A “gold-rush-like” buzz has spread across Germany in the last week over tentative plans to invest the staggering sum of 400 billion euros to harvest solar power in the Sahara for energy users across Europe and northern Africa. Even though European and Mediterranean Union leaders have been exploring and studying for several years the idea of using concentrated solar power (CSP), the Desertec proposition suddenly captivated the public’s attention a week ago when German reinsurer Munich Re announced it had invited blue chip German companies such as Deutsche Bank, Siemens and several major utilities to a July 13 meeting on the project. The 20 companies aim to sign a memorandum of understanding to found the Desertec Industrial Initiative that could be supplying 15 percent of Europe’s electricity in the decades ahead.

Germany’s deputy foreign minister, Guenter Gloser, has been the government’s point man for the project. I had the chance to talk to him about it.

Question: How did this project to turn the sun in the Sahara into electricity for Europe and north African countries get started?
Guenter Gloser: About 15 months ago Germany and France proposed including the solar plan into the list of projects for the Union for the Mediterranean. There were institutions that had already done research and we thought: ‘Why don’t we use this sun belt where there is such an abundance of sunshine as a source of renewable energy?’ Together Germany, France and Egypt put forth this solar plan as one of the six projects for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and underscored the fact that it could benefit both sides. It was not an idea where just countries north of the Mediterranean will benefit but rather those countries south of it as well as across the EU would also benefit.

Question: What is the current status of the project?
Gloser: We agreed to move forward with the project and want to go forward step-by-step towards its implementation. But obviously neither the EU nor the Arab League will be the principal players but rather private investors. Our task for this project is to create the political framework — for example with setting up of the feed-in tariffs, ensuring the infrastructure is built and ensuring that the renewable energy can be transported to Europe. The political framework can also make it possible to expedite the approvals process. But what is also very important is that the energy produced is also available for countries in the region. For example, Morocco can take advantage of its solar and wind conditions on the Atlantic coast to build solar power plants or wind energy parks to provide energy for its domestic market and to sell energy abroad as well. Even countries such as Algeria, which has fossil fuel reserves, could also use the sun belt for solar thermal power for some of their energy needs — and prolong their fossil fuel reserves.

Question: Is there not risk involved in such large-scale investment in a region with a potential for political instability?
Gloser: It’s a cooperation that will contribute towards diversifying energy sources, geographically and in terms of energy sources. It’s a truly fascinating project because it’s a win-win for everyone. And the third winner will be the people and institutions that finance this project. Neither the EU nor the countries in the south are capable of financing this on their own. So the question is: can third-parties bringing financing be involved. Energy security is an important issue everywhere. There are energy sources we have today that at times have been somewhat at risk. There’s no contradiction in saying that it’s important to diversify a country’s energy source as well as diversifying the types of energy it receives. It’s not that there is no risk whatsoever but it’s important to keep in mind that there are also some risk factors for other sources of energy that we are now importing.

Question: What impact do you think a project like this could have in the Mediterranean Union?
Gloser: I think the partnership approach that we have taken could well have a positive influence of stability for the countries taking part as well as the neighbouring nations. The EU has been enlarged and come closer together in the past decades but there hasn’t been as much of that among Arab countries. Perhaps it would be possible through certain projects, such as this solar energy project or water projects or transportation routes, to increase the cooperation among those countries.

Question: There have been fears expressed that Europe would be exploiting natural resources in Africa, raising fears of a new sort of ‘colonisation’. What would you say to those fears?
Gloser: It is not in any way an issue of the north dominating the south. It is not only the north that is interested in acquiring renewable energy but rather other users are interested. And if that mutual need for energy leads to a project that satisfies all sides then that is in my view a good route to take. I don’t think there’s any justification for the notion of this being an ‘energy colonisation’ or anything like that at all. It’s a mutually beneficial project.”

Question: How high is the interest in other countries? Some cynics would say Germany’s expertise in renewable energies gives it a big advantage.
Gloser: So far the countries in the south and north have been in agreement about the project. Now the task is to identify the next steps. There are countries in both the south and north that are more interested in the project than others — because, for example, they already have had positive experiences with renewable energy. That is not only Germany but also Spain and other countries. And on the other side of the Mediterranean there are countries that will have more interest at first than others.

Question: Some might see this project somewhat cynically as a vehicle to help German companies that already have such a considerable head start in know-how with renewable energy. What would you say to them?
Gloser: Obviously there are some important players (in Germany). But they are not only in Germany. Certainly we have built up a renewable energy sector in Germany, thanks to the right political framework a decade ago, that has created an enormous number of jobs. But Spain has also had an enormous development in recent years and in Denmark the wind energy sector has reached a large dimension with considerable know-how. But beyond those countries there are many other countries with companies and suppliers for the industry.

Question: Are there problems on the horizon being overlooked?
Gloser: In my eyes the biggest problem right now is that the expectations have possibly been raised too high. I’m someone who’s thought: that’s a great idea and why don’t we take advantage of all these things at hand: know-how, sun belt, political cooperation, development, stability, security, partnership. There are so many positive aspects that come together. Now it’s time to come up with some realistic timetables and see how we can move forward step-by-step to make this project a reality.

PHOTO: Mirrors are seen channelling sunlight onto a tube filled with oil during the dedication of Acciona’s Nevada Solar One power plant in Boulder City, southeast of Las Vegas February 22, 2008. The 400-acre, 64-megawatt, concentrating solar power (CSP) plant is the third largest in the world, according to Acciona. The plant produces energy to power about 14,000 homes. REUTERS/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus

Home electric bills could rise as much as 30 percent under a U.S. cap-and-trade plan to address carbon dioxide emissions, Moody’s estimates.

The tough part for households is that Moody’s expects industrial users to figure out a way to duck the cost with special rates, meaning residential electric customers will carry “the vast majority” of the cost burden. Check out our story here.

If Moody’s is right, and if the cap-and-trade plan slows global warming, is the price right?

Since the days of Thomas Edison, finding a way to effectively store electricity has been one of the “Holy Grails” for power companies.

While it won’t be an overnight revolution for electricity, eventually plug-in electric cars and trucks will be a step toward the elusive goal, said Ted Craver, chief executive officer of Edison International.

Edison International is the parent of Southern California Edison (SCE), which is the biggest utilty in the United States in terms of power delivered to customers.

 ”They are effectively storage units on wheels,” Craver said of electric cars and trucks.

Vehicles batteries charged during off-peak periods could feed power back to the grid during periods of peak demand, said Craver in a telephone interview on Thursday.

California like other states requires that power utilities have enough power plant generation to serve the highest demand day of the year. This means that more than half of the state’s power generation sits unused most of the time.

“Our electricity system is about 49-percent utilized,” said Craver. “If we had a reasonably modest introduction of electric vehicles into the system, we could change that 49 percent to 55 or 56 percent.”

So in addition to having the ability to propel cars without creating carbon dioxide emissions — outside of the power plants that must run to serve them — electric vehicles may one day help keep utilities from building as many power plants.

Craver’s interview came minutes after he hosted President Barack Obama’s visit to SCE’s electic Vehicle Technical Center in Pamona, California to promote green jobs are green technology.

Obama said that by 2015 there will be a million plug-in hybrid vehicles on U.S. roads.

Obama also announed $2.4 billion in grants for work on plug-in hybrid vehicles and batteries to run them, as well as a $7,500 tax credit for owners of plug-in vehicles.

SCE has more than 300 cars and trucks that run on electricity, the largest U.S. fleet of electric vehicles, Craver said.

President Barack Obama set in motion a process on Monday that may eventually allow California and other states to set tougher greenhouse gas pollution and efficiency standards on cars than those mandated by the federal government. 

 Obama’s move sends a signal to the world that the United States is beginning to join the rest of the developed countries to act on emissions blamed for warming the planet.

But some say allowing the states to take control of car emissions could lead to complications within the auto industry by forcing them make two sets of cars.  Consumers in California and as many as 18 other states would have to buy one set of cars built according to a set of guidelines and regulations and the other states would have another set of cars that are built differently.

Certainly U.S. car companies have fallen behind in making clean cars that consumers want and the federal government should push them to get on track. But are two sets of rules what the ailing car industry needs right now? 

Bill Bumpers, the director of the climate change practice at the law firm Baker Botts in Washington, D.C. doesn’t think so. “These are requirements that would be better off implemented on a national scale,” said Bumpers, who does not represent car companies.  He wonders if state-by-state regulations would add expenses for them to comply with the rules.

Many environmentalists have pushed for state-by-state regulation on emissions for exactly the reason that it could pressure companies to lobby for a federal solution rather than go through the headache of complying with a patchwork of regulations throughout the land.

“For a lot of industry players this is going to help them say let’s capitulate, let’s go to Congress, let’s get a comprehensive climate regulatory regime on a national scale,” said Bumpers. 

As a sign that the car companies want emissions to be controlled by the government, the Big Three joined earlier this month with other big corporations in lobbying Congress to pass federal economy-wide greenhouse gas regulations.

What do you think, is state-by-state best or should the country act as a whole?

(Photo by Kimberly White)

A Chinese campaigner has urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to prove his green credentials, asking him to offset the emissions generated by his inauguration by funding a forest in China.

A carbon fund named “Obama, future” could invest in increased forest coverage in another country and Obama himself could plant a tree there, Lin Hui said in an open letter, published on www.ditan360.com. Lin hopes that country will be China.

Lin’s appeal is based on estimates by conservative U.S. think-tank, the Institute for Liberty, that people travelling to attend Tuesday’s inauguration would generate 220,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

“Obama’s presidency is a big opportunity. The whole world is pinning their hopes on him, even the greens, believing he’ll be different than Bush,” Lin told Reuters.

The website, run by a team of volunteers, contains news articles and information designed to educate Chinese about a low-carbon lifestyle.

The Chinese government, which has been active in encouraging Western firms to invest in carbon-offset projects in China, approved the website in April, Lin said.

Lin’s posting in Chinese is illustrated with photos of Obama’s “whistle-stop tour”, his itinerary for Tuesday, and pictures from the inauguration of predecessor George W. Bush. He tried sending a copy of the open letter, which is in English, through Obama’s public email address, “but I doubt he’ll receive it.”

Lin signed his congratulatory letter as “A Chinese citizen, also your friend in green career”.

It was a disarmingly simple question but, embarrassingly, I didn’t have a clue when first asked that 18 months ago. Even though I’d have to describe myself as a genuine tightwad when it comes to expenditures, I simply had no idea, strangely enough, about how much money my four-person household was spending on electricity — nor how much carbon dioxide was being produced.

Now, after a year of carefully tracking the daily use of electricity, I’ve discovered a bit about when and where power is being used and, in theory, saved — without much pain. It seemed like a no-brainer and it honestly was not hard to cut our consumption by 1,000 kilowatt hours in 2008 to 5,000 kWh — saving about 200 euros and 500 kg of CO2 in the process. There were only minor sacrifices: rigidly turning off “standby” switches and unused lights, pulling plugs on little-used appliances, putting in energy-efficient lightbulbs, using the washing machine sparingly and the dryer only rarely, and replacing an inefficient dishwasher with a low-energy model.

In the past year, we used as little as 4 kWh on some days (in the summer) and as much as 30 on others (in the winter) — although most days were in the 10-to-17 range. Annoyingly, the house “wasted” about 3 kWh per day when we were away on holiday — largely due to the refrigerator, which I’ll be emptying and turning off next time. The 2008 total of 5,000 kWh (which amounted to an electricity bill of about 1,000 euros) isn’t bad for four people (one rule of thumb I’ve seen is 1,500 kWh per person/year) but I’m convinced that usage could be even less (the benchmark of 1,000 kWh per person/year is considered “thrifty”).

So the goal at home for 2009 is to cut electricity consumption by another 1,000 kWh (saving another 200 euros and 500 kg of CO2) to 4,000 kWh. Having a photovoltaic system on the roof (it produced 3,800 kWh that went into the grid) has helped wake me up to the mathematics and economics of power consumption and the goal of producing 100 percent of the electricity we need is now tantalisingly within reach. (The utility has to pay me 49 cents per kWh for the solar power I “export” into their grid while I have to pay 20 cents per kWh for the electricity I “import”.)

My wife was not exactly thrilled at first at my turning-the-lights-off crusade, which she saw as an unhealthy obsession rather than a good habit. But I was eventually able to win her to the cause. It didn’t hurt to promise her the “windfall” profits from the power savings. Saving another 1,000 kWh in 2009 won’t be as easy, I fear. A new A++ fridge (refrigerators are the real power guzzlers in most households) is at the planning stage and perhaps a new energy-saving washing machine, too. They aren’t cheap but they should pay for themselves through energy savings in the long run — and save a lot of CO2 in the process. Closely tracking the amount of gas for heating and diesel fuel used for the car in 2008 proved to be insightful as well: we cut both by roughly a third in 2008 by simply turning down the thermostat and driving less.

The electricity-saving habit (or obsession) might not be the magic solution to climate change. It also might not be as glamorous as high-tech solutions. Having seen myself how much electricity (and CO2) can be saved with relatively minimal disruption, it’s opened my eyes to how large the savings could be on a more global scale.

So, let me ask you: How much electricity do you use each year? And how much do you think you could save this year?

Many people hope to come back from a wildlife safari with close-up pictures of lions or elephants – this picture below is my best attempt from a search for the largest land animals in Antarctica.

If you look hard you can see a reddish blob at the tip of the thumb — it’s Antarctica’s most aggressive land predator, an eight-legged mite known as Rhagidia.

Pete Convey, a biologist at the British Antarctic Survey (that’s his thumb), says that such tiny creatures evolved in Antarctica over tens of millions of years — they can freeze their bodies in winter in an extreme form of hibernation.

Penguins, seals and whales are the best known animals in Antarctica, but none live year-round on land, where the biggest creature is a flightless midge whose name is ”Belgica antarctica” and who’s about 0.5 cm long.

Global warming could mean problems for some of these tiny creatures if it keeps going — the Antarctic Peninsula where Pete showed us the creatures has warmed by about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) over the past 50 years, the fastest rate in the southern hemisphere.

Some other creatures might be able to survive in a warmer climate and threaten mites like Rhagidia.

Pete is a genius at finding the creatures — the second rock he picked up had one of these red mites on it…I picked up about 50 and found none.

Here is Pete on his hunt being filmed by my colleague Stuart McDill of Reuters TV: (for a text story, click here)

 And here’s a much better close-up of a monstrous Antarctic mite, related to Rhagidia:

 It’s not often that greenhouse gases spewed out by human activities get praise as potential saviours of the planet in a leading scientific journal — they’re normally viewed as villains for causing global warming.

But a study in Nature today shows that heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide can help avert an even worse problem in thousands of years’ time — a shift to a freeze worse than an Ice Age that could blanket much of the northern hemisphere with ice (see picture on the left and story here).

The scientists say that the Earth is close to a natural tipping point, partly based on shifts in the orbit around the sun, that could abruptly end swings between warm periods, like the present, and Ice Ages like the one that ended 10,000 years ago.

Sometime between 10,000 and 100,000 years in the future, a shift would bring an icy blanket to much of North America, Russia and Europe – permanently. (…well, the projection only goes about half a million years into the future, but it shows no let up).

But greenhouse gases can come to the rescue by keeping the planet artificially warm, the scientists say. Still, they say the findings are no excuse to ignore the fight against global warming now — at least 10,000 years is a long time to work out how to avoid the freezer.

“I’m sure some headline writers will want to say ‘CO2 good for the atmosphere’, or ‘CO2 is good for us’. That’s not the case,” said Thomas Crowley, an American scientist at Edinburgh University who was one of the two authors. (…he stressed that point several times in an interview).

Greenhouse gases are of course a reason why the planet is warm enough to support life in the first place. But the problem is that extra emissions of the gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, are upsetting the climate. (A small minority disagrees – the U.S. Competitive Enterprise Institute famously produced pro-fossil fuel advertisements about CO2, saying: “They call it pollution, we call it life”)

…Maybe the Nature study adds a new twist for greenhouse gases — from saints, for creating the conditions for life, to criminals to future saviours?

New research shows that both Antarctica and the Arctic are getting less icy – and the best explanation is mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases.

But will that convert anyone who doubts that global warming is caused by human activities, led by burning fossil fuels?

The scientists, writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, say that a study of temperature records from Antarctica (there aren’t many of them) shows a slight rising trend over recent decades that can be best explained by a build-up of greenhouse gases led by carbon dioxide.

Antarctica had until now been the only continent where a human fingerprint of warming had not been detected by scientists — that meant some sceptics said it might not be global at all.

Ice around the frozen continent has tended to expand in recent years — some climate experts have theories to explain that that could be a side-effect of warming linked to shifting ocean currents or changes in snow and rainfall.

But more ice obviously doesn’t sound a convincing argument for global warming when a runaway melt of the summer sea ice in the Arctic — to a record low in September 2007 – is often held up as Exhibit A in the evidence for climate change.

The U.N. Climate Panel said last year that it was at least 90 percent certain that most of the global warming in the past half century was caused by human activities. Ten percent is room for doubt, but it seems to be shrinking.

Coca-Cola is the latest American brand working to improve its environmental credentials with a sweeping new program that pledges to improve water efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide emissions throughout its massive global system.

The soft drink maker today said that through a partnership with environmental group WWF, it has commited to eliminating 50 billion liters of water from its bottling plants by 2012 by improving water efficiency by 20 percent over 2004 levels. Coke’s announcement comes a few months after General Electric said it would cut water usage by 20 percent by 2012.

The beverage industry has increasingly become a target for environmentalists, who say plastic soda and water bottles add to landfills while the companies themselves use too much energy producing and shipping bottles across the world. 

Coke also pledged to promote more sustainable agricultural practices, initially focusing on sugar cane production. It will work with two additional crops beginning next year.

The water initatives build on an agreement Coke struck last year with WWF in which it vowed to “return to communities and to nature an amount of water water equivalent to what we use in all of our beverages and their production.” Coke at the time said it would commit to specific targets for reducing water usage this year.

Coke’s biggest challenge is reducing its carbon or water footprint while its business keeps growing. The company said it plans to “grow the business, not the carbon system-wide.” That goal will prevent the release of more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2015 — about the equivalent of planting 600,000 acres of trees. In developed countries, Coke will reduce emissions by 5 percent from 2004 levels by 2015.