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Gene Ellis

Wind Farms Take Root Out at Sea - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...arms-take-root-out-at-sea.html

wind

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • “If you want to do wind on a big scale with power plants based on wind, you need to go offshore,
  • but that will depend on many factors, including costs and government support.
  • Siemens figures there are about 3.3 gigawatts of offshore wind power connected to the grid in Europe. That is similar in size to a large contemporary nuclear power station.
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  • Wind farms are no longer engineering experiments or small pilot schemes. They have grown very large, to the point where they are of the same scale as gas- or coal-fired power stations.
  • Offshore wind has advantages beyond the presence of sea breezes. The seabed is relatively cheap real estate, and much larger wind farms can be built there than on land. The vast expanses available at sea allow economies of scale that may bring down costs.
  • The key to cutting costs, Mr. Hannibal said, is to simplify the installation process and turn manufacturing of turbines into a cookie-cutter industrial process. The latest turbines are made of just a few components that are relatively easy to anchor to the sea bottom.
  • Still, costs remain stubbornly high. Mr. Hannibal figures that the power to be produced by new German offshore wind projects will cost 130 to 140 euros, or $175 to $185, per megawatt hour, which is about triple the wholesale power price.
Gene Ellis

Tracing Germs Through the Aisles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-germs-through-the-aisles.html

antibiotic animals

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • More than 70 percent of all the antibiotics used in the United States are given to animals.
  • Agribusiness groups disagree and say the main problem is overuse of antibiotic treatments for people. Bugs rarely migrate from animals to people, and even when they do, the risk they pose to human health is negligible, the industry contends.
  • He is comparing the genetic sequences of E. coli germs resistant to multiple antibiotics found in the meat samples to the ones that have caused urinary tract infections in people (mostly women).
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Urinary infections were chosen because they are so common. American women get more than eight million of them a year. In rare cases the infections enter the bloodstream and are fatal.
  • A new strain of the antibiotic-resistant bug MRSA, for example, was first detected in people in Holland in 2003, and now represents 40 percent of the MRSA infections in humans in that country, according to Jan Kluytmans, a Dutch researcher. That same strain was common in pigs on farms before it was found in people, scientists say.
  • He thinks the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to limit antibiotic use on farms have been weak. In 1977, the F.D.A. said it would begin to ban some agricultural uses of antibiotics. But the House and Senate appropriations committees — dominated by agricultural interests — passed resolutions against the ban, and the agency retreated. More recently, the agency has limited the use of two important classes of antibiotics in animals. But advocates say it needs to go further and ban use of all antibiotics for growth promotion. Sweden and Denmark have already done so.
  • Ms. Slaughter said aggressive lobbying by agribusiness interests has played a major role in blocking passage of legislation.
  • But the economics of food presents perhaps the biggest obstacle. On large industrial farms, animals are raised in close contact with one another and with big concentrations of bacteria-laden feces and urine. Antibiotics keep infections at bay but also create drug resistance.
Gene Ellis

The FDA is cracking down on antibiotics on farms. Here's what you should know. - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rms-heres-what-you-should-know

shared by Gene Ellis on 21 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The FDA is cracking down on antibiotics on farms. Here’s what you should know.
Gene Ellis

Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ice-vs-conventional-fuels.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels
  • In Texas, Austin Energy signed a deal this spring for 20 years of output from a solar farm at less than 5 cents a kilowatt-hour.
  • Without subsidies, the firm’s analysis shows, solar costs about 7.2 cents a kilowatt-hour at the low end, with wind at 3.7 cents.
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  • Mr. Mir noted there were hidden costs that needed to be taken into account for both renewable energy and fossil fuels. Solar and wind farms, for example, produce power intermittently — when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing — and that requires utilities to have power available on call from other sources that can respond to fluctuations in demand.
  • “Renewables had two issues: One, they were too expensive, and they weren’t dispatchable. They’re not too expensive anymore.”
  • Especially in the interior region of the country, from North Dakota down to Texas, where wind energy is particularly robust, utilities were able to lock in long contracts at 2.1 cents a kilowatt-hour, on average, she said. That is down from prices closer to 5 cents five years ago.
  • Already, solar executives are looking to extend a 30 percent federal tax credit that is set to fall to 10 percent at the end of 2016.
Gene Ellis

U.S. Offshore Wind Farm, Made in Europe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-wind-farm-made-in-europe.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • On Germany’s coast, for example, an estimated $1.3 billion went into revitalizing ports and factories to serve the industry, creating about 10,000 jobs. But demand frequently drops off when projects stall, at times leaving factories in coastal towns like Cuxhaven, on Germany’s North Sea, sitting idle with hundreds of workers laid off.
  • But a major setback came around 2009, when G.E. decided to back away from the offshore wind business, saying it was still too expensive to compete with land-based wind power.
Gene Ellis

European Union Leaders Agree to Slimmer Budget - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ropean-union-budget-talks.html

european union

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Why should a Latvian cow deserve less money than a French, Dutch or even Romanian one?
  • In a system that requires unanimous approval of budget decisions, what Latvia wants for its dairy farmers — or Estonia for its railways, Hungary for its poorer regions or Spain for its fishermen — is no small matter.
  • The colossal effort that was required to agree to a sum of about 960 billion euros ($1.3 trillion), a mere 1 percent of the bloc’s gross domestic product, exposed once again the stubborn attachment to national priorities that has made reaching agreements on how to save the euro so painful in recent years.
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  • the ordeal as “not a pleasant experience,” but said, “It only happens every seven years, so we can tolerate it.”
  • Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands were among the Northern European nations that fought hard to reduce agricultural subsidies and increase spending on research and development to bolster the bloc’s global competitiveness.
  • The spectacle of European leaders haggling through the night over amounts of money representing rounding errors in their national accounts demonstrated vividly their reluctance to make collective policies that erode their nations’ sovereignty.
  • “What we’re seeing is that European integration is very important to European leaders as long as it doesn’t imply that someone has to be paying for someone else,”
  • farm spending remained the largest single portion of the budget, accounting for about 38 percent of the total — although that was down from about 42 percent in the previous seven-year budget period.
Gene Ellis

European Union Leaders Agree to Slimmer Budget - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ropean-union-budget-talks.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Galileo, a grossly overbudget and still unfinished satellite navigation project that aims to free Europe from its dependence on the United States’ global positioning system, escaped the cuts and is to receive 6.3 billion euros from 2014 to 2020.
  • But he cheered the preservation of heavy spending on farm subsidies, of which France is the biggest beneficiary.
  • And about 1 billion euros in cuts came from the part of the budget used to employ 55,000 people, including 6,000 translators,
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  • he devoted much of a postsummit news conference to boasting about his steadfast defense of British interests, particularly a multibillion-dollar rebate that Britain receives each year on its payments.
  • In the Baltic nations, for example, farmers are furious that a system of cash payments to support agriculture is skewed in favor of farmers from richer countries like France and the Netherlands. Latvian farmers say they get less than 40 percent of the European Union’s average payment level for each acre of land. Dairy farmers say they fare even worse, getting just 20 percent of what their Dutch counterparts receive.
Gene Ellis

European Union Leaders Gather in Brussels Over Budget - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-in-brussels-over-budget.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • He has threatened to veto any new budget that does not at least freeze spending,
  • “Europeans who are attached to the European Union are now in a minority.” Fifty-two percent of those surveyed said they felt little or no attachment, up seven percentage points since 2010. In Britain, only 27 percent felt attached to the union.
  • Ahead of this week’s negotiations, at least seven countries, mostly those that contribute more to Europe’s coffers than they get back in farm subsidies and other payments, have already warned that they may veto a budget that does not give them a better deal. Among these is Austria, where, according to Mr. Ehrenhauser, who sits on the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee, “there is a critical mass building against the European Union.”
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  • The rethink, which would have scrapped spending on agricultural subsidies, ran into heavy opposition and stalled
  • All long-term budget decisions require unanimous approval by the member states, a rule first established when the grouping, then known as the European Economic Community, had just six members, not 27. The power of veto makes any major change to spending all but impossible and entrenches the status quo, no matter how unworkable or unpopular.
  • “It is extremely difficult to change anything,” Mr. Sapir said. “Everyone is always fighting at the margins over narrow national interests. They try to make sure they get money for their own countries and that cuts go to other countries.”
  • After months of arguments, two broad alliances have emerged. The first comprises countries like Britain, Germany and Sweden that are big net contributors and want to keep a tighter rein on spending. The second, known as the “Friends of Cohesion,” after a class of development grants aimed at less wealthy areas, includes Poland, Spain, Portugal and others that want to make sure the union’s largess does not dry up.
  • The European Commission, however, has been far less forthcoming. It told Mr. Ehrenhauser that it could not give a breakdown of spending in recent years on wine because that would require “lengthy research” and “it cannot consider doing this at the present time because of other priorities.”
Gene Ellis

Why Is Zambia So Poor? And Will Things Ever Get Better? - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...zation-mining-corruption-66080

Zambia Why so poor?

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.
  • For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.
  • Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company
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  • At its peak, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines company employed more than 65,000 Zambians and carried out services like water delivery and waste collection for five cities in the Copper Belt Province.
  • Mining employment has dropped to just 30,000, half of its glory-days peak, and the job of maintaining all that company housing and infrastructure has reverted back to the government.
  • The stats identify Switzerland as Zambia’s primary export market. This is not an indicator that Zambia hosts a thriving chocolate and suspenders sector, but rather that its copper trades are booked in the jurisdiction where they are least likely to be taxed.
  • Many of the mining companies pay just 0.6 percent royalties to Zambia, far below the already-meager industry standard of three percent.
  • And then there’s the Chinese. They arrived like a well-packed picnic, everything in shipping crates ready to be unpacked. Their own materials, their own equipment, their own workers, their own fences. If you were designing a foreign investment not to benefit the host community, this is what it would look like.
  • This is Namwile Uzondile, the director of a rural health education project.
  • Last year Namwile conducted a survey of prostitutes here in Kitwe, and found that at least half of them had education certificates, but couldn’t find work. Most had been married off early, 15 or 16, and since then had either left their husbands or lost them to AIDS.
  • First, you go to the tribal chief. Ninety-four percent of the land in Zambia is customary or traditional, no one has a title to it. It’s not just sitting there, people are living on it, farming, grazing animals, it’s just technically under the control of a chief.
  • In Zambia most of the chiefs require a gift just to get a meeting. This might mean taking them lunch at a restaurant in Lusaka, or it could mean buying their daughter a car—it’s up to them.
  • Another reason Zambia lacks skills is that some parts of the workforce operate as cartels. Take lawyers. Zambia only has 1,000 of them, and they’re concentrated where the money is: Lusaka (government), Copper Belt (mining) and Livingstone (safari tourists).
  • Last year, only six lawyers were admitted to the bar out of 164 who took the exam. The year before that, it was 16 out of 145. Keep in mind, these aren’t people coming in off the streets. These are people who have a law degree.
  • More than 60 percent of Zambia’s government revenue comes from the copper mines.
  • Taxing all this informal activity would be costly in both resources and voter goodwill. In 2012, Zambia collected just $2.3 million in income taxes from its citizens.
  • It goes as high up as you want to follow it. Michael Sata, the president of Zambia, appointed his uncle the finance minister, his nephew the deputy finance minister, his niece the local government minister, and cousins as ambassador to Japan and chief justice.
  • Zambia’s cabinet has ballooned to 20 ministers and 47 deputy ministers, the largest in Africa. With salaries three to four times higher than opposition MPs and each ministerial post bundled with perks like a company car, free fuel, house servants, and mobile phone talk-time, you get the feeling politicians aren’t jumping from opposition into government on moral sentiment alone.
  • But even if Zambia was run by a coalition of charitable technocrats and Mormon philanthropists, that wouldn’t solve the most fundamental problem of all: There simply isn’t that much money to go around.
  • In 2011, Zambia spent a total of $4.3 billion running itself. Stretch that to cover every man, woman, and child, and it amounts to just $325 per person per year. That amount—less than a dollar per person per day—has to cover education, health care, infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign debt … everything.
  • Now she goes all NGO. “Little government capacity,” she says, is the nicest way to put it. “There are simply no systems for routine government services,” she says. Getting a license, a permit, certificates, approvals to start work, visas for expats to fly down here—nothing is in one place, nothing is fast or easy.
  • And that’s just the bureaucracy. Then there are the cops that pull you over to ask for 50 kwacha ($10); the schools with slots reserved for paying parents; the hospitals that swear the earliest appointment, the only available medicine, is six months away until you reach into your pocket.
  • “Sometimes we have to pay for the inspectors to come to our mines,” Jane says.
  • The conversation goes like this: Jane tells the local certification body that she needs an inspector to sign off for a permit. The local certification body tells her that they would be happy to come out to the site, but they don’t have fuel for their cars, or enough petty cash to pay per diems. Jane offers to pay their costs, but only their costs, and the payments aren’t related to clearing the inspection.
  • The company has even paid the police to follow up on complaints or to investigate thefts. “They say, ‘We don’t have this in our budget’ or ‘We’ll need you to pay for it,’” Jane says. So the company fixes the police cars, covers their travel expenses, treats them to lunch.
  • “We tell them, ‘The company I work for, we’re not going to pay up.’ But at the end of the day, they know you’re on a short timeline, and they aren’t.”
  • Thomas’ family told him his nephews didn’t need to be in school. From their perspective, that’s not totally irrational. In a country with so few formal jobs and so much competition for getting them, I can see how spending hundreds of hours, thousands of kwachas, on education would seem superfluous. Thomas’ daughter wants to become a lawyer. You could almost forgive Thomas if he told her that the bar exam failure rate is more than 90 percent, so what’s the use?
  • International investors pledged $750 million last year to build infrastructure.
Gene Ellis

A Disease Cuts Corn Yields - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-disease-cuts-corn-yields.html

GM

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • No one is certain why Goss’s wilt has become so rampant in recent years. But many plant pathologists suspect that the biggest factor is the hybrids chosen for genetic modification by major seed companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. “My theory is that there were a couple of hybrids planted that were selected because they had extremely high yield potentials,” said Dr. Robertson, whose research is financed by Monsanto and the Agriculture Department. “They also may have been highly susceptible to Goss’s wilt.”
  • About 90 percent of the corn grown in the United States comes from seeds that have been engineered in a laboratory, their DNA modified with genetic material not naturally found in corn species. Almost all American corn, for instance, is now engineered to resist the powerful herbicide glyphosate (often sold as Roundup), so farmers can kill weeds without killing their corn.
  • As farmers grow more corn to satisfy the demand for ethanol, they are rotating it less frequently with other crops.
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  • “One of the best management techniques for controlling Goss’s wilt is crop rotation — corn, then soy or another crop,” Mr. Anderson said.
  • nother possible factor is the growth of no-till farming, which leaves cornstalks, on which the bacteria can linger, to decay in the field after harvesting, rather than being plowed under.
Gene Ellis

Utilities Switch Off Investment in Fossil Fuel Plants - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ent-in-fossil-fuel-plants.html

utilities switch investment fossil fossil fuel fuel plants

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14
       
      Note:  a LARGE power station =s 40 direct jobs.
  • workers at the large power station known as Keadby 1 are preparing to shut it down at the end of the summer, with the loss of about 40 jobs.
  • fluctuations in global energy markets have made the natural gas power plant unprofitable
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  • It has also delayed new energy investments and is planning to close almost a quarter of its fossil fuel power plants,
  • European energy companies, struggling to respond to weak demand in a flatlining economy, say they need guaranteed pricing to keep open unprofitable plants or to invest in new ones.
  • Their revenue is being hit by dwindling demand for electricity and by new wind and solar projects that undercut the price of the energy produced from many fossil fuel plants.
  • At the same time, record-low prices on carbon emissions trading markets, which were introduced to encourage clean and efficient energy production and use, have perversely become a disincentive to investment.
  • Many of the Continent’s aging power stations, particularly those that burn highly polluting coal, are earmarked for closure by 2020 to meet stringent local environment regulations.
  • Without these investments, industrial companies in Europe may face higher energy prices when local economies eventually recover,
  • “Energy utilities are facing a perfect storm,”
  • In a bid to generate 20 percent of the European Union’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020, Germany, Spain and other E.U. countries have provided hefty subsidies to wind and solar farms, which now constitute a sizable minority of daily electricity generation, often surpassing the 20 percent target.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14
       
      In effect, a cheaper overall form of energy (non-renewables) had to compete with heavy subsidies to renewables, which, once built, had low operating costs.  They cannot compete and do not invest, and there are major problems w/investing more in renewables (they are overall more expensive, and they have built-in faults, producing electricity erratically, or during the wrong times.)  The high costs of energy also lie with government, who cemented long-term deals with the ex-USSR linking other energy prices to the price of oil.  In short, they shot themselves in the foot.  Several times.
  • European utilities like E.On of Germany have announced plans to shut down less-polluting natural gas-fired plants that have been undercut by dirtier coal-burning generators benefiting from a flood of low-cost coal imports and low carbon emissions prices.
  • Despite the upfront costs associated with green energy projects, they are inexpensive to run. In contrast, Europe’s gas and coal plants, which also provide backup power when renewables cannot operate, need constant spending on fossil fuels.
  • Policy makers are debating a system of support payments to keep uneconomic power plants open,
  • “Without long-term signals of energy prices, investment won’t happen.”
  • Some analysts also expect domestic regulators to eventually create financial incentives for companies
Gene Ellis

EU energy market: Pipe dream - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...3c-11e3-afb3-00144feabdc0.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • EU energy market: Pipe dream
  • A more competitive market also means importing new sources of gas from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as building terminals for liquefied natural gas.
  • France’s nuclear industry was also reticent about cheap renewable energy streaming into the French grid on an uncertain timetable.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Spain’s grid is barely connected to France so its wind farms cannot export their production when it exceeds domestic demand. Similarly, solar and wind energy from southern Italy is wasted because it is not effectively linked to the industrial north.
  • Full energy convergence needs more than interconnectors. Widely divergent electricity prices are often determined by national tax rates. Grids that can respond to demand further afield in a continent-wide “supergrid” will need more direct (rather than alternating) current infrastructure. While it took Spain and France more than three decades to build a 64.5km interconnection, some 52,000km of lines need to be built or upgraded across the continent.
  • Poland argues that Gazprom has confidential data on each country it deals with, knowing its gas prices and infrastructure vulnerabilities. It can then use this data to its advantage, pushing some countries into more onerous contracts than others.
  • The advantage of a hub would become more apparent when new supplies from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean are integrated into the market by means of the so-called southern corridor supply route.
  • Geoffrey Feasey of the European Network of Transmission Systems Operators for Electricity says one-third of the most vital projects to connect Europe are being held up by “permitting and public acceptance”.
Gene Ellis

Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...03global.html

Business globalization economics shipping ocsts

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Jan 14 - Cached
  • The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.
  • Jeffrey E. Garten, the author of “World View: Global Strategies for the New Economy” and a former dean of the Yale School of Management, said that companies “cannot take a risk that the just-in-time system won’t function, because the whole global trading system is based on that notion.” As a result, he said, “they are going to have to have redundancies in the supply chain, like more warehousing and multiple sources of supply and even production.”
  • In a more regionalized trading world, economists say, China would probably end up buying more of the iron ore it needs from Australia and less from Brazil, and farming out an even greater proportion of its manufacturing work to places like Vietnam and Thailand.
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