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Gene Ellis

Gazprom Cuts Russia's Natural Gas Supply to Ukraine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-ukraine-in-gas-dispute.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The gas flowing into Ukraine as of Monday was meant only to transit the country to Europe. “Gazprom supplies to Ukraine only the amount that has been paid for, and the amount that has been paid for is zero,” Gazprom’s spokesman, Sergei Kupriyanov, told reporters.
  • Gazprom, which has sought for the past decade to convince the Europeans that it is a reliable supplier and not an arm of Russian foreign policy, painted the dispute as strictly commercial.
  • Second, Gazprom has provoked economic ire in Europe over its plans to build an alternative gas route under the Black Sea for the company’s exclusive use, contradicting Europe’s open access laws. That has put the future of what is known as the South Stream pipeline in doubt.
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  • About a fifth of the European Union’s supply of natural gas flows through Ukraine. Ukraine itself imported from Russia 63 percent of the natural gas it consumed in 2012, producing the remaining 37 percent domestically, according to the United States Energy Information Agency.
Gene Ellis

As LED Industry Evolves, China Elbows Ahead - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lbows-its-way-to-the-fore.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • As LED Industry Evolves, China Elbows Ahead
  • “LED lighting could see itself become the next solar, wind or other future opportunity that the U.S. will have given away by failing to address Chinese industrial policies and unfairly traded products,”
  • SolarWorld, a solar panel maker that complained to the American government about what it considered unfair advantages for Chinese competitors, was later the victim of a cyberattack by Chinese military officials, according to a recent indictment by the Justice Department.
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  • American, European and Chinese regulators have put in effect energy-efficiency rules that phase out the use of incandescent bulbs. Big multinationals that make light bulbs like Philips, Osram and General Electric have responded by embracing light-emitting diodes, which use one-fifth of the electricity of incandescent bulbs and half the electricity of fluorescent bulbs.
  • Many Chinese producers also have a poor and worsening reputation for quality, which may hurt them in the long term.
  • The industry, for instance, is highly segmented.
  • Lighting accounts for about 6 percent of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, and LEDs have the potential to steeply reduce them.
  • Prices have fallen by nearly half in the last year for low-end, low-wattage LEDs made in China, and by 15 to 20 percent for the higher-wattage versions made elsewhere, buyers and manufacturing executives said.
  • “We do not buy Chinese LEDs,” said Mike Pugh, the procurement director at Xicato in San Jose, Calif., a large provider of indoor lighting systems for retailers and hotels. “We just can’t take that chance.”
  • Xicato instead buys LEDs from multinationals like Cree of Durham, N.C.; Philips Lumileds, based in San Jose, Calif.; and Osram Opto Semiconductors of Regensburg, Germany.
  • Three-quarters of China’s electricity still comes from burning coal, which contributes to severe air pollution as well as global warming.
  • The Chinese LED industry has created tens of thousands of well-paid jobs for young community college graduates
  • She earns $500 a month plus medical benefits and free food and lodging in an air-conditioned dormitory where employees sleep four to six i
  • the solar and LED industries in China received huge loans at low interest rates from state-owned banks following directives from Beijing
Gene Ellis

Blueprints for Taming the Climate Crisis - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...taming-the-climate-crisis.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Blueprints for Taming the Climate Crisis
  • Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. In fact, by midcentury more than half of the American economy will run on electricity. Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal’s footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply.
  • “This will require a heroic cooperative effort,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who directs the Sustainable Development Solutions Network at the United Nations,
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  • The teams, one in each of the 15 countries, looked at what would be necessary to keep the atmosphere from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above the preindustrial average of the late 19th century, a target that most of the world committed to at the climate summit meeting in Copenhagen five years ago.
  • To do so, CO2 emissions from industry and energy use would have to fall to at most 1.6 tons a year for every person on the planet by midcentury.
  • That is less than a tenth of annual American emissions per person today and less than a third of the world average
  • Lacking any understanding of the feasibility of the exercise, governments postured and jockeyed over which country should be responsible for what
  • This is not achievable by going after low-hanging fruit, such as replacing coal with natural gas in power plants.
  • The decarbonization paths rely on aggressive assumptions about our ability to deploy new technologies on a commercial scale economically.
  • Russia, for instance, hit the target. But Oleg Lugovoy of the Environmental Defense Fund, who worked on the Russian plan, observed that “if we don’t have carbon capture and storage we would have to reconsider.”
  • it does not do away with the main hitch that has stumped progress for decades: How much will this all cost and who will pay for it?
Gene Ellis

Wind Industry's New Technologies Are Helping It Compete on Price - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lping-it-compete-on-price.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Wind Industry’s New Technologies Are Helping It Compete on Price
Gene Ellis

Why Apple Got a 'Made in U.S.A.' Bug - NYTimes.com - 0 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...-apple-got-a-made-in-u-s-a-bug

apple u s location economics mncs

shared by Gene Ellis on 11 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Today, rising energy prices and a global market for computers are changing the way companies make their machines.
  • Hewlett-Packard, which turns out over 50 million computers a year through its own plants and subcontractors, makes many of its larger desktop personal computers in such higher-cost areas as Indianapolis and Tokyo to save on fuel costs and to serve business buyers rapidly.
  • “It’s important that they get an order in five days,
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  • there is a pride for the local consumer to see a sticker that says ‘Made in Tokyo,’
  • Cook is looking to give Apple some good news.
  • A Dell factory in Winston-Salem, N.C., for which Dell received $280 million in incentives from the government, was shut in 2010 (Dell had to repay some of the incentives).
  • In 1998, President Bill Clinton visited a Gateway Computer factory outside Dublin to cheer the role of American manufacturers in the rise of a “Celtic Tiger” in technology.That plant was shut in 2001, when Gateway elected to save costs by manufacturing in China
  • As cheap as a Chinese assembly worker may be, an emerging trend in manufacturing, specialized robots, promises to be even cheaper. The most valuable part of the computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with robots. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.
  • The labor cost on a notebook, which is about 4 to 5 percent of the retail price, is only slightly higher than the cost of shipping by air. Soon even that is likely to change because of the twin forces of lower manufacturing costs from automation and higher transportation costs from rising global activity.
  • Intel, which makes most of the processors, has plants in Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Israel, Ireland and China.
  • Many other chip companies design their own products and have them made in giant factories, largely in Taiwan and China. Computer screens are made in Taiwan and South Korea, for the most part.
  • The special glass used for the touch screens of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, however, is an exception. It comes primarily from the United States.
  • More recent products, laptops and notebook computers, were in many cases originally assembled in China, and they are still largely made there. So are most smartphones and tablets. Every week, H.P. sends a group of cargo containers filled with notebooks to Europe.
  • That plant was shut in 2001, when Gateway elected to save costs by manufacturing in China. Dell, which made its mark by developing lean manufacturing techniques in Texas, closed its showcase Austin factory in 2008 as part of a companywide move to manufacturing in China. A Dell factory in Winston-Salem, N.C., for which Dell received $280 million in incentives from the government, was shut in 2010 (Dell had to repay some of the incentives).
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