Scientists may face an uphill battle in trying to warn the world about the looming perils of global warming, but one of Britain's top academics wouldn't trade places with the politicians tasked with negotiating a new global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"Although the science (of climate change) is difficult and still uncertain, it's a doddle compared to the politics," said Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, Britain's science academy.

Thousands of international delegates will convene at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December. All early indications suggest those talks, seen as critical to agreeing a successor to the Kyoto Protocol after it expires in 2012, will be anything but a cake walk.

That said, Rees thinks UK policymakers have done a good job so far.

"We must give (the UK) government credit for its leadership in this area, going back to the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005 when climate change was pushed up the agenda," Rees said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit this week.

"The UK punches above its weight in the debate on climate change even though we only produce 2% of the world's emissions," said Rees, likening Britain to some sort of environmental boxer.

Rees thinks that because the UK has the high-tech know-how, it should strive to provide more than 2% of the solution to the climate problem by upping investment technologies to help replace fossil fuel burning.

"The level of research and development into new energy technologies is far lower than the scale of the challenge demands ... The R&D on renewable energy should be closer to what we spend on health or medicine, but it's tiny, tiny compared to that."

"Without new technologies, we'll never meet out 2050 targets," he said, referring to Britain's goal of cutting carbon emissions by 80% by mid-century.

Should the UK assume a larger climate role relative to its size or greenhouse gas contribution? Should it spend as much on researching renewable energy as it does developing cures for disease?

To listen to an excerpt of our interview with Rees, click here

To read the Reuters Climate Summit interview with Rees, click here

(Reuters photo - British boxer Amir Khan)

John Woolard, the chief executive of solar thermal energy company BrightSource, sat down at Reuters' Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco to talk about energy efficiency, project financing and the future  of carbon-free power.

His advice: build fast!

(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman)

After nearly 25 years in the computer science and aerospace industries, including a stint at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Doug Caldwell decided to pursue a career-long dream of putting his engineering skills to use for the environment. So the Southern California native left his own start-up, a company that builds cameras for spacecraft launch systems, to explore his options.

He didn’t have to look far, or for very long. Within months Caldwell had landed work on a solar power development project, recruited by an old buddy from his days launching model rockets in the desert. Perhaps more ironic is the company he ended up working for — Boeing Co.

Two years later, Caldwell, 47, is chief engineer of the project, which employs about 60 people in a $45 million endeavor to design a new type of photovoltaic solar technology for what would be a 20-megawatt power plant.

One thing he has learned from the experience is that renewable energy development is more of a dollars-and-cents proposition than building rockets. “It’s not about engineering. It’s about business and finance,” Caldwell says.

While space science is largely mission-driven, albeit within the confines of a budget, the paramount concern for clean energy is making it cost-effective and achieving a reasonable return on one’s investment. Moreover, he says, the history of U.S. energy development, and how closely it’s tied to the economy, will make the nation’s transition to cleaner energy especially tough.

Americans, he says, are “spoiled” by cheap energy prices that fail to account for the true costs of environmental damage wrought by extracting and burning fossil fuels, or the national security implications of maintaining access to foreign oil.

“Everybody wants to be green, but no one wants to pay for it,” he says. With sizable investments required to transform the energy sector, the development of low-carbon alternatives is going to be “very dependent on public sector incentives.”

Boeing’s solar project is a case in point; the aerospace giant dipped its toe into energy with the help of a matching grant from the U.S. Energy Department. But Caldwell says the company already is looking for an exit, deciding when the economy faltered to concentrate on its core business. He says Boeing executives now see little point investing in a power plant that will take a year or two to build, then generate in one year the amount of revenue, about $100 million, that an aircraft product line can churn out in less than a day.

That means Caldwell will soon be looking for another job. But that’s OK with him. He’s more interested in “smart” power grid technology and developing small-scale photovoltaic cells for urban rooftops, rather than sprawling solar farms that “require despoilment of large tracts of the desert.”

“I have a real problem with the idea that we’re going to save the planet by scraping large tracts of pristine land. I see that as fundamentally no different than lopping off a mountaintop for extracting coal.”

Caldwell also says the nation stands to gain more bang for its buck by investing in greater energy conservation, such as home weatherization and retrofits. But he acknowledges that solar power, while costly to produce and install, still has a special appeal.

“It’s very visible. If I put solar on my rooftop, I get to point at it and say, ‘Look what I did.’ And solar panels have that patina of being high tech,” he said. “If I insulate the roof or the attic, I don’t get to point to it, and it looks dreadfully low tech… It’s nothing more than a guy with a big hose blowing stuff in your attic.”

Spoken like a true rocket man.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Ho New ( An array of solar panels at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada)

The idea to tap solar power from the Sahara desert to provide CO2-free electricity for Europe and northern Africa has captured the public’s imagination in Germany after the Desertec Industrial Initiative was formally launched in Munich on Monday. Several German commentators compared the notion of catching the sun’s rays in the Sahara to the boldness of the U.S. space programme in the 1960s with its drive to put a man on the moon. As my colleague Christoph Steitz pointed out in his report, 12 companies took the first step towards the project that could be delivering up to 15 percent of Europe’s power by 2050.

Even if it was only the start and details on how it will all work remain sketchy, the Desertec story led the news broadcasts on all the major German networks on Monday and triggered an avalanche of front-page media coverage and editorials, most favourable. Germans see Desertec as a “win-win-win” prospect. It would a) produce CO2-free energy, b) create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Europe and Africa, and c) promote better relations between countries north and south of the Mediterranean through business and trade connections similar to the way Europe grew together after World War Two. There is, of course, another point — d) it could give German companies, many of which have spent the last decade building up their know-how with solar and wind energy, a chance to take advantage of their expertise on an even larger scale.

“It’s rare that I’ve been so fascinated by a news item as I have by the idea of using the hot desert as a giant socket,” wrote Bild newspaper’s venerable Franz Josef Wagner, one of Germany’s most popular columnists known for his usual biting criticism. “Desertec is for me the greatest leap for mankind since Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk. The hot desert could save humanity. This project is greener than green. Desertec is the bright future.”

And Michael Miersch, in a commentary for the conservative daily Die Welt, wrote: “It seems at first glance like some sort of Jules Verne Utopia but it’s nevertheless being backed by 12 large companies that want to invest in it. Even if it falls short of the goal of delivering 15 percent of Europe’s electricity by 2050, it is nevertheless a clear start signal — it could possibly mark the beginning of the end of the oil age.”

Miersch also likened Desertec to the U.S. space programme and quoted President John F. Kennedy’s rallying cry “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard.” Miersch wrote: “There is a large choir of critics. But problems are there to be solved.”

Joachim Wille wrote a column in the left-leaning Frankfurter Rundschau that also compared Desertec to the Apollo programme. “It is far more than just electricity for our sockets. It represents a quantum leap forward into a new energy age.”

But Andreas Heitker cautioned in a page one editorial in the Boersen-Zeitung business daily that it was far from unsure if Desertec would ever be built: “Desertec could give a boost to renewable energy in Europe but whether the 400-billion euro project turns out to be anything more than a good idea remains doubtful. It shows quite clearly, in any event, that there is still a great untapped potential for solar energy.”

Hamburger Abendblatt columnist Oliver Schade said: “It makes a lot of sense to put such a major project in an area where the sun shines brighter and more often than between Flensburg and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Europe is moving in the right direction by launching a project like this. It sounds like a fairy tale — but in fact solar power plants in North Africa and Arabia could be delivering one in seven kilowatt hours that we need in Europe by the year 2050.”

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper observed that after Monday’s news conference the executives from the 12 companies that signed the memorandum of understanding were lined up, as planned, for a group picture. But before the assembled photographers could start snapping, the stage quickly filled up with political leaders who were also attending the launch. “It was a situation that was perhaps symbolic — everyone wanted to be part of it and they wouldn’t feel they were part of it if they weren’t in the picture,” wrote the Munich daily’s Thomas Fromm.

There is clearly a buzz about Desertec in Germany even if the same level of enthusiasm hasn’t yet been detected in any of the other countries that might be involved. Maybe it has something to do with Germans’ yearning for sunshine and fascination with the sun in their country that is often covered by clouds? Or maybe it has something to do with companies getting a whiff of profits in the air — the sun doesn’t send any bills, after all.

PHOTO: A “solucar” solar park in Sanlucar La Mayor, near Seville, November 6, 2008. The solar thermal power plant uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays onto the top of a 100 metre (300 foot) tower where it produces steam to drive a turbine, producing electricity. REUTERS/Marcelo del Pozo

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

Google Green Energy Czar (real title) Bill Weihl sat down with Reuters to talk about Renewable Energy Less Than Coal - the company’s plan to make affordable clean energy. Google started off trying to green up its own computer operations and then launched this save-the-world effort, which includes some investment in renewable energy startups and the work by a Google team.

Weihl describes that work in the video below, saying that the chances of successfully creating clean energy at less than coal prices - or about 3 cents per kilowatt — had risen from long shot to roughly even odds in about three years’ time.

This is an overview of Google efforts (that’s me asking questions):

And here is Weihl giving a bit more detail of solar thermal work for you wonks (like me):

Video by Peter Henderson/Reuters

Rich Kinder, CEO of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, says the Obama Administration's push to develop alternative energy sources such as wind and solar are not the answer to reducing the nation's dependence on oil or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Click below to hear where Kinder thinks the U.S. should be focusing its attention.

Kinder: wind, solar not the answer from Reuters TV on Vimeo.

We knew things were going badly in the renewable energy industry, but this week we got a grim view of just how ugly it looks out there.

Today, research group New Energy Finance said first-quarter investment in so-called clean energy fell 44 percent from the fourth quarter of last year, which in the immediate aftermath of the credit crisis wasn’t exactly stellar itself.

The $13.3 billion of investment in the most recent quarter was 53 percent below the same quarter of last year, the group said.

Things are particularly bad in the United States, where financing of new renewable energy projects was only $500 million in the first quarter compared with $2 billion in the fourth quarter of last year and $5 billion in the first quarter of 2008, according to New Energy Finance.

That report came a day after several other groups, including Deloitte and the Cleantech Group, gave their own views of first-quarter activity in clean tech. Though they had different authors, all the studies sent the same message: green investment is way down, and it’s unlikely to bounce back any time soon.

“The sector has been hit by an oncoming train,” New Energy Finance CEO Michael Lebreich said in a statement. “The industry has to get through some very difficult quarters until the stimulus funds start to flow.”

Companies including solar panel makers, wind turbine manufacturers and biofuels producers are all hoping that the U.S. government’s energy-focused economic stimulus plan will unlock lending for new projects such as wind farms and solar power plants.  Many analysts, however, say those funds may not materialize until the end of this year.

A green contracting outfit based in a former Brooklyn brewery says it’s the first business in a major U.S. city that can sell power back to the grid that it generates from the sun.

New York state gave Big Sue, LLC, which has about 3,500 square feet of solar panels on its roof, the OK to sell any extra power it generates from the panels back to the grid.

For years, homeowners who have put solar panels on their roofs have been able to sell a bit of solar power back to the grid, which has helped them deal with the big costs of buying and installing the panels. For homeowners it can take 8 to 12 years to break even on the initial investment.

New York businesses, which have shorter break-even times on their solar investments due to greater availability of  tax breaks and incentives,  have had to wait until now to get net-metering rights.

But eventually commercial net-metering could help New York deal with growing power demand. Gov. David Paterson said in a press release about Big Sue that businesses with solar net-metering will “relieve stress on New York City’s overburdened” power grid.

David Buckner, the president of Solar Energy Systems, who installed Big Sue’s solar panels, said he has 15 other commercial projects lined up for net-metering, including a bicycle manufacturer and a perfume bottle top maker. (Full disclosure: Solar Energy Systems’ COO is the husband of a colleague of mine.)

Small manufacturers stand to gain the most from net-metering because of the way the law is written, he said.  At least 35 other businesses in the region are lining up for net-metering with other solar installers.

Commercial net-metering by itself is probably not enough to boost shares in solar companies that fell after oil prices plummeted and amid surplus panel supplies.  But with optimism that the Obama administration will move quickly on legislation to boost renewable energy demand, it certainly can’t hurt.

Susan Boyle, the co-owner of Big Sue, said it’s fun to check her solar panel system on Mondays to see how many electrons her panels pushed to the grid over the weekend, when power demand is low from her business and the 24 studios in the building that lease space there.

If the panels have generated more power than her business used at the end of the year she’ll get a credit from the power company toward future bills.  She installed compact florescent lighting and took other efficiency steps in the late 19th century brewery to help the chances.

Oh, and she cleared the snow off her panels after a recent storm so they will work better.

On a British Antarctic research station, engineer Andy Binney (pictured above at work) and plumber Adam Gerrard have what must be one of the shortest commutes in the world – 10 cm.

Here is a picture of Andy at work — installing boilers that will be partly powered by solar energy at the Rothera research station in Antarctica — and pointing to the wall behind which he sleeps. For a story about Antarctica shifting to renewable energies, click here.

Andy and Adam share the bedroom behind the 10 cm thick wall. If the boilers play up in the middle of the night, they will even be woken up by the noise.

At Rothera, run by the British Antarctic Survey, up to 100 base staff double up and share rooms with one other person in summertime. In winter, the base staff of about 20 get their own rooms. The base has a large canteen with great meals, Internet access, a weight training room, a library and a large room to relax in with beers in a fridge (maximum two drinks a day).

Andy and Adam joke that they might knock a hole in the wall to make it easier to get to work.

The project they are working on is part of a shift towards renewable energy in Antarctica — the United States, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and especially Belgium (with a base completely driven by wind and solar energy) — are doing the same. 

On the right is a picture of Andy inspecting a new batch of solar panels. 

Should all energy in Antarctica be renewable to help protect the environment — as well as cutting vast fuel bills? Or is that impractical because of the harsh climate?

Please tell us what you think.