, none of this will be necessary. Large amounts of groundwater are already pumped out of the deep shafts today to keep the tunnels dry. The infrastructure -- kilometers of shafts to hold the pipes, large halls for the turbines and the power supply -- already exists. And even the creation of man-made lakes on the decommissioned mine sites will improve the landscape -- and won't likely trigger protests.

It would be possible to build pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants in three locations in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and two in the southwestern state of Saarland in the next few years, says RAG Director Peter Fischer. They could produce about as much power as two medium-sized nuclear power plants.

The plans, which are being developed in collaboration with the University of Duisburg-Essen, are not entirely new, having sat idle in the drawers of RAG executives for the last few years. But they were long overshadowed by the hope that the German bituminous coal industry, and with it RAG, could be on the verge of a comeback. They hoped that the political decision to phase out coal might be reversed.

Vision of the Future

Now, though, RAG executives have come to see such a change in fortunes as unrealistic. In addition to winding down operations, closing mines and selling parts of the company, they are trying to develop new prospects for RAG and the 24,000 employees it still has today.

The pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants are only part of the company's vision of the future. Powerful wind turbines will be erected on top of the tall waste heaps, known as spoil tips, on the mine grounds. Engineers also plan to install solar panels on the southern slopes of the spoil tips.

Even the mine water -- which has to be pumped out for decades after mine closures to prevent landslides -- will be used to generate energy in the future. At a depth of 1,000 meters, the water is up to 40 degree Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), explains Professor Ulrich Schreiber of the University of Duisburg. That means it is warm enough to heat buildings, residential areas and industrial plants. Initial pilot projects in the Ruhr region cities of Essen, Bottrop and Bochum, where RAG has already connected a few apartment buildings, schools and an outdoor swimming pool to hot water pipes, have apparently been successful.

Using the simplest of methods, says RAG executive Fischer, the company could generate another 600 to 700 megawatts of renewable electricity at its former mine sites. This corresponds to the output of a medium-sized coal power plant, and it doesn't even include the output that would come from the pumped-storage plants.

The company officially unveiled its green vision to the broader public on Monday in Essen, to coincide with the traditional local holiday of Coal Day. RAG has also hired an outside firm to prepare a funding application for a pilot power plant designed to demonstrate that the technology in the depths of coal mines actually works. "It's an ambitious project," says geologist Schreiber. "But the problems are solvable."

The only thing that would still be needed before the project can move ahead on a large scale is the approval of RAG's shareholders, particularly the federal government and the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Saarland.

But in contrast to the difficult negotiations over new coal subsidies in the past, RAG management isn't in the least bit concerned about securing the necessary approval. Even the Greens, the company's biggest critics in the past, have had nothing but praise for the company's new direction.

Learning From China: Why The Existing Economic Model Will Fail By Lester Brown

For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world's people, consumes a third or more of the earth's resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does.

Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a quarter more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is double that of the United States. It uses three times as much coal and four times as much steel.

These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume conservatively that China's economy slows from the 11 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then in 2035 income per person in China will reach the current U.S. level.

If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2035 China's 1.38 billion people will use four fifths as much paper as is produced worldwide today. There go the world's forests.

If Chinese grain consumption per person in 2035 were to equal the current U.S. level, China would need 1.5 billion tons of grain, nearly 70 percent of the 2.2 billion tons the world's farmers now harvest each year.

If we assume that in 2035 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The entire world currently has just over one billion. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area equivalent to more than two thirds the land it currently has in rice.

By 2035 China would need 85 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 86 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world's oil reserves.

What China is teaching us is that the western economic model—the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy—will not work for the world. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2035 is projected to have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream." And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy—one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. But can we muster the political will to translate this potential into reality?

Beyond the Financial Crisis Germany’s Plan to Regrow the Global Economy

At the moment, Germany is embroiled in a fierce debate over how to save the Eurozone and, with it, the future of the European Union. Although stringent austerity programs will have to be enacted in the member countries to reduce government debt, and new regulatory mechanisms put in place to oversee European financial institutions and markets, there is a dawning realization that these measures alone will be insufficient to assure the future of Europe and its member states. What's required, above all else, is a new sustainable economic growth plan that can take Europe into the future. That's beginning to happen.

While the rest of the world is in a near panic over the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, a fresh new economic wind is blowing across Germany. In discussions with German business leaders over the past several months, and in recent conversations with Chancellor Angela Merkel and key political leaders in Berlin, it has become clear that Germany is embarking on a journey into a new economic era. The German plan is based on the historical understanding that the great economic paradigm shifts in history occur when new communications revolutions converge and merge with new energy regimes. New energy revolutions make possible more expansive and integrated trade. Accompanying communication revolutions manage the speed and complexity of commercial activity made possible by the new flow of energy. Today, the distributed Internet communication revolution is converging with distributed renewable energies, giving birth to a powerful Third Industrial Revolution that is going to fundamentally change German society.

The Merkel administration has launched an ambitious effort to transition the West's leading exporting power into a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR). The federal government has teamed up with six regions across Germany to test the introduction of an "energy Internet" that will allow tens of thousands of German businesses and millions of home owners to collect renewable energies onsite, store them in the form of hydrogen, and share green electricity across Germany in a smart utility network, just like we now share information online. Entire communities are in the process of transforming their commercial and residential buildings into green micro-power plants, and companies like Siemens and Bosch are creating sophisticated new IT software, hardware, and appliances that will merge distributed Internet communications with distributed energy to create the smart buildings, infrastructure, and cities of the future.

The transition into the new Industrial Revolution is quickly picking up momentum. In May, the government announced that the country's 17 nuclear power plants would be shut down by 2022. Then, in late summer, the German Association of Energy and Water Companies reported for the first time that renewable energy sources now account for nearly 20% of the country's electricity, putting Germany ahead of schedule in its goal of producing 35% of its electricity from green energy by 2022. On September 12th, Dr. Dieter Zetsche, the Chairman of Daimler, unveiled the company's hydrogen fuel-cell car at the opening of the Frankfurt International Auto Show. The company that launched the Second Industrial Revolution 125 years ago with the invention of the gasoline-powered automobile has joined with seven industrial partners -- EnBW, Linde, OMV, Shell, Total, Vattenfall, and the National Organization of Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology -- in a partnership to establish hydrogen fueling stations across Germany in preparation for the mass production of zero-emission fuel cell vehicles in 2015, signaling the beginning of the post-carbon auto era and a Third Industrial Revolution.

The creation of a renewable energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via an energy internet, and connected to plug-in zero-emission transport, establishes the essential 5-Pillars of a Third Industrial Revolution. The forty year build out will create thousands of businesses and millions of sustainable jobs and position Germany as the leader in the next industrial revolution.

Germany's ability to export the new model throughout the European Union and in its partnership regions in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and beyond, will set the framework for the next great stage of European integration, and ultimately determine whether the European political experiment and the European Dream succeeds or fails.

The opportunity is clear. The European Union has 500 million consumers and an additional 500 million potential consumers in its partnership regions, giving it the prospect of becoming the largest and wealthiest internal commercial market in the world. The key is creating a seamless green energy infrastructure, electricity grid, and communication and transport network that will allow one billion people to engage in "sustainable" commerce and trade across the European continent and its periphery. This represents the next stage of European integration as a political union.

In May 2007, the European Parliament issued a formal written declaration endorsing the Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) vision as the long-term economic road map for the European Union. The Third Industrial Revolution is currently being implemented by the various agencies within the European Commission as well as in the member states.

Now, Germany, the economic engine of the European Union, has set out on a course to quickly transform its economy into the new economic paradigm and serve as a lighthouse for moving the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure across the European space. To the extent that Germany can effectively create a sustainable and prosperous post-carbon Europe and transform the continent into the largest integrated market space in the world, Germany will prosper, and the European Union will come of age. Other continental markets and continental unions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas will likely follow suit.

The world community will be watching the German experiment closely to see whether this new economic model can serve as a template for ushering in a new economic era. Germany's future, as well as Europe's and the world, depends on its success.

Renewable Energy Fosters a Boom in Depressed German State

ROSTOCK, GERMANY — Renewable energy has created a gold rush atmosphere in northeastern Germany, the country’s poorhouse, giving the region good jobs and great promise.

The natural resources attracting investors and industry are of a simple variety: wind, sunshine, agricultural products and farm waste like liquid manure.

The rush to tap green resources in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is reminiscent of the frenzies that came with gold or oil discoveries in past centuries. The buzz can be felt in towns and sparkling new factories across the state, which is on the shores of the Baltic.

“Renewable energy has become extremely valuable for our state,” its premier, Erwin Sellering, said during an interview. “It’s just a great opportunity — producing renewable energy and creating manufacturing jobs.”

“From an industrial point of view, we’d been one of Germany’s weaker areas,” he continued. “But the country is abandoning nuclear power. That will work only if there’s a corresponding — and substantial — increase in renewables. It’ll be one of Germany’s most important sectors in the future. We want to be up there leading the way.”

The national government did an about-face on nuclear power after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan, set off by the earthquake and tsunami on March 11. Germany shut eight nuclear plants and plans to close the remaining nine by 2022.

The country is a world leader in renewable energy and wants an even larger share of the $211 billion global market. A fifth of its electricity comes from renewables, up from 6 percent in 2000, and it aims to increase that to 35 percent in 2020.

There are some clouds on the horizon. State-mandated incentives, which fueled a private investment boom, have been cut, squeezing profit margins in sectors like solar energy.

There have also been delays in expanding and improving the national grid of high-voltage transmission lines from sparsely populated coastal regions like Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania to areas where the power is needed, in the west and south. The German government is working to remove infrastructure bottlenecks, but if the grid is not expanded soon, there could be problems later, when more power from offshore wind starts being produced.

Renewable energies, especially wind energy, are injecting new optimism into Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, reflected in a word that often comes up in conversations with business and political leaders: reindustrialization.

In a state with a seafaring heritage, there are now more jobs in renewable energy than in shipyards: 6,000 jobs at 704 companies, a number expected to reach 22,000 by 2020.

Companies are building, designing, maintaining and operating wind turbines and photovoltaic plants, as well as biomass plants, for which farmers are growing crops and collecting animal waste. There are more than 1,200 wind turbines on land, and a new push into offshore wind energy in the Baltic will further fuel that growth.

Many new jobs are at companies like Nordex, which employs 1,000 in Rostock making lightweight rotor blades — as long as 65 meters, or 215 feet — for wind turbines. Nordex has invested €100 million, or $139 million, in expanding its plant and exports 95 percent of its output.

These are sorely needed, highly skilled jobs in a sparsely populated state whose industrial base was devastated by the economic upheaval that accompanied reunification in 1990.

There were 32,800 jobs in the once bustling shipyards around the port city of Rostock when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. But most were wiped out when the shipbuilding industry in eastern Germany collapsed in the face of surging labor costs and fierce competition. There are only 3,300 shipyard jobs left, and the industry’s demise epitomized the east’s decline.

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania became one of the poorest regions in Germany. The jobless rate soared to 20 percent in 2004, double the national average, and the population fell 250,000 to 1.6 million, as many young, well-educated people moved to the more prosperous west in search of jobs. More than 8,000 left the state in 2008, but only 3,500 moved away in 2010.

The prospect that some areas could turn into ghost towns was an explosive issue, but the gloom is lifting, as unemployment has nearly been halved. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, which had the worst jobless rate among Germany’s 16 states in 2007, now has a lower rate than the states of Berlin and Bremen.

“There’s a new sense of optimism, thanks to sectors such as renewable energy, and the migration westwards was slowed if not completely stopped,” said Edeltraud Günther, a professor of environmental management at the Technical University of Dresden.

Jürgen Trittin, a leader of the Greens in Berlin, said a renewables law drafted by his party in 2000 had proved unexpectedly successful in creating jobs across the east. “All of the east is benefiting from that,” he said. “The jobs growth is going to continue with the push into offshore.”

Germany’s first commercial offshore wind park, Baltic 1 — a €48 million project with 21 turbines made by Siemens and operated by EnBW Energie Baden-Württemberg — began pumping enough power for 53,000 households into the grid in May from 16 kilometers, or 10 miles, north of the coast. By 2013, EnBW aims to complete 80 more offshore wind turbines in the Baltic 2 development, 32 kilometers offshore.

Germany expects to have 25 megawatts of offshore wind energy capacity by 2030, produced by 4,000 wind turbines.

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania already gets half of its electricity from regenerative sources — nearly four gigawatt-hours, a fivefold increase since 2000. It aims to cover its entire electricity needs by 2017 and then export the surplus to other states. By 2020, it expects to have 12 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy, enough for three million households. The state will then produce enough power for itself and two neighboring states.

“The natural conditions for renewable energy here are good,” said Mr. Sellering, the state’s premier. “The first goal is to cover our own electricity requirements. Then we want to be an energy-exporting state.”

Warren Buffett – How to Fix Congress

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the best
quotes about the debt ceiling:

“I could end the deficit in 5 minutes,” he told CNBC. “You just pass a law
that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all
sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only
3 months &8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That
was in 1971…before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less
to become the law of the land…all because of public pressure.

Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum
of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do
likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the
message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011
1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when
they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present &future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security
system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system,
and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for
any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans
do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay
will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the
same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American
people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective
1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen.
Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress
is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen
legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to
work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take
three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it
is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!!

If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete.

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Denmark’s Road Map for Fossil Fuel Independence

In BriefLast year, the Danish Commission on Climate Change Policy found that Denmark can remove fossil fuels entirely from its energy system—including transport—by 2050 without introducing nuclear energy or carbon capture and storage. In response, the Danish government immediately adopted the goal of becoming independent of fossil fuels by 2050. Removal of fossil fuels would bring Denmark in line with the EU policy goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80–95 percent by 2050. This report represents the first, comprehensive national analysis for achieving independence from fossil fuels. While the report’s recommendations are specific to the current Danish situation, the approach used in the analyses is generic and can be of use to other nations. Perhaps the most striking finding of all is that the overall cost of achieving fossil fuel independence is only marginally more (on the order of 0.5 percent of GDP in 2050) than predicted total energy-related expenditure in a “business-as-usual” scenario. This near equivalence in cost is due primarily to expected increases in the price of fossil fuels.

For more info click here.

Also, for Virginians see my old blog post Re: Virginia vs Denmark

The True Price of Gas

Rising hopes electric cars can play key role on grid

Climate Progress 15 Oct 2010 07:25 AM PDT


Will electric cars one day become part of a network of rechargeable batteries that can help smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar power? Many experts believe so, pointing to programs in Europe and the U.S. that demonstrate the promise of vehicle-to-grid technology.

Journalist Dave Levitan has the story in this Yale e360 repost.

The United States now has more than 35,000 megawatts of installed wind energy, enough to power close to 10 million homes. Close on the heels of this ongoing renewable energy revolution is another green technology: By next year tens of thousands of Nissan LEAFs, Chevy Volts, and other electric vehicles will start rolling off assembly lines.

The electricity generation and transportation sectors may seem like two disparate pieces of a puzzle, but in fact they may end up being intimately related. The connection comes in the form of the vehicle-to-grid concept, in which a large electric vehicle (EV) fleet — essentially a group of rechargeable batteries that spend most of their time sitting in driveways and garages — might be used to store excess power when demand is low and feed it back to the grid when demand is high. Utilities and electricity wholesalers would pay the EV owners for providing that power.

Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, is not a new idea. In fact, it’s been floating around environmental and green tech circles for a decade at least. But it has always had the tough-to-shed image of a utopian technology. Now, though, V2G — as well as simpler schemes based on smart-timed charging of the vehicles — is slowly becoming reality, evolving in quiet synergy with the worldwide push for renewable energy.

The main drawback of wind and solar power has always been their intermittency: By now it is more than a cliché to say that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. To some extent, that claim is specious: Existing power supplies also vary by huge amounts, and flexible generators, such as natural gas power plants, are called on to balance out the blips. This is called frequency regulation.

Those generators can handle only so much variation, though, says Willett Kempton, director of the Center for Carbon Free Power Integration at the University of Delaware and one of the pioneers of the V2G concept. “And also, we’d rather not be using those generators at all. When you get to 40 percent, 50 percent generation coming from renewables, you need some kind of storage, and this [V2G] is a way of getting storage on the system.”

That storage takes the form of the lithium-ion battery pack on board most EVs being produced today. For V2G to work, though, the cars need to be able to communicate with system operators running the electrical grid — this can be accomplished with a simple Internet connection that could be built into the car’s plug. That communication link and a power converter that lets electricity flow both in and out of the battery will allow an overtaxed electrical grid to draw power from a group of cars, and then charge them when there is plenty of electricity to go around. If renewable energy ever supplies a sizeable portion of a nation’s power needs, using EVs as a diffuse network for storing electricity — and then feeding it back to the grid on demand — could be an important tool in decarbonizing the economy.

V2G technology is beginning to emerge in a number of countries. Japanese carmakers, including Nissan and Mitsubishi, plan to start producing V2G-ready cars by mid-decade. Small pilot projects to test the idea are also underway in Europe, from Sweden to Italy.

Increasingly-green Denmark, though, has taken the lead in V2G adoption. Wind power already accounts for about 20 percent of its electricity supply, and additional planned wind farms will raise that level to 27 percent by the end of 2012 and beyond 50 percent by 2025. At times, when the wind blows strongest, the entire country’s power demand is already met and exceeded by wind turbines. But without a way to store that excess energy, it is essentially lost.

So could a large number of EVs actually help with the huge variations in wind that can occur? According to Claus Ekman, a researcher at the Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Frederiksborgvej, Denmark, it can, to an extent. Ekman recently published a paper in the journal Renewable Energy that modeled how well EVs could handle increasing wind power generation. He found that in a scenario involving 500,000 vehicles and 8 gigawatts of wind power, various strategies would reduce the excess, or lost, wind power by as much as 800 megawatts — enough to power more than 200,000 homes. Ekman calls this a “significant but not dramatic” effect on the grid. Scenarios involving 2.5 million vehicles and even more wind power show an even greater impact.

“The limitation is the total amount of power that the EVs can absorb,” Ekman told Yale Environment 360. “The peaks in the wind power will be too high for the EVs to absorb them completely.”

Even if a large EV fleet couldn’t handle the full extent of a 50-percent wind power penetration in a country like Denmark, which could be fossil fuel-free by mid-century, it could clearly make a dent. And Denmark has already gone beyond the theoretical, with a V2G project called EDISON running on the small island of Bornholm. The goal is to use the storage capacity of EVs to bring the island’s wind power capacity up to 50 percent of the total demand. Because V2G will reduce the need to generate power from traditional sources, researchers estimate that the price of electricity on the island could drop by 50 percent or more. Though the island is home to only 40,000 people, the project could eventually be used as a proof-of-concept for larger systems, both in Denmark and elsewhere.

In the U.S., commercial-scale V2G projects are farther off, but then again so is 20 percent renewable energy penetration. (The U.S. is currently hovering around 2 percent.) Nonetheless, some progress is being made. For almost a year, several modified vehicles based at the University of Delaware have been providing power back to the grid, and getting paid for it.

Kempton, who runs the Delaware V2G pilot program, notes that using V2G storage, rather than huge centralized aggregations of batteries, eliminates the need for additional high-voltage infrastructure, and the economic benefits of using car batteries that consumers are buying anyway are undeniable.



“Maybe once a year you won’t have enough power in your battery to drive where you want to drive, and you’ll have to wait half an hour before you go somewhere,” says Kempton. “In exchange, you’ll get these payments and you’ll be helping bring more renewables onto the system. That’s the deal.”

The Delaware project involves fewer than 10 cars at this point, each earning about $6 per day for the power fed back into the grid. The price will depend on external factors like the cost of natural gas, so as fossil fuel prices rise in the future a plugged-in EV might generate even more money for its owner. And a common concern, that V2G might tax the car batteries too much and shorten their lifespan substantially, hasn’t proven to be an issue to this point.

Policy makers are also getting on board. Delaware now features a first-of-its-kind law requiring utilities to buy back electricity that EVs can offer up to the grid, and an energy storage bill recently passed in California could open the door to V2G in the future. Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) — which governs the interstate sale and movement of electricity — has also expressed support.

Still, the need for further hardware on board the cars may present an economic challenge to large-scale V2G integration. A standard EV can receive a charge but lacks the equipment necessary to send it back out. Paul Denholm, a senior analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Strategic Energy Analysis Center, says that issue is far from resolved.

“I get the impression that the vehicle [manufacturers] aren’t particularly interested in V2G because that’s not a core vehicle technology,” Denholm says. “That would be a lot of extra costs, and they’re in the business of selling cars, not grid services.”

“It’s fine to talk about plug-ins, but it is really going to be a while until we see a sufficient number of vehicles on the road to have an impact on the grid,” Denholm says. “How many Volts are they going to sell, how many LEAFs are they going to sell this year and next year? We’ve got time to figure this all out.”

Chevrolet’s and Nissan’s EV entries won’t ramp up to full-scale production — on the order of hundreds of thousands of vehicles — for a few years, and 20,000 cars here or there won’t provide the type of grid impact that Kempton and others envision. President Obama, however, has set a goal of 1 million EVs and plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015, and last year the administration threw $2.4 billion of stimulus funding behind that goal.

And if slowly building a scattered fleet of residential vehicles won’t help the mass adoption of V2G and managed charging, there are other possibilities. Ken Huber, the senior technology and education principal at regional transmission organization PJM Interconnection — they’re the ones paying that $6 per day to the University of Delaware cars — says fleet vehicles like those of the U.S. Postal Service might make a very attractive place to start with V2G.

The EVs coming onto the market now — including the Volt, LEAF, and Tesla’s Roadster — aren’t equipped for V2G, but Kempton says he is working with manufacturers and hopes to see that change soon. He guesses that within five years, tens of thousands of V2G-ready cars will be produced, and within 10 years “it will be a major component of the vehicle fleet.”

The logical intermediate step before full V2G adoption, most seem to agree, is the use of managed- or smart-charging practices for EVs. With smart charging, a car won’t have to feed any power back to the grid. Instead, it will charge at certain times when demand is low or when the wind is blowing the strongest. Both of those often occur early in the morning, say, between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.

“When people get home at 5 or 6 p.m., that’s typically when the grid peaks in terms of demand for air conditioning and things like that, so it’s a really bad idea to charge right when people get home and plug in,” says Denholm. “If you’re talking about thousands or millions of vehicles, some kind of controlled charging scheme is going to be absolutely necessary.”

In this case, the technology isn’t hard to come by, with smart meters already being deployed nationwide and software that could control the car’s charge readily available. Denholm says that on the simplest level, just a basic timer could do the trick. In Ekman’s Danish study, the best schemes he modeled combined V2G with smart-charging practices to maximize the benefit to wind power integration.

Even with managed charging, though, we may be years off from EVs playing a significant role in renewable energy’s growth.

“They park at the same place, they are very regular in their routes, they know the amount of distance and charge that they need, and they are typically available during those periods when we need it, those 12 off-peak hours,” he says. School bus fleets, which often sit for the entire summer in a parking lot, offer another opportunity.

Such vehicle fleets could fill a need immediately. According to Huber, PJM Interconnection — which provides electricity to about 18 percent of the country’s population in 13 states and the District of Columbia — currently has only about three gigawatts of wind power out of its peak capacity of 144 gigawatts. Even now, there are periods in the early morning when the price of electricity actually becomes negative: There is too much generation and not enough demand, demonstrating the need for power storage.

Huber said that if, as planned, wind generation in the PJM system eventually rises from the current three gigawatts to almost 50 gigawatts — and if EVs in the area reach 1 million in the next five years — the goal of large-scale V2G technology will become a reality in a market that supplies electricity to 51 million people in the mid-Atlantic, Midwestern, and southern states.

Beyond The Empty World Economy: Embracing Time and Consequence

by ADAM FRANK

It’s the horizon that is the problem. It's horizons in time that we have not evolved to see over. We are species with little capacity for no long term planning and its killing us.

Over the last two days Mike Brown, former Microsoft CFO and Nasdaq Chair presented arguments for restricting the dangers of “short selling” — placing bets that investments will fail. Part of Mr. Brown’s cogent argument rested on the dangers of millisecond trading performed solely in the rarified realms of silicon intelligence. This “high frequency” computer trading is a profound example of how science and technology alter the fundamentals of our economic life. Their appearance shifts the adjacent possible –- to use Stuart Kauffman’s terminology –- which then manifests as new facts on the ground for all of us.

But there are dangers living at the other end of timescales for the integration of science, technology and economics. It is the long time horizon which poses the threat to our project of civilization. If we are to adapt to the challenges facing us now we must learn a longer vision that reaches over that temporal horizon.


We live in an illusory empty world economics, where material magically appears for consumption and its waste products magically disappear again. This economic structure was constructed before the tight couplings of ecological relationship were discovered. Thus the fundamentals of our economic model exists in a fictional world where consequences for planetary systems of atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere were of little or no importance. To understand how this was possible you need only reflect on a single word.

Time.

The timescales for large-scale changes in planetary systems have been too long to be seen or acted on.

The horizon was too far away.

Climate change, driven by 100 years of exponential growth in fossil fuel consumption is an obvious example of consequences living over the time horizon of our economics. For those who continue to insist on ignoring the overwhelming evidence for Climate Change the impending crisis in fresh water supplies can serve as an example.

Stepping back it is remarkable that our science and technology became so powerful, so quickly that their economic deployment rocketed us towards the “ceilings” in planetary systems in just a century or so. On one level we could be proud of ourselves. But as Spiderman’s uncle says. “With great power comes great responsibility”

The responsibility here will be to invent a new economics of consequences, an economics that can think in centuries.

This will not be easy but it will not be without precedent. Humanity has shown itself capable of engaging in multi-generational projects (The Great Wall of China, The Great Cathedrals of Europe, Stonehenge, etc). The trick, of course, is to get started now. There is more to say on this idea of humanity and the Long Now and I will post on it again.

For now it is enough to see the disparity between the short attention span built deep into the heart of our economics and the long attention to consequence that our scientific and technological evolution have forced upon us.

Europe Will Be Powered By Saharan Sun in Five Years

The super-sized solar projects being built in the Sahara desert will start generating and providing Europe with clean energy within the next five years, according to the European energy commissioner. This is much sooner, than the initial 10-year time frame given to the project.

The EU and many European companies are helping to fund a large scheme of solar projects in Northern Africa called Desertec in hopes of using that energy to meet a target of having 20 percent of its energy come from renewables by 2020. The first phase of projects will have a capacity in the hundreds of megawatts, while over the next 20 to 40 years, the capacity will reach hundreds of gigawatts.

The electricity will be transmitted to Europe with new inter-connector cables being constructed under the Mediterranean Sea, but will also service African nations.

New planet Corot-9b has Earth-like temperatures

By Steve Connor
The first planet with a "temperate" climate to orbit a distant star has been discovered by astronomers, who claim that the techniques used to study it will be critical in the search for Earth-like worlds beyond our own solar system.

Corot-9b, as the planet is called, is one of more than 400 "exoplanets" found to be orbiting other stars, but it is the first one with a near-normal temperature range that can be studied as it moves across (or "transits") the sun it orbits. "This is a normal, temperate exoplanet just like dozens we already know, but this is the first whose properties we can study in depth," said Claire Moutou, one of the team of astronomers at the European Southern Observatory who made the discovery. "It is bound to become a Rosetta stone in exoplanet research."

Corot-9b passes in front of its host star, 1,500 light years away in the constellation Serpens, every 95 days, and the transit lasts about eight hours, which is when astronomers can make measurements of the planet's composition and temperature, estimated to range from minus 20C to 160C.

"Corot-9b is the first exoplanet that really does resemble planets in our solar system," said Hans Deeg, the lead author of the study published in the journal Nature. "It has the size of Jupiter and an orbit similar to that of Mercury."

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Applied Materials Moves Solar Expertise to China

Here is another example of the changing leadership in the world economy:

The world's biggest supplier of solar-manufacturing equipment has opened a research and development center in China, and its chief technology officer will relocate from Silicon Valley to that country next month. Applied Materials, founded in 1967 as a semiconductor company, has manufactured in China for 25 years, but is expanding its presence to be closer to its customers and develop products suited to the country's urban population.

For the rest of the article click here.