Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
Hard road on Japan’s nuclear policy
By Kevin Krolicki
Suddenly Taro Kono doesn’t look like quite the lonely maverick in Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party.
Kono, a member of the lower house of parliament, has been an unrelenting critic of Japan’s pursuit of nuclear power since he was first elected in 1996. That made him an odd fit with the LDP, which ruled Japan almost continuously from the mid-1950s to 2009 and put nuclear power at the center of Japan’s energy policy.
“For the past 15 years, it has felt like Taro Kono against the LDP,” he told the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit.
But since the Fukushima Daiichi accident triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Kono’s call to scrap nuclear in favour of renewable energy and conservation has moved from the fringe to something closer to the mainstream of political opinion.
About 50 lawmakers attended a recent study group he sponsored on energy policy, out of 722, and Kono sees a prospect for a kind of “green alliance” between sympathetic LDP lawmakers and some in the Democratic Party of Japan.
from Environment Forum:
Could “putting the cow inside the plant” make a new biofuel?
The Next Big Thing in biofuel might involve genetically engineered plants that digest themselves, making it cheaper to turn them into fuel. That's one of the new ideas that Arun Majumdar finds fascinating. As the head of the U.S. Energy Department's ARPA-E -- the path-breaking agency that aims come up with efficient, green energy solutions -- Majumdar said this concept is one of a few dozen that are in the development stage now.
Majumdar let his enthusiasm show as he described this project at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit on Thursday. He was talking about a project in its early stages at Massachusetts-based Agrivida.
"If you look at biofuels, cellulosic biofuels ... you take agricultural waste, you separate out ... the cellulose, then you throw a bunch of enzymes at them. And these enzymes are there in the cow's gut, or termites, that break down this long chain polymer, this cellulose, into small bits and pieces called sugar molecules. And then you take those sugar molecules and feed them into another bug and then you produce gasoline," he said.
The costly part of this process, Majumdar said, is growing these enzymes in a bio-reactor instead of in a cow.
"What this company's doing is a very interesting idea. They take the gene sequences that produce enzymes and put them in the plant itself, so when the plant grows, it produces the enzymes free of cost." But isn't there a risk that the plants wouldn't grow, since they would carry enzymes that would make the plants self-digesting? One possible solution is what this start-up company is trying: make the enzymes inactive, and activate them later by changing temperature, humidity or acidity.
"It's supposed to chew itself from the inside," Majumdar said, with evident delight. "And I call this 'putting the cow inside the plant.' It's an amazing idea. Now I don't know whether it's going to work, but if it does, you essentially eliminated the cost of those enzymes, which is the really expensive part, and you create a more competitive pathway for biofuels than what is traditionally being done."
For more from the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit, click here.
Economic security or environmental destruction?
The Oil Sands, the world’s second-largest proven reserves after Saudi Arabia, hold out the promise of energy security for the United States and economic security for Canada. But environmentalists fear the destructive, energy intensive process of extracting the oil will carry direct consequences for the planet. Despite the doubts, new oil sands projects are again springing up after the financial crisis halted development. How will oil companies balance the quest for more oil with environmental concerns? Mar. 22-23 we’ll put those questions to the oil companies, environmental groups and government officals at the first Reuters Canadian Oil Sands Summit in Calgary.
Why can we have economic security without environment destruction? After all we never hear Arnie, Greenpeace etc protest about the tarsands in California. They therefore must be environmentally friendly. I would have included Cuba and venezula but Americans are wanted there so they wouldn’t have a clue about what is happening there but they should know about California seeing that Arnie likes to mind everyone else’s business and California was the home to the flower children (I mean Greenpeace).
from Chris Wickham:
Climate change is off the agenda in Dubai
The headline in the Gulf News English language daily reads 'UAE tops world on per capita carbon footprint'.
For a place so reliably bathed in sunlight, the Dubai property explosion seems to have generated enough construction noise to drown out the environmental debate raging elsewhere in the world.
For the first-time visitor, the scale of the global construction superlatives - The Palm, made from reclaimed land jutting out defiantly into the Gulf, the skyscrapers built in a region where there is no shortage of space - is staggering.
The amount of environmentally 'sinfull' concrete poured over the last decade is ncalculable. Billboards lauding the benefits of solar power look like a bit of an after thought.
Climate change was just beginning to take hold as an issue for property developers when the economic downturn struck and put paid to nascent environmental ambitions. "Green is not cheap," says Markus Giebel, chief executive of Dubai property group Deyaar Development. "Dubai was on the right track, but there's no money now. People are thinking about survival."
Washington divided, more trouble ahead for Obama?
Washington insiders say that not since the 1890′s have the people that represent the U.S. been so divided. From Gay rights to Afghanistan lawmakers are at polar opposites on issues that are on the Obama administration’s agenda. What’s next? And, what’s likely to get the green light or the stop sign?
Who are all those Thought Police that are forcing all those people to watch Fox instead of the preferred liberal networks? Seems that the folks are voting their preference with their remote controls. The ratings are the proof.
The liberal networks, especially MSNBC, have gotten so out of touch with mainstream America that the viewers have no interest in such a one sided opinion. It’s simply the marketplace at work by choice, in spite of what President Obama and his minions would like us to believe. Fox does not control the viewer, the viewer chooses Fox.
Global warming: Economic opportunity or not?
Stephan Dolezalek, Managing Director of VantagePoint Venture Partners and Tom Werner, Chief Executive of solar power company SunPower, sat down at Reuters’ Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco and shared their views on global warming, investment and cleantech.
Dolezalek sees industrialization in developing countries as a more predictable impetus for investment than global warming.
Werner sees global warming as a stimulus for new business and a tool for adaptation.
What are your thoughts? Is global warming an economic stimulus, an unreliable driver for investment, neither or both?
(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman, pictures by Kim White)
Any centralised economic stimulus that can be provided for the widespread expansion of energy efficiency technologies and sustainable energy production should be encouraged (after all many other industrial and financial sectors, since the onset of the current global recession have been supported in this way, which would otherwise have gone to the wall). The previous commentators denying that global warming is man made or even real at all makes me think of the huge numbers of supposedly learned people/philosophers/theologians who have, over the centuries, believed that the Earth is flat and not spherical. Furthermore anyone who underpins their arguments that the warming seen on this planet is purely from natural cycles over geological time-scales unwittingly shows themselves to have little understanding of the climate observations from the modern industrialised era. No one disbelieves that the climate has, over geological time, changed by vast extremes but the warming seen today is NOT on a geological time-scale and hence is an extremely real and current threat.
Enviro-boxer Britain needs to spend more on climate cure
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.
Silver Spring Networks shows grid smarts
Scott Lang, the Chief Executive of Silver Spring Networks, sat down at Reuters’ Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco to talk about building and expanding within green tech sector.
Here Lang discusses how his company’s technology for reporting power consumption to utilities also finds problems quickly.
(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman)
BrightSource CEO talks about building carbon-free future
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)
Last month, all renewables combined (wind, solar, biomass and mainly waterpower) exceeded nuclear in power generated. Globally, wind is being added at several nuclear plants a year, but that will greatly accelerate in the US. Why? Because between the Atlantic, Great Lakes and Great Plains, the US has enough undisputed wind space to double in average terms its currant average power draw of 430,000 MW. Also, current new nuclear has a wholesale power price (per recent EU report) of 9.7 cents/KWH. But that dies not include future escalations in that nuclear power cost. Wind can survive quite nicely on 9.7 cents average on a 20 year fixed price contract, providing we change our technology to lower cost gearless reliability, which China is fast doing, already with two factories producing gearless turbines. We have none, but that can change dramatically and fast with my new gearless turbine and fast offshore deployment barge IP (both to be announced soon). New software, very high voltage dc grids, better wind power planning with new weather forecasting tech to predict day ahead wind capability when and where will all revolutionize wind so that it can dominate the grid power feed. It has to; we can’t depend just on nuclear (because it’s next impossible to get approval and construction accomplished) and carbon to meet 2050 power needs.
Carbon fails to capture EU cash
The EU boasts of its global leadership in fighting climate change but some in the energy industry wonder whether the bloc will put money to work to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
EU governments have been reluctant to back clean technologies — such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) that could sharply reduce pollution from coal — with cash, potentially killing their future, Czech power utility CEZ told the Reuters Central European Investment Summit this week.
“I see a very big gap between the rhetoric of the EU representatives, saying it’s a number one priority of the EU and on the the hand zero commitment to put any funding behind (it),” CEZ sales chief Alan Svoboda said.
“There are billions of euros channelled into agriculture a year and zero goes to fighting CO2 on the R&D and technology side,” he said. “Without public money CCS will not be born.”
Perhaps after years of food piles and wine lakes, the EU doesn’t want to face a carbon mountain or a CO2 reservoir.
