Clean Energy Transition

Searching the web it is possible to find the price of a short gallon of regular gasoline for a number of countries around the World. In April the USAToday published a good number of prices provided by the AA Motoring Trust. And the Wikipedia gathers prices reported on the media during the last months. Compiling these numbers one gets Figure 1.

To take a glimpse at what life might be like without today’s reliable supply we take a trip to Africa, Uganda, courtesy of Nokia who have carried out an investigation looking at how people manage to keep their mobile phones charged and maintain some degree of electricity use at home in off-grid parts of the country.

Odyssee is a detailed database on energy efficiency data & indicators, for the EU-15 members and Norway.

To all, who know how to solve the problems mathematically, something for you all? Please solve it Kirchoff’s Current Law (KCL): At every node, the sum of all currents entering a node must equal zero. Kirchoff’s Voltage Law (KVL): The voltage law says that the sum of voltages around every closed loop in the circuit must equal zero.

Together, we project these four clean-energy technologies, which totaled $39.9 billion in 2005 and expanded 39 percent to $55.4 billion in 2006, to quadruple to more than $226.5 billion within a decade.

Oil commodity futures are in demand as financial instruments in a different way than when they were used primarily as a way for refiners and distributors to manage the risk on their physical market activities. As that demand grows--as more individuals, companies, and hedge funds want to participate in the oil market, without a link to any physical supply or demand for the commodity--then the price of these instruments ought to rise, in tandem. But with the price of most physical oil pegged to a futures market, whether for WTI or European Brent crude, that demand can influence the physical market, as well, without changing the real supply or demand by one barrel.

Ohio State University engineers are working to make the traffic control boxes that stand beside major freeways smarter. They've developed new software that helps the computerized boxes locate road incidents -- such as traffic back-ups or accidents -- and notify transportation authorities at lower cost, especially in rural areas.

Global Resource Corporation (GRC) (OTC: GBRC.PK) claims that its HAWK 10 high-frequency microwave recycling process can recover oil and gases from oil shale, residual oil, drill cuttings, tar sands oil, contaminated dredge/sediments, tires and  plastics with significantly greater yields and lower costs than are available utilizing existing known technologies.

But does planting trees reduce global warming? Not in most places on the earth. The Carnegie Institution's Ken Caldeira summarized the result of a major 2005 study (PDF) this way: "To plant forests to mitigate climate change outside of the tropics is a waste of time."

But a new study by the Harvard School of Public Health could throw a wrench in that argument, by suggesting that heat waves are deadlier than cold snaps – if true, that means the winter-time benefit of a warmer planet may be more than offset by an increase in deaths in the summer.

If a smart company like Google can seriously think it can go green by burning coal and then buying offsets and if a smart company like PG&E is bragging about a new program that allows customers to offset their electricity emissions by planting trees (a dopey program I'll blog about later), then something is very wrong about the general understanding of offsets.

I suspect many people here have already written off hydrogen as a near-term transportation fuel, but I wanted to recommend Joseph J. Romm’s The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate anyway. (Note that I read the 2005 edition of the book.)

In a follow-up to his now-legendary TED2006 presentation, Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty.

According to a June 6, 2007 press release by Marine Current Turbines Ltd (MCT), the installation of its 1.2 MW SeaGen commercial tidal energy system will commence during the week of August 20th in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough. SeaGen will be the world’s largest tidal current device and will generate clean and sustainable electricity for approximately 1000 homes. Being a full size prototype, no scale up will be required for future commercial installations.

In their sustainability report 2006, Shell gives a few key figures to paint a picture of the world in 2050 and to compare it with the world we are living in today and the world as it was in 1907 when Shell was founded.