Green Industrial Revolution can replace carbon-generated and even nuclear power infrastructures with renewable energy, storage system technologies, and smart green on-site distributed grids

Prompted by the Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970s, the Green Industrial Revolution started to emerge at the end of the 20th century. Initially proclaimed as occurring in northern Europe, it actually began in Japan and South Korea before it emerged in Europe. As a small and densely populated island nation of 130 million people, Japan has a tradition for the need of energy, but with "no waste" that dates back to the Middle Ages. By the 1980s, Japan and South Korea were concerned with the need to become energy independent and secure. As a result, they developed national policies and programs to reduce their growing dependency on foreign fuels. By the beginning of the 21st century, China had leapfrogged the USA into this new era, driven by unprecedented economic growth and development, urbanization and infrastructure needs. In northern Europe, the Green Industrial Revolution received a big push from Germany's Energiewende and its feed-in-tariff (FiT) program. Germany became the number one producer and installer of solar panels for homes, offices, and large open areas from 2006-09. In 2010, Italy then took the FiT concept into its economic and culture so that it held the distinction of world leader in solar panel installation. China took the lead in 2011 and continues as the number one solar panel and photovoltaic manufacturer and installer. Japan is now leading in auto manufacturing, jumping ahead of the competition with its hybrids. The Green Industrial Revolution, with its extraordinary new technologies and promise of thousands of new green jobs, is trying to come to America. It is hampered by the lack of a national energy policy, and a political process that is beholden to the fossil fuel industry. Big Oil and now Natural Gas, which calls itself "clean energy", have been America's "elephant-in-the room" for over a hundred years, exploiting the nation's resources, pushing the country into a dependence on foreign oil producers who are politically destabilizing, and not aligned with our national interests. The natural gas industry sees the rise and commercialization of hydrogen fuel cell cars from all the auto manufacturers around the world as its future. The industry anticipates being "selected" as the primarily source for hydrogen to refuel the thousands of hydrogen-powered cars predicted to be on the roads, starting with California and other areas of the US in 2015. A recent biding process in California awarded 20 out of 25 hydrogen refueling stations to one natural gas company. And Yes. There are ethical and conflict of interest issues in this process and the one company selected. These companies have "influenced" decisions made on the refueling stations as they know that these stations will need to be paid for over decades and make the consumers of all transportation systems dependent upon them: drilling, processing, pumping (pipelines and trains) as well as reforming into hydrogen energy for vehicles. A new era of sustainability and carbonless energy generation is here now. The push , public policy, economics and technologies for renewable energy with a carbonless lifestyle will become history's largest social and economic megatrend. The potential of extraordinary benefits in the form of economic revival, innovation, emerging technologies, and significant job growth for those nations capable of fast entry is here today. Developing nations know this. Developed ones, like the US are still trapped in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions. Indeed, the world has changed Source:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/woodrow-clark/green-industrial-revolution_b_6045660.html

UPDATE: Any Climate Deal From Upcoming Summit Likely To Be Too Weak To Stop Warming - Reuters

A global deal to combat climate change in 2015 looks more likely after promises for action by China, the United States and the European Union, but any agreement will probably be too weak to halt rising temperatures. Delegates from almost 200 nations will meet in Lima, Peru, from Dec. 1-12 to work on the accord due in Paris in a year's time, also spurred by new scientific warnings about risks of floods, heatwaves, ocean acidification and rising seas. After failure to agree a sweeping U.N. treaty at a summit in Copenhagen in 2009, the easier but less ambitious aim now is a deal made up of "nationally determined" plans to help reverse a 45 percent rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. "We are in much better shape," a year before Paris than in the run-up to Copenhagen, said Yvo de Boer, who was the U.N.'s climate chief in 2009 and now leads the Global Green Growth Institute in South Korea, which helps poor nations. The hope is that in Paris, delegates will also work out ways to ratchet up national plans in coming years to limit average temperatures rises to an agreed ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above levels before the Industrial Revolution. Temperatures have already climbed 0.85 C (1.5 F). "Not in my wildest dreams do I expect the Paris agreement to close the gap to 2 degrees," de Boer told Reuters. China, the United States and the European Union, which together account for more than half of world greenhouse gas emissions, have indicated they want some sort of global accord in Paris, sharply raising the chances of success for the summit. "The prognosis is vastly better than going into Copenhagen," said Robert Stavins, director of Harvard University's Environmental Economics Program. "The expectations (in 2008-09) were much too high."

CLEANING OF COAL INDUSTRY: CARBON CAPTURE & STORAGE: Clean up coal-fired power plants by capturing carbon dioxide & liquefying it for underground storage or commercial use

The key technology needed to drastically reduce CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants is carbon capture and storage, or CCS. All of the components of this system are in commercial operation today, At this point, they are employed mostly to enhance oil recovery. There are about 4,000 miles of pipeline in the U.S. transporting tens of millions of tons of compressed CO2 annually, mostly from natural wells, for injection into geologic formations to help extract oil. Numerous demonstration projects have shown that captured CO2 also can be safely and effectively stored in deep geologic formations, as most of it will be. Last month brought an important milestone: SaskPower’s Boundary Dam power plant in Canada officially opened as the world’s first commercial-scale coal power plant with CCS. About 90% of the plant’s CO2 is captured and piped about 40 miles for injection into oil fields. Next year, the Mississippi Power unit of Southern Co. will start operating a new clean-coal plant, and construction has just started on a clean-coal power plant in Texas. Other projects are being planned, most prominently in the U.S., U.K. and China. Clean coal will become more common because climate policy will demand cleaner power. For instance, an emissions restriction on coal-fired power plants in Canada was a major driver for the Boundary Dam project. There will be added costs to power providers. But clean coal won’t be so expensive that it can’t compete with renewable or nuclear resources. All three will find significant markets. Yes, clean coal will require massive infrastructure investments on a global scale—but so will a major expansion of renewable-energy projects. For the electricity price of the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, we could easily build a clean-coal plant with CCS. A recently released assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that clean-coal projects are projected to be competitive in a low-carbon world, and that excluding CCS from a mitigation-technology portfolio would more than double the cost of achieving climate-stabilization goals through 2100. Selling captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery can help reduce the cost of CCS. And new technologies under development could allow carbon to be captured with dramatically lower expenditure of energy. ............................... Why would implementing CCS be so expensive? For starters, capturing and storing the carbon from coal combustion is estimated to consume 25% to 45% of the power produced, depending on the approach taken. That translates to not only higher prices for coal-generated electricity but also the need for more plants to serve the same customers. Other technologies designed to make carbon capture more efficient aren’t commercial at this point, and their full costs are unknown. And there’s more. Capturing and burying just 38% of the carbon released from current U.S. coal combustion would entail pipelines, compressors and pumps on a scale equivalent to the size of the nation’s oil industry. And while bolting CCS technology onto existing power plants is possible, it is inefficient. A new generation of plants would do the job much better—but that means replacing roughly 600 current-generation power plants. Altogether, the Energy Department estimates that wholesale electricity prices with the initial generation of CCS technology would be 70% to 80% higher than current coal-based power. The discussion of CCS technology in a recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contains too many qualifiers to be interpreted as a declaration that clean coal will be competitive with renewable fuels. Long term, the economics of coal are likely to get worse, with or withoutCCS. Coal is nonrenewable, finite in quantity and therefore subject to depletion. Rates of production from most regions of the U.S. are in decline. And as depletion forces the mining of lower-quality resources, production prices will rise because of the need for more-sophisticated extraction technologies. Declining output is inevitable sooner or later. Meanwhile, the price of electricity produced from solar and wind power is steadily dropping. The only thing that keeps coal-based electricity cheap today in relation to power from renewable sources is the industry’s ability to shift the hidden costs—environmental and health damage—onto society. If, as climate regulations inevitably kick in, the coal power industry adopts CCS as a survival strategy, any lingering economic advantage over wind and even solar will disappear. CCS also doesn’t address the full range of coal’s impact on society. It won’t banish high rates of lung disease, because it doesn’t eliminate all the pollutants from the combustion process or deal with the coal dust from mining and transport. It also doesn’t address the environmental devastation of “mountaintop removal” mining. This is not to say that “clean coal” has no future whatever. Coal plants with CCS will be built where captured carbon dioxide can be used to generate extra income—for example, by using it to stimulate old oil wells or make cement. But even a dramatic increase in such uses would put only a small fraction of carbon from coal to work. A full transition of today’s coal power industry to CCS is extremely unlikely unless the economics substantially change for some currently unforeseeable reason. And other technological advances, like more-efficient coal-fired plants, can only slow the growth of harmful emissions at best. In all likelihood, the real future lies elsewhere—with distributed renewable energy. Mr. Heinberg is a senior fellow-in-residence at the Post Carbon Institute, an advocate for renewable fuels. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com. Source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/does-clean-coal-technology-have-a-future-1416779351

POWER-GEN 2014 Women of the Year Award: Recognizing Women Leaders in the Power Industry

The Women in Power committee believed that it was important to give recognition to the pioneering women who have worked to advance the power industry. To do this, the committee asked power industry stakeholders to nominate women they admired for a Woman of the Year Award, which would be given out at POWER-GEN International. To judge the nominees, the committee came up with three focus areas. 2014 is the second year for this award. The first and most important accomplishment that the committee believed a potential Power-Gen Woman of the Year should have made is advancing the power industry. In addition, the committee judged nominees by their leadership abilities, as well as their ability to collaborate with, influence, and mentor others. Finally, the committee believed that a potential Power-Gen Woman of the Year should impact her community through industry associations and other organizations. After four months of collecting nominations, the 19-member committee voted on the nominees and came up with three finalists. One of these women will be named the Power-Gen 2014 Woman of the Year at the annual awards banquet on Monday, Dec. 8, which takes place at the Disney's Odyssey Pavilion at Epcot in Orlando, Fla. The banquet is part of the POWER-GEN International Conference and Exhibition and the co-located NUCLEAR POWER International Conference and Exhibition, Renewable Energy World Conference & Exhibition, North America and the Power-Gen Financial Forum. The 2014 Power-Gen Woman of the Year will give a keynote speech during the Women in Power Luncheon on Tuesday, December 9 at the Orange County Convention Center also as part of the co-located conferences.

GE wind-power business looks to global expansion, data services- exec

General Electric Co looking to grow its wind-power business by increasing installations of turbines globally while providing services such as data analytics to improve their performance, a top company energy executive said on Wednesday. The U.S. conglomerate plans to have a presence with its wind turbine business in 35 or more countries next year, up from eight in 2003. Anne McEntee, chief executive officer of GE's renewable energy business, pointed to the importance of diversifying into different countries to take advantage of where energy demand and policy are encouraging. "We have been putting a big focus on expanding our presence globally," McEntee said in an interview as GE on Wednesday commemorated the installation of its 25,000th wind turbine. "As you look at policy around the world, you are going to have ups and downs in various countries." GE does not disclose revenue for its wind business, which is part of its Power & Water segment, whose other products include gas turbines and generators. Last year, GE ranked as the world's fifth-biggest wind-turbine supplier, according to Navigant Research. GE is increasingly using software and data analysis throughout its industrial businesses to improve performance and efficiency of its machines so it can reap more service revenue. The company offers a product designed to help wind farm operators raise output by up to 5 percent by optimizing performance based on environmental conditions. "Our view is with technology advancements, the turbine that you buy today will run better tomorrow," McEntee said. GE said in October it expected a "very strong" fourth-quarter overall, including a big jump in wind turbine shipments. GE said at the time it expected shipments of about 3,000 wind turbines for 2014 overall. "It looks very strong," McEntee said, when asked about reaching that target. "Of course, it all depends on our customers' ability to close some of these deals financially. But we're pretty confident that we'll be able to hold the 3,000 shipments." (Reporting by Lewis Krauskopf; Editing by Diane Craft)

WAVE ENERGY: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded NREL and SANDIA to work on a three-year collaborative project to develop a simulation tool

A number of initiatives aimed at speeding up the development of the wave energy sector have been launched in the U.S. and Europe. As part of the ongoing work to establish a viable United States wave energy industry, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SANDIA) are working on the creation of a sophisticated open-source modeling tool known as WEC-Sim — and the U.S. Department of Energy is also enlisting the coding community to help in its development. Meanwhile, the European WavePOD project is an industry-wide initiative that aims to solve the problem of converting captured wave energy into electricity by creating a "standardised self-contained offshore electricity generator for the wave industry." WEC-Sim Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded NREL and SANDIA to work on a three-year collaborative project to develop a simulation tool for the wave energy sector. A little over a year into the project, the team has already released the first version of the Wave Energy Converter Simulator (WEC-Sim), a customisable open-source numerical modeling tool designed to help the wave energy community to analyse and optimise wave-energy converters (WECs) and meet device-specific modeling needs. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/11/marine-energy-making-waves-on-both-sides-of-the-pond

RENEWABLE ENERGY: 2nd largest Generating Power in India plan to Expand its Renewable Energy via Tata Power Renewable Energy Limited (TPREL)

The company is planning to acquire wind energy projects from three generators, CEO Rahul Shah said recently. The wind energy capacity in question is about 300 MW spread across southern India. The projects seem to be operational under long-term power purchase agreements at “competitive tariffs,” Shah added. Tata Power had earlier announced that all new capacity to be added over the next two years would be based on renewable energy. It plans to commission or acquire about 800 MW capacity based on wind, solar, hydro, and waste-to-power technology. This skewed business plan seems a result of the legal battle the company is fighting over tariffs for one of its coal-based power plants. Tata Power had commissioned India’s largest thermal power plant in Gujarat some time back. The tariff for the project was very low, determined through an auction conducted by the Indian government. The 4 GW Tata Mundra power plant is based on super critical coal technology with significantly lower emissions intensity compared to other coal-based power plants in the country. The power plant, however, uses coal imported from Indonesia, as Indian coal has higher ash content and lower calorific value. Following restrictions placed by the Indonesian government on the export of coal, the cost of generation exceeded the tariff quoted by Tata Power. The company has filed a petition to increase the tariff and is facing stiff resistance from the state utilities over this issue. http://cleantechnica.com/2014/11/23/stung-rising-coal-prices-indias-tata-power-plans-renewable-energy-acquisitions/