Project Omelas - Front Page

The Earth is our Grandma

Unenergy — Fri, 14 May 2010 05:58:52 GMT

Below is an extract from a movie I watched a while back which had a pretty powerful monologue at the end. Many people have likely forgotten or not seen this movie, and I have linked to it at the end with a video of the dialog, but it is as relevant today as it was back in 1994. To think that 16 years ago the same things were being warned about which we have seen over and over again, makes one wonder about the intelligence of man.

I'd like to start off by saying thank you to all the brothers and sisters that've come here today representing this cause.
I've been asked by Mr. Ittok and the Tribal Council to speak to you and the members of the press about the injustice that's been brought against us by some government officials and big business.

How many of you out there have heard of alternative engines? Engines that can run on anything from alcohol to garbage or water?
Or carburetors that can get hundreds of miles to the gallon?
Or electric or magnetic engines that can practically run forever?
You don't know about them, because if they were to come into use they'd put the oil companies out of business.

The concept of the internal combustion engine has been obsolete for over 50 years. But because of the oil cartels and corrupt government regulation we and the rest of the world have been forced to use gasoline for over 100 years.
Big business is primarily responsible for destroying the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we eat.
They have no care for the world they destroy only for the money they make in the process.

How many oil spills can we endure?

Montara Timor Sea oil spill "could have been prevented"

Millions and millions of gallons of oil are destroying the ocean and the many forms of life it supports.

Among these is plankton, which supplies to 60-90% of the earth's oxygen.
It supports the entire marine ecosystem which forms the basis of our planet's food supply.
But the plankton is dying.

I thought, "Well, let's go to some remote state or country anywhere on Earth.
But in doing a little research, I realized that these people broker toxic waste all over the world.

They basically control the legislation and, in fact, they control the law.

Republicans Block Bid To Raise Oil-Spill-Damages Limit
Separately, an effort by a few Senate Democrats to raise the cap on damage claims that BP PLC must pay for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill was blocked Thursday after Republicans said the plan wouldn't work.

The law says no company can be fined over $25,000 a day.
If a company's making $10 million a day by dumping lethal toxic waste
into the ocean it's only good business to continue doing this.

BP's Daily Tally: $17.5M for Spill, $93M in Profits
the operators of the offshore rig face no more than $75 million in liability for the damages

They influence the media so that they can control our minds.
They've made it a crime to speak out for ourselves.
If we do so, we're called conspiracy nuts and we're laughed at. We're angry because we're all being chemically and genetically damaged and we don't even realize it.

Unfortunately, this will affect our children. We go to work each day and right under our noses we see our car and the car in front of us spewing noxious, poisonous gases that are all accumulative poisons.
These poisons kill us slowly, even when we see no effect.
How many of us would've believed if we were told 20 years ago that on a certain day we wouldn't be able to see 50 feet in front of us that we wouldn't be able to take a deep breath because the air would be a mass of poisonous gas.

That we couldn't drink out of our faucets that we'd have to buy water
out of bottles.

Our most common and God-given rights have been taken away from us.
Unfortunately the reality of our lives is so grim that nobody wants to hear it.
I've been asked what we can do.
I think we need a responsible body of people that can actually represent us rather than big business.
This body of people must not allow the introduction of anything into our
environment that is not absolutely biodegradable or able to be chemically neutralized upon production.
Finally, as long as there's profit to be made from the polluting of our Earth, companies and individuals will continue to do what they want.

We have to force these companies to operate safely and responsibly with all our best interests in mind.
So that when they don't we can take back our resources and our hearts and our minds, and do what's right.
Kompasla, the great spirit, I ask you to bless all the people here. All the grandmas, all the grandpas, and the little ones.

We have the four directions and I want to bless the future generation and the lndian nation, our people to be strong again.

Spotted Eagle..the Earth is our grandma.

On Deadly Ground 1994, Steven Seagal

Those Fish Belong to ME

Unenergy — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 06:04:13 GMT

During the Christmas break a book I read called "From Edison to Enron", had the following lines in it :

Utilities, of course, were regulated monopolies that avoided competition and the free enterprise system, but Vennard wrapped them in the American flag while he attacked his public power opponents as socialists.
"And who'd want to leave a socialistic U.S.A. to his kids?

A pioneer in polling and public relations, Vennard hired George Gallup to discover phrases and images that would spur Americans to feel positively about private utilities and negatively about public power.
"Investor owned' rather than 'privately owned; and disliked 'government owned' rather than 'public power'.

Remind you of what any particular 'News' network has been engaging in?
Or any specific, tactics employed to come up with talking points?

See that was how the arguments were going on back in 1935 around energy, where the government of the time tried to improve the system to become more equitable and serve the American people better.

With 75 years passed since then, all that has happened is the Vennards of today are trained at Fox News studios or interned to right wing radio and the whole 'discover words and images' has become a lucrative business, a highly co-ordinated effort which politicians of all stripes use to try to sway public opinion.

Honesty has taken a back seat over messaging. Manipulation over truth. Fear mongering over making American, Australian citizens feel secure in their own homes, lives and neighborhoods.

My Christmas break
Last Christmas my sister and I drove about 2,000km (1,243 Miles), from Queensland's Gold Coast to Victoria's Lakes Entrance (Australia). On the way down to Lakes Entrance we drove through an area called the La Trobe Valley. This is where I grew up and an area of a state of about 5.5 million people where all the brown coal fired power stations are.

Consisting of several cities, towns and farming communities, it is most famous for its abundant resources of brown coal, which are mined and fed to the local power stations that produce 85% of the electricity for the entire state of Victoria.

It was also a part of the state which suffered terribly during the black Saturday fires back in February of 2009 where 173 people died.

February 2009
As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on 7 February. Following the events of the 7th of February 2009, that date has since been referred to as Black Saturday.
173 people died as a result of the fires and 414 were injured.

Being from the area, we stopped in at one of my sisters best childhood friends, who is married with a couple of kids, who lives on a rural property just out of town. Her husband, lets call him Jack (not his real name), is an independent fencing contractor and although he is always busy, was able to sit down for a while for a cup of coffee and tell us a bit about the fires in February.

Seems Jack does a lot of fencing work for the forestry plantation groups of the Latrobe Valley as it has a large paper mill in the area as well, and is always driving up around the unsealed dirt roads which access these plantations.
And being a country lad who has always worked on the land, he'd had a lot to do with the volunteer fire brigade and knew his fires. On the day of the February fires, around the 9th Feb 2009, he was tasked with being a fire spotter at the top of one of the mountains in the area.

What he was seeing from the elevated fire lookout he said he had never seen before and it literally 'scared the crap' out of him. He said that he has seen fire balls jump ahead of the front before maybe 1 or 2 km (1 mile) but on this day he said it was much worse, much more intense. The fire would jump 10-15 km (8-10 miles) he said at any time and he would watch as areas not on fire, would suddenly burst into flames. In other words people could be thinking the fire front was far enough away, it looked that way and all the reports said it was, that they had time to move, when from 10km away a fireball would burst into flames around them without warning.

Jack said he watched as the fire would approach homes and they would get so hot before the flames even hit from a wall of radiant heat, they would just explode. That he said he knew there were people in some of these places who just had no hope of surviving.

The fire was intense, so much so that his wife, a very long way from a fire front said she could feel the heat and not see ten meters in front of her face due to the smoke.

The saddest part was, after frantically trying to get through on her mobile to Jack, his wife (lets call her Dianne) said they said their goodbyes to each other as he knew where the fire was and figured he was surrounded and didn't expect to get out of the plantations alive.

Dianne is about 35, Jack 40, their two sons, their boys about 7 and 8.

Going through my mind listening to this horrid story, all I could think was no one should have to go through that at their ages.

This war with our environment, not started by us, not started by mine, Jack and Diane's generation, has to end, because we will not win in the long run.

The Monck' and the Sly old Fox
In January with much fanfare, promotion and coverage by the News Corp owned Australian press, we had a gentleman called Christopher Monckton in Australia on a 13 stop tour, sponsored by a mining conglomerate, pushing the line that the entire climate change issue was a massive fraud.

He has based this conclusion on nothing more than a vivid imagination and a calculation he admitted had been done 'on the back of an envelope', yet was given disproportionate and 'protected species' coverage by our press for someone relatively unknown in Australia. This legitimized his standing in our community resulting in older people turning out in droves to these 'debates'.

I wrote a diary about it here :
Punk'd or Monck'd?

But would like to follow up with a couple of choice quotes straight from the horses mouth, as it were.

Monckton : "Now I know, that in American speak, you have a word for Global Warming, can someone tell me what it is?"
Crowd : "Bullsh!&"
Monckton : "Altogether. Global Warming is..."
Crowd : "Bullsh!&"
Monckton : "Global Warming is..."
Crowd : "Bullsh!&"
Monckton : "That's better"

And yet on 29th January, this very same person said this :

We are going to concede that Carbon Dioxide and other Greenhouse Gases which possess or mimic a dipole moment, will cause warming if you add them to the atmosphere.
We concede also that human kind is adding CO2 to the atmosphere at about the rate that the NOAA figures mention.
So we're not trying to pretend that we're not the cause of the CO2 in the atmosphere increasing, we're not going to try and pretend that that CO2 will cause no warming.

Those Fish Belong to Me
Lakes Entrance is one of those places which people flock to with their kids at Easter and Christmas time. There are at least 4 boat ramps in the immediate vicinity of Lakes Entrance as due to the area being what its name describes, an area with lots of Lakes, water related activities are incredibly popular.

Lakes Entrance is predominantly a fishing and tourism-driven town; the main beach front is a safe harbour for many major commercial fishing and recreational watersport operations.

The Lakes

The Google View

During the non-tourist season the area is what would be known as a fishing village as the protected Lakes are a perfect place to build fish processing facilities and the area off shore is excellent for a multitude of different seafood.

Current Lakes Entrance Fishing Fleet

- The last Danish seine trawl fleet in Australian (17 boats)

Deep water board trawlers (5 boats)

A shark fishing fleet (6 boats)

Estuarine fishermen who fish the Gippsland Lakes (18 boats)

A scallop harvesting fleet that also catch squid when in season (30 boats)

Rock lobster (3 boats)

A fleet of inshore vessels (6 boats) who ply their trade in diverse forms of fishing close to the coast including prawn fishing

Bait fishers who supply recreational anglers (9 boats)

Fish landings to the port vary from 5,000 to 9,000 tonnes annually and represent a value to the Victorian community in the order of AU$150 million.

I've tried to find tourism statistics for the period when I was there in December/January 2009/2010, however I cannot locate any. What I will say is that the place was full of families.

We had a fishing boat, a sailing boat and my cousins had a jetski, so we were often on the water. There was a constant stream of boats at all four boat ramps every time we went to put one of the water craft in the water.

These boats were mostly dad and mum (and grandparents) and kids heading out to the lakes with a chiller filled with food and drink, for a bit of fishing. They'd load their boats with fishing rods, nets and in many cases, tyre tubes or water skiing equipment.

Along the entire beach front are also a significant number of jettys where you'd often see Dad taking the kids out in late afternoon, their new fishing rods they got for Christmas in tow, off to learn how to fish. And if not on the jettys or in the water on a boat, right along the sandy beach people would set up little temporary camping spots (not overnight) and be fishing directly in the surf.

So the attraction is that Lakes really is a place where families go to do family things. Together.

Of course it also is a boon for the local businesses along the Esplanade who depend on the two major tourist seasons to look after their families.

But the town also has a fishing industry as mentioned above, and it provides a fair amount of employment, some of it seasonal, but also some which is all year round.

Sitting on my Mothers balcony looking out on the ocean night after night we would see, regular as clockwork, a fishing trawler about an hour or two before dusk each evening, trawling within a short distance of the shoreline with what can only be described as drag nets.

This caught my attention, as I'd walked the shoreline where the boat was trawling on more than one occasion and knew that those families who were trying to catch one or two fish with their kids, frequented these jettys and shore or usually stayed fairly close to shore if in their boats.

So I asked my mother and her husband about this fishing boat.

Apparently in the town there is some sort of processing facility which takes whatever the catch is, processes it and turns it into pet food. The person who owns this trawler I was seeing close to shore every afternoon, owns the factory.
My mother said that he basically has been licensed to do this, however what happens is the shoreline becomes effectively barren the entire coastline so that all of those people coming to town, all of those families wont have much luck catching a thing, as the trawler pretty much cleans up.

On reflection, I asked why he doesn't just give it a rest during the two holiday periods, or move further up or down the coast. I was told the local community has spoken to the guy who owns this boat about it, particularly the people who rely on the tourist trade, and have been met with a wall of resistance. That it is well known in the community that this goes on, but they feel powerless to stop him, and thus he continues these practices.

After pushing a bit more, my mother's husband said this person, because he owns the processing plants and a few boats and employs people, has power in the town and has nothing but disdain for the tourists that come to town. That he had said he was intentionally sending his boats out along the shore line to stop tourists catching anything, because he believes that "those fish belong to me."

Earth Day

As Insull integrated the demands of disparate customers and networked his expanding empire with high voltage transmission lines, he convinced General Electric to build new generating technologies that would replace the size limited, gasoline powered, piston driven engines. In October 1903, General Electric and Chicago Edison opened the Fisk Street Turbine Station, which was powered from water boiled by burning coal and provided a then remarkable 5MW of electricity.

That paragraph above is important. Our entire world economy is heavily dependent on our ability to harness and transform energy so that it does meaningful work. In the case of electricity, the predominant form of harnessing technology is the combustion of fossil fuels, coal number one, in order to heat water, create steam and turn a Turbine Alternator.

It is interesting to note then that it was imagined out of a desire by an individual to move away from one form of fuel which had been plentiful in supply, now used in automobiles and thus expensive, to something, anything else.

It took the imagination and courage of Americans, to think outside the square, to try the impossible, to shift us from one way of doing things to another. General Electric inventing something better than what they currently had.

And so it goes with where our energy sector stands today.

According to the graphic above, world wide we use in total 16 TeraWatts of energy per year. Remaining depletable coal resources are at around 900 TeraWatts. However those resources require us exploding our natural environment, burying and poisoning rivers, and yes, endangering people's lives as has been seen recently with the Massey Coal mine explosion and the Gulf of Mexico Rig.

We should be trying to find a better way to do this like they did in 1903.

There is also another element to this which goes to why I think we've got it wrong and it's time to change things. That story about the man who believes all the fish belong to him, reflects the things our media have convinced many to value. This 'I must get mine' and 'sacrifice the environment', 'prevent other people from getting it before me' is selfishness which has been rationalized in our world. It is not sustainable. It harms more people than it helps. It is sociopathic.

We have just seen it with the American banking industry.

But the part of that story which hurts me the most is not that this person does this. It is that the people in the town know it. They are pissed about it. But because of a media which promotes people who push the 'Global Warming is BS' brainwashing chant, those who would stand up and say, hold on, you're wrong and everything we can see tells us your wrong, good people are cowed into non-action. Even when it is evident that those very same people who control public opinion have, on record, said the very opposite to what they are encouraging the crowd to chant.

So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't subscribe to the belief that we should say nothing when something is evidently hurting other people, or impacting our environment. No matter how powerful or how many radio stations, newspapers and TV talking heads they have backing them up, spinning the narrative.

Because we are all on this planet together and I know, if we wanted to, we are smart enough to find ways for that trawler guy and those tourists to both get the fish they need, possibly with offshore hatcheries. We are smart enough to figure out a way to reduce and eventually eliminate the need to depend on carbon emitting fuels, which the Scientist tell us will simply make those fires which Jack is spotting, and fighting, even worse than they already are.

That we need to begin to bury the concept that 'all those fish belong to me' is an acceptable way to think, to behave.

Because they don't.

They belong to that kid Seven generations from now who just got a fishing rod for Christmas and can't wait for his Dad to come home so he can take them down the beach and teach him how to catch a fish.

It's up to each and everyone one of us to do our bit to make that the reality that he will be living in.

That's my two cents for Earth Day.

Punk'd or Monck'd?

Unenergy — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:36:31 GMT

There is a common misconception, spread throughout the media, that Climate Skeptics have been intentionally ignored by the mainstream media in order to create the impression in the reader or viewers mind, that what they have to say is being supressed.

Our natural instinct once this framing became the conventional wisdom, was to see overcompensation within the media to 'give them equal air time', and for many individuals to become somewhat outraged, believing that something was being hidden from them.

The net result, many of these individuals became convinced of a conspiracy, hence increased malleability to accept on face value the statements of the well groomed media personalities which burst onto the scene just prior to Copenhagen with the pretense they were 'whistleblowers' and there was a concerted effort to keep them quiet.

However, things are not quite as they seem....

On 19 October 2009 a fellow by the name of Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, burst onto the scene on a Glenn Beck radio program claiming all sorts of outrageous conspiracies around climate, the IPCC and the UN were taking place which we did not know about due to suppression of the press.

First a bit of history, a couple of notes which help bring what happened next into context :

An art and Journalism major

He was educated at Harrow School, Churchill College, Cambridge, where he received a BA (Honours) in classics in 1973, and an MA in 1974, and University College, Cardiff, where he obtained a diploma in Journalism Studies.

Classics?(also known as Classical Studies) is the branch of the?Humanities?comprising the?languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient?Mediterranean?world

Being a journalist in the UK we are able to establish there existed a long standing relationship with News Limited, News Corp or more specifically, Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

Ferdinand Mount, the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and a former CPS director, brought Monckton into the Policy Unit in 1982, where he worked until 1986 as a special advisor on economic matters.

He left the Policy Unit (1986) to become assistant editor of the newly established, and now defunct, tabloid newspaper?Today.

Today, with the American newspaper USA Today as inspiration, launched on Tuesday, 4 March 1986
Today?was sold to Rupert Murdoch's?News International?in 1987.

Today?ceased on Friday, 17 November 1995

So on 30 October 2009 Lord Christopher Monckton gets an entire hour on Rupert Murdoch's, News Corp Fox News channel on the Glenn Beck show to discuss his claim that a worldwide scientific conspiracy is going on with climate science and he is being muzzled by a press/media uninterested or intentionally ignoring the story.

But if we go back, way back to 1 August 2008, we see another News Corp publication blogger, (a blogger with his own moderators and staff supplied by News Corp), publish a post mentioning this Monckton character who attacked Australia's federal government over proposed carbon emission mitigation policy.

An English hereditary Lord, who used to work for a News Corp publication, never elected to office in any way in the UK, gets press in Australia in a different News Corp publication warning our elected leaders on what is good for Australians.

Monckton warns Wong: You're steering Labor to doom

Next up on 11 November 2009, Lord Monckton was interviewed by one of Australia's most prominent radio personalities, Alan Jones. Alan's position mimicked Lord Monckton's in his belief that a conspiracy existed. He pushed the line that suppression by the press needed to be counter balanced by an 'honest' radio announcer.

==========================================================================

Rewinding a bit here, as although I'd watched this gentleman talk about conspiracy theories on Glenn Beck's show, I knew he was able to speak well enough and had strung together enough of an alternative story to muddy the waters around climate science, that some people would take what he had been saying as the truth.

However the alarm bells started going off big time when, in response to young people exercising their democratic right to free speech, including many Americans, when they voiced their concern at what they saw as misrepresentations being spread by Mr Monckton they were labelled with the term 'Hitler Youth'.

Anyone making that sort of comment as reaction to people in disagreement, particularly with such a carefully nurtured profile as Monckton had, warrants additional scrutiny.

Lord Monckton Invades SustainUS Booth - Calls U.S. students "Hitler Youth"

His first (and second) faux pas was reiterated in this video which I wrote a diary on.

Monckton repeats his misguided claim about 'Hitler Youth'

It's all opinion dressed up as fact, but there was one particular line in this interview which made me sit up and pay attention, as looking at Monckton's past work history as an arts and journalism student as well as working for a Murdoch publication, would this be an area he would necessarily have first hand knowledge of?

No it wasn't this line :

Coal and Oil are just as clean as any other form of energy.

It was this :

So it does show if you use modern methods of combustion which are designed to achieve a much more complete burn, then you dont get the problems we used to get, which have largely been solved in the West.

I agree there are problems in the poorer countries, like India and China, simply because their governments haven't taken the decisions that they could take if they wish, to use the modern technology. I think they should and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't help them to do that.

The Truth is much different

300 New FGD Projects Planned In China

In the 11th?plan from 2006-2010 the six major Chinese utilities will install 300 new SO2?flue gas desulfurization (FGD) systems.
Since they plan to install FGD on all units and the?U.S.?has not yet made that commitment, it is only a matter of a few years before?China?becomes the scrubber leader.

FGD = Flue Gas Desulfurization or the removal of acid rain causing gases. China has policy to require power stations to have this, the United States does not. Further China is using modern technology to build their power stations and add to their grid build out, whereas countries such as the United States, Australia and even the UK, have stations which were built 10, 20, up to 60 years ago with the technology available at the time.

This, drawing on my own knowledge and experience, was a big fail by Monckton.

Further, not only is this simply putting up a false equivalency, or more accurately, 'look, they are worse' argument, it is simply incorrect.

Shooting from the hip with either a talking point which the fossil fuel industry would pay to hear, ignorance presented as fact, or an intentional misrepresentation.

==========================================================================

Monckton's Australian Tour

January 22, 2010 Promotion by News Corp paid blogger

How to catch up with Lord Monckton

The story goes like this : A couple of Australian Engineers so enamoured by the story Lord Monckton had to tell, considered putting up their homes for mortgage in order to finance sponsoring him to tell of the things which News Corp's Glenn Beck had just shown on Fox News.

The climate change sceptic will carry out an extensive 13-day lecture tour of Australia at an estimated cost of $100,000. The cost is being covered by two semi-retired Queensland engineers, John Smeed and Case Smit.

And :

Billionaire backs Monckton tour

An idea that stemmed from a few drinks between friends will now be backed by Australia's richest woman Gina Rinehart and be made into a documentary with the BBC.

Hancock Prospecting Is a Western Australian mining company chaired by Gina Rinehart

These are the tour dates of Moncktons tour and we are to believe, financed with $100,000 by a couple of guys in a pub/bar.

Monckton & Plimer tour Australia: dates & venues

SYDNEY

Wednesday 27 January

12:15, Luncheon, The Union Club, SOLD OUT

17:30 Public lecture, Sheraton on the Park

Friday February 12th

12:30 - 2:30 Grand Ballroom, Hilton Hotel

NEWCASTLE

Thursday 28 January

12:30 Public lecture, Newcastle City Hall - Banquet Room

BRISBANE

Friday 29 January

12:00 - 2.00 Brisbane Hilton - Grand Ballroom

15:00 Public Lecture Brisbane - Irish Club, Tara Ballroom

NOOSA

Saturday 30 January

2pm Public Lecture "The J", Noosa Heads, John McRobert

MELBOURNE

February Monday 1

12:30 SOLD OUT "Sandwich Luncheon", (Inst. For Private Enterprise)

17:30 Public Lecture, Sofitel Hotel Grand Ballroom

CANBERRA

Wednesday 3 February

15:00 - 17:00 Public Lecture, National Press Club

ADELAIDE

Thursday 4 February

19:30 Public lecture Intercontinental Hotel (formerly Hyatt)

PERTH

Monday 8 February

18:00 Public Lecture, Parmelia Hilton Hotel - ARGYLE ROOM now

Tuesday February 9th

6 - 8pm Business School, University of Western Australia

And of course he had News Corp providing plenty of coverage for this grass roots, spur of the moment tour, who would bring balance to these poor, hard done by climate skeptics who'd been ignored, seemingly intentionally, by the mainstream media.

8 January 2010

The Adelaide Advertiser

High-priest sceptic to visit

20 January 2010

The Australian

'High priest of the sceptics' lured to tour

Heated moments mar Monckton

25 January 2010

Adelaide Advertiser

British climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton slams Kevin Rudd's ETS

The Australian

Climate sceptic Christopher Monckton to 'prove Rudd wrong'

Melbourne Herald Sun

Monckton applies the heat

Alan Jones Radio Show another interview

26 January 2010

The Australian

Climate denier lords it over scientists and their `global warning nonsense'

28 January 2010

The Herald Sun

Monckton feels warmth

30 January 2010

Brisbane Courier Mail and News.com.au site

Climate sceptic warmly received during debate

The Australian

Action can be 'riskier than doing nothing'

The Herald Sun

Monckton takes Brisbane

3 February 2010

Herald Sun

Abbott meets lord of the climate sceptics

Mud slinging is so typical of the approach of warm-mongers

4 February 2010

The Australian

Climate options get airtime as Lord Monckton strides the stage

The Herald Sun

How the 7.30 Report nobbled Monckton

(Complaint of how another media outlet, not News Corp, interviewed this individual)

8 February 2010

Lord Monckton gets another debate

So what did Mr Monckton have to say that News Corp, his former employer, would provide so much positive and supportive coverage of the message?

==========================================================================

Extract from Brisbane debate 29 January 2010

Introduction by moderator

Business Consultant, Policy Advisor, Writer, Columnist, Inventor and Hereditary Peer.

He served as an advisor to Margaret Thatchers policy unit in the 1980's and invented the eternity puzzle at the end of the 1990's, as well as the Eternity 2 in 2007.

Educated in the classics at Cainbridge and with a Diploma in Journalism Studies from university college Cardiff, Lord Monckton joined the Yorkshire Post before continuing his career as a media writer and editor and a press officer for the Conservative Central Office.

In 1982 through his involvement with a pro-conservative think tank, the center for policy studies, he came to the attention of the policy unit in Margaret Thatcher's government and worked there until 1986 as a special advisor on economic matters. He then returned to his media career
before establishing his own specialist consultancy company giving technical advice to corporations and governments...//SNIP

Why no mention that the good Lord once worked for News Corp for many years?

Lord Monckton at 1:30

What I want to do since I've only have 10 minutes here, is to concentrate on what I think is the one central argument on which the entire climate debate depends.... //SNIP

lord Monckton at 2:37

...and I'm going to try and boil that down, as every policy maker not expert in the field must, to one question which seems to hold the key to the entire debate.

And that question is known to climate scientists as the climate sensitivity question.

That is the question, how much Warming will you get, if you increase, as we are increasing, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Now, we are going to make, on this side of the house, a number of important and necessary concessions so that we can move this debate forward.

We are going to concede that Carbon Dioxide and other Greenhouse Gases which possess or mimic a dipole moment, will cause warming if you add them to the atmosphere.

We concede also that human kind is adding CO2 to the atmosphere at about the rate that the NOAA figures mention.

So we're not trying to pretend that we're not the cause of the CO2 in the atmosphere increasing, we're not going to try and pretend that that CO2 will cause no warming.

What we are going to contend is that, on the measured evidence, the amount of warming it causes is around 1/6th to 1/7th of what the UN thinks it is.

Now that is a rather startling claim, and I am going to try to give you some actual evidence for it.

And, right, you may have heard of the Climate Gate emails......

Entire recording here.

==========================================================================

Extract from Sydney 12 Feb 2010 debate moderated by .... Alan Jones

From 20:55 minute mark with Tim Lambert speaking

First thing to note is that we are increasing CO2. As you can see here :
Went along fairly flat for a while then in about 1950 or 60, CO2 has shot up and increased quite a lot.

And that's because of all the fossil fuels we are burning.

But the actual most important thing about this graph is over here on the right, if you can read what that says, that's the radiative forcing.

And if it wasn't for that, the fact that we are putting more CO2 in the atmosphere and increasing its concentration, would be just a scientific curiosity. No-one would really care, wouldn't really matter.

But radiative forcing is important and I know Lord Monckton explained it to you briefly, but I'll explain it to you just in case so we all know what we are talking about here.

We have in the Earth short wave radiation, and that comes in from the sun, and we have long wave radiation that goes out from the Earth.

If those two things are equal, the energies are equal, then the Earth will stay the same temperature.

But if you have more energy coming in than going out, then you're going to tend to warm the planet, and the difference, it's the difference between incoming and outgoing is called radiative forcing.

I've said more coming in than going out, but it can work the other way, you can have more going out that coming in.

And that would be a negative forcing and that would tend to cool the planet.

Same debate Lord Monckton introduction from 15:15

...And we can therefore use satellites to measure not only what temperature was and how it changed over this period from about 1980, '83 onwards. And we can also tell how the outgoing radiation from the Earth's surface changed.

It is the relationship between changes in temperature of the Earths Surface and changes in outgoing radiation at the top of the atmosphere that absolutely govern this debate, that's what it's all about.

So what we're going to do is we're going to try to explain the one of those three of those relatively rapid periods of warming that we can explain because we've got satellites there.

And here in a paper by Pinker et al of 2005 is a graph, which is, pretty boring to look at you might say what's going on here.

Well let me add a few details to it so that you can see what's going on.

What we have got is a reduction in cloud cover over that 19 year period. 1983 to 2001.

A reduction which led to a radiative forcing, as it is called, an extra amount of solar radiation hitting the Earths surface and going out as long wave radiation.

3.04 watts per square meter in just 19 years, now none of you are gasping at that figure, but it is in fact an astonishing figure.

The reason why it's astonishing, is that the UN's climate panel, which is probably exaggerating, says that the entire human effect on the climate in the 256 years from 1750 to 2005 inclusive, is just 1.6 watts per square meter.

So here we have an enormous naturally occuring forcing verified in Pinker's paper by four seperate methods.
Which occurs it seems, we don't know why it occurs, it's a natural reduction in cloud cover, then it comes back again, it's a cyclical thing, and from that we can do a simple calculation. Now I'm not going to go through this graph in detail, you'll be tested on it later.

But what I am going to do is just show you, very quickly, just what this means. What the bottom line is here, and the bottom line is this, that if Pinker's measurement is right,
and remember in science these are always big ifs that we have to check and verify and other people have to come in and look,
But if his measurement is right, then we can do a very simple back of the envelope calculation and I admit it is a back of the envelope calculation, I don't admit it is the last word on the subject, but what it shows is the ball park within which we are operating here.

And what we see is that the warming we would expect to get if we doubled the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, that is what's known as climate sensitivity, will be about a fifth of a celcius degree, just a little bit more than a fifth of a celsius degree, but the UN is saying it will be 3.26 celcius degrees. 7.5 times too big.

Now that is only a back of the envelope calculation, it's very simple, it's very crude, it's very rough and ready. So I communicated this result to a team of mathematicians around the world with whom I discuss these ideas from time to time, one of them, at my request, did a more detailed calculation, and he said sorry mate but you're wrong.

It's actually at least 8 time exaggerated the UN's figure....(Snip)

Take away the UN's exaggeration and you take away the problem. End of the Science.

Video wont embed Link here

So far only one of these individuals is engaging in hyperbolic attacks on the integrity of others. We effectively have two individuals in agreement on the fundamental importance of the science, but one who uses unecessary inflammatory language directed at individuals and institutions who are trying to find the truth.

They both agree on CO2. One says it will warm the planet by 3 degrees Celsius or more according to the IPCC, the other basing his statements on a paper written by a Pinker et al, says it is overstated by a factor of 7 to 8.

More from Tim Lambert 21:44

And this is where I agree 100% with Lord Monckton.
The most important question about the science, and, as you can see, he's agreed with me here. Is the climate sensitivity.

And what does that mean?

It tells us how much warming do you get from a certain amount of radiative forcing in the long run.

As an important qualification there what happens if you have a forcing, the planet starts to warm up, but it takes a long time.

We have these oceans which take a long time to heat up so to actually get the full amount of warming, from a forcing if it just stays constant, might take a hundred or 200 years. You get a fair bit of it straight away, but then a lot of it takes a much a time to happen.

But heres the equation, very simple equation that says the change in temperature, to work that out if you know the forcing, you just have to multiply it by the climate sensitivity.

What does that mean? It means if the climate sensitivity is low, as Lord Monckton suggests over there, then we can put lots of CO2 in the atmosphere and things wont warm up very much.

So if it's low, there is no problem. And this is where I think we're in complete agreement.
If on the other hand it's high, and he has the number for the IPCC up there. If it's high then we do have a problem.

Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will cause quite a bit of warming and that will have all kinds of bad consequences.

So if sensitivity is low, no problem, Sensitivity is high, yes theres a problem.

That's the key question in this debate. If you think it's low then Lord Monckton wins, if we conclude that it's high then I win the debate.

26:05 Tim Lambert on Monckton calculation and criticism in Melbourne of IPCC

His calculation has 0.43 degrees of warming, and the IPCC thinks its going to be more like 3. So this is it, this is what the whole debate is about.

So since this calculation is so simple, there's an obvious question I asked myself, and I hope all of you have been asking yourself, why haven't the climate scientists noticed this? Does Lord Monckton think they're fools?

The only conclusion that you can come to is that [the IPCC] were deliberately avoiding the very clear implications of Dr Pinker's paper. They knew perfectly well that if they took proper account of that paper they would have to evaluate climate sensitivity as low by the remarkably simple calculation that I showed you on the screens or something very very close to it. And they simply fudged it because if they did that and admitted that all their?previous reports were wrong they'd be out of business before you could say "Jack Robinson".

So he doesn't think they're fools, he thinks they're frauds.

They're all doing it just for the money.
Which is a pretty extraordinary claim, because, well there's lots of scientists, are they all in on it?

And then I had another thought, what about Dr Pinker? Why hasn't Dr Pinker spoken up and said "you haven't represented my work fairly"?

"Now this paper was written in 2005 by a satellite nerd named Pinker. He is wholly unconcerned with the global warming debate. It's as though he lives on another planet. He lives for verifying weather satellites and doing their job. That's what Pinker is all about."

So the answer is, Pinker is just not interested in that question. Doesn't care.

So that was also a surprise to me, that person is completely out of it.

So I thought I'd contact Dr Pinker.

And the first thing I noticed was that she was a woman.

Monckton on Pinker

And here in a paper by Pinker et al of 2005 is a graph, which is, pretty boring to look at you might say what's going on here.

So here we have an enormous naturally occuring forcing verified in Pinker's paper by four seperate methods.

What the bottom line is here, and the bottom line is this, that if Pinker's measurement is right, and remember in science these are always big ifs that we have to check and verify and other people have to come in and look, but if his measurement is right, then we can do a very simple back of the envelope calculation...

So I communicated this result to a team of mathematicians around the world with whom I discuss these ideas from time to time, one of them, at my request, did a more detailed calculation, and he said sorry mate but you're wrong.

It's actually at least 8 time exaggerated the UN's figure....(Snip)

Take away the UN's exaggeration and you take away the problem. End of the Science.

Pinker's statement read by someone else (not her voice)

"The CO2 "radiative forcing" value that Mr. Christopher Monckton is quoting refers to the impact on the Earth's Radiative balance as described above. The numbers that we quote in our paper represent the change in surface SW due to changes in the atmosphere (clouds, water vapor, aerosols). These two numbers cannot be compared at their face value. To the best of my understanding this is the source of the misunderstanding."

"Our work was properly interpreted in the latest IPCC Report (2007)"

Link to Lambert's Blog

Link to Pinker response

Link to part one of debate here.

==========================================================================

Lord Monckton has clearly made the connection between man, Carbon Dioxide emissions and warming of the atmosphere.

He has clearly made the statement that Pinker's 2005 paper he has read and believes it discredits all of the IPCC work on Climate science which is warning of a temperature rise of 3.2 degrees celsius if we stick to business as usual.

That with a 'back of the envelope calculation' he has determined they are wrong by a factor of seven.

He even makes the point that "we have to check and verify and other people have to come in and look".

That was his main argument. Pinker proved the IPCC was wrong, his maths buddies agreed, therefore Australian media, News Corp in particular, relentlessly publicized this man's tour around Australia.

And let me tell you, people bought it up. Every bit of it.

But he never checked with the author of the paper, if his intepretation was correct.

How do we know?

He consistently referred to Pinker as he, his, him. A paper released in 2005 and this debate informing Australian's of this travesty of science was in 2010. 5 years and a thesis which changes direction of policy for an entire country ought to warrant at least a phone call, wouldn't you think.

Not only that, Pinker said he had misunderstood her paper and that the IPCC got it right.

What hope does humanity have with people like this, a media machine which pushes the line of former employees that everyone in the scientific establishment associated with Climate Change is a fraud, that he knows the truth?

==========================================================================

Let me end with this from Today, the Rupert Murdoch owned newspaper Lord Monckton worked for, Wikipedia entry :

Closure came shortly after a front page of the Oklahoma City bombing showed a fireman carrying the body of a young girl accompanied by the headline "IN THE NAME OF ALLAH", which proved embarrassing when it soon became clear the bombing had nothing to do with Muslim militants but with American extremists.

I'm guessing that would be this photograph. (Warning Graphic Imagery)

==========================================================================

Tell me, what ever happened to integrity, decency but most of all honesty in journalism? I'd expected more from the generation who had opportunities those in future will not ever see, and who have squandered so many chances they had to make the world into a more sustainable, tolerant place.

And how sad that a foreigner can come to your country, call American young people 'Hitler Youths', one a Jewish Student, and many Americans who watch Fox News take the side of the foreigner, a hereditary Lord from Britain, over their own.

Arctic Ice Melt could cost 24 trillion by 2050

Unenergy — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:51:59 GMT

Arctic ice melt could cost $24tln by 2050: report

Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $US2.4 trillion ($2.8 billion) to $US24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday.

The research project involved more than 370 scientists from 27 countries who collectively spent 15 months, starting in June 2007, aboard a research vessel above the Arctic Circle. It marked the first time a ship has stayed mobile in Canada's high Arctic for an entire winter.

"It's happening much faster than our most pessimistic projections," said University of Manitoba Prof. David Barber, the lead investigator of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead study. A flaw lead is the term for open water between pack ice and coastal ice.

"There are more storms now because there's more open oceans and those storms are having a dramatic impact on the sea ice," said Barber.

The storms drop precipitation, mostly snow, on the sea ice and the snow insulates the ice, keeping it from growing thicker.

Barber compared the impact of losing sea ice in the Arctic to the loss of trees in a tropical rain forest.

The Arctic sea ice isn't just a cap on top of the ocean, Barber said. "The sea ice breathes," he said. "It pumps carbon dioxide in and out."

There are also a number of unknowns including:

Just how ocean currents will shift as Earth warms.

How much additional warming of the air may result as giant but unseen natural stores of methane in the frigid seabed's begin to bubble out as warming currents thaw them.

How the complex yearly give-and-take cycles of carbon dioxide (CO2) by Arctic plants and animals -- as they breathe in and out -- will alter as average global temperature rises.

In addition, as we've been hearing for some years now, studies have shown the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, further complicating the calculating.

Melting of Arctic sea ice is already triggering a feedback of more warming as dark water revealed by the receding ice absorbs more of the sun's energy, he said. That could lead to more melting of glaciers on land and raise global sea levels.

Whilst I was reading Fish out of Water's diary the other day, he posted this heat content anomaly graph reminded me to look at the amount of energy it takes to melt ice to water.

Citation: Murphy, D. M., S. Solomon, R. W. Portmann, K. H. Rosenlof, P. M. Forster, and T. Wong (2009), An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D17107, doi:10.1029/2009JD012105.

According to this physics site it takes 80 calories of energy (in the form of heat) per gram of ice to phase shift to water.

However it only takes 100 calories per gram for that now melted water to reach boiling temperature of 100 degrees celsius.

With the feedback loops of Methane being released by melting undersea ice, loss of the ability of the ice to reflect the sun, and the energy already absorbed and present in the water, once again, I would expect these figures above as was the estimates of speed of melt, to be grossly understated.

Which is why I cannot understand people like Australia's coalition party and America's GOP pretending that they are doing anything but ensuring our demise by playing obstructionist politics, particularly around this now observed impact of climate change.

Every young person, in fact any person who believes our youth deserve a chance at any sort of life, needs to get motivated and demand action on this, if it is not too late already.

An Aussie Visiting America - A futurist for a week

Unenergy — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:00:00 GMT

For a few years now I have been following the development of a number of renewable energy technologies. This is a keen interest of mine as my background has been predominantly in the power industry, and I of course am very concerned about the release of millions of years of stored carbon is having on the climate.
In August I visited the United States and as part of that trip, my intent was to stop at a number of solar company installations, preferably unannounced, to see whether what they were telling people was going on with their business, did actually reflect the reality on the ground.
This is what I saw, and my interpretation of where solar technology could be headed.
In about March of 2008 I had come across a technology concept called concentrated solar. This is where diffuse sunlight was collected either through the use of mirrors, often in the form of heliostats, or Fresnel lens, to focus or concentrate the sunlight from a large area to a small area.

I had also discovered that an Australian company was talking about a product they had been designing called a Sunball and Suncube, and it had been raising interest in the blogosphere. Previously I'd started a website and had done a little bit of preliminary research into alternative energy technologies, but hadn't really found one which I could hang my hat on which could be rolled out quickly in multiple markets and bring the price of solar generated electricity down to comparitive levels as fossil fuels.
Concentration technology, because it uses a much smaller amount of active material than silicon, or creates enough heat to create steam to turn a turbine without the combustion of a fuel, has the potential to achieve what others had failed to do.

I'd first heard of concentrating the sun to create heat way back when I was an apprentice at a coal fired power station and had started a correspondence course on Energy and Society. A couple of the books I'd read as part of the course covered something called parabolic trough technology.

"the answer is there in the row upon row of mirrors, steel frames, pipes and generators at Kramer Junction. It works. 'It's an alternative energy source. No one can fail to get excited about that,' Norris said. 'In the long run, this is the way we as a people should head. We're here on this planet for ever and we'd better take care of it. I feel this industry, right, is going to be the grandfather of what we're going to end up with. We're doing a good thing.'
The near 50 hectares of trough shaped collectors at Kramer Junction are not only proof that solar energy on a grand scale works; they also demonstrate how government policy, in this case of both the US Government and the Californian Government, can get things moving; taking a fledgling technology, encouraging private investors to invest what eventually totalled $1.25Billion, and fast-tracking the concept to the point where it was a viable, job-creating, clean source of electricity. Kramer Junction power station employs 125 people - managers, operators, maintenance staff... and mirror cleaners....
Page 51 The Big Switch, Clean energy for the 21st century, (c) 1994, Gavin Gilchrist

In Luz's design, the solar trough heats a working fluid that circulates to a power station where water is super heated into steam, which then powers an electricity producing turbine....The power plant built at Harper Lake, California, in the Mojave desert in 1989....produce enough power for about 170,000 homes for as little as 9ckWh ........unenergy comment:down from 29ckWh in 1984 in their pilot plant
But then this...
Unlike the tax breaks for the U.S. oil and gas industries, which amounted to $8.8 Billion in 1989, the federal solar tax credit required annual renewal. In 1989, Congress renewed the credits for 9 months instead of the normal 12, forcing Luz to finish its 1990 project 3 months earlier than planned and driving up costs. The final blow came a few months later when a faulty analysis led California's finance department to temporarily revoke the company's tax exemption, leading nervous investors-who had already put more than $1.25 Billion into Luz- to pull the plug.
Page 145/146 Power Surge (c)1995 Christopher Flavin, Nicholas Lenssen

So a new technology in 5 years had managed to move from pilot stage plant at a cost of 29ckWh to reduce costs down to 1/3rd of that, and remarkably two beauracratic decisions had created an artificial slump in investor confidence to shut down this technology from progressing further. Despite the level of promise it had shown in such a short time.

At the time, 1995, 1996, I was just learning about coal fired power stations, boilers, and turbines, but can remember thinking even back then what an amazing future we have coming up when 1900's technology which relies on burning clumps of coal, burning dirt, may eventually be replaced by the input only of the sun.

However it was not to be, as I have previously alluded there were forces at work behind the scenes to see that people and the planet were not as important as profit.
We knew how to profit, not how to protect

But discovering not only that there was new life being breathed into concentrated Solar power, had me incredibly excited about this future which I had read about and briefly wondered when it would begin to happen, all the way back in 1995.

Green and Gold Energy

Sunball to Suncube

ES Systems

Square Engineering

AC Gava

GGE

Sunseeker

ADD VIDEO

Solar Systems factory street view Front

Solar Systems factory Street view side

Solar Systems at Bridgewater

Original dish

Heliostat on central tower

LINK
http://www.solarsystems.com.au...

Acciona Boulder

Emcore

Entech

Solar PV production
http://gadgets.solarfeeds.com/...

Work in Einstein telling the President to pursue Nuclear energy

Acciona and Dale from the GCTC

Nuclear Museum and rain
Emcore
3 dudes outside hotel

2 Airports expensive taxi ride
Entech
Bus trip and deaf woman
Tour of Outdoor world and Shreveport waterfront

Cape Kennedy?

Entech
Solar Airconditioning
http://sopogy.com/blog/2009/08...
http://74.125.155.132/search?q...

Disruptive Solar technologies

Unenergy — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:57:48 GMT

Yesterday I wrote of a technology called concentrated photovoltaics, which if all goes well, may bring the retail cost of solar panels down from at present, $4.31 per watt, to 30c per watt.

Moore's Law for Solar - 30c watt in years to come

The technology I discussed was the concentration of the sun, using fresnel lens or mirrors like in a telescope, being able to reduce the area of active semi conductor material down to 1000th of that of Silicon to produce equivalent electricity.

Today I'd like to look at Silicon solar cells and what happens if we concentrate sunlight onto them.

I mentioned yesterday the amount of Silicon based solar panels produced in a year at 6.37 Gigawatts.

I also mentioned that in 2006-2007 China went from 622 GW of electricity generation assets to 713 GW of generation. And from 713GW to 793GW between 2007 and 2008. In other words 90GW and 80GW of generation.

Link

So if we know that we can concentrate the sunlight onto a solar cell and increase the amount of power coming out, what would that mean for our Silicon production for solar cells if all we did was change the lens?

Well, Silicon has a limitation in that as the temperature increases, so efficiency levels reduce. That is the amount of sunlight converted to usable electricity.

Silcon PV panel rating

Module performance is generally rated under Standard Test Conditions (STC) : irradiance of 1,000 W/m?, solar spectrum of AM 1.5 and module temperature at 25?C.

Temperature influence on cell output

For most crystalline silicon solar cells the reduction is about 0.50%/?C, though the rate for the highest-efficiency crystalline silicon cells is around 0.35%/?C. By way of comparison, the rate for amorphous silicon solar cells is 0.20-0.30%/?C, depending on how the cell is made.

Lets consider that for a moment - For every degree of temperature above 25?C (77?F) a standard Silicon PV panel can lose anything up to 0.5% of its efficiency.

Maybe no big deal for temperatures don't get much above 77?F for much of the year even in Las Vegas which hits a peak of 106?F in July or 41?C resulting at worst case a 16?C over test conditions (STC) or 0.5% x 16 = 8% drop in output. However consider again this:

Sunpower - Silicon panels 20.4%

Suntech Breaks Solar Panel Efficiency Record - Again 16.53%

CIGS at 19.9%

Flexible CdTe Thin film at 12.4%

Although these are not all Silicon, you can see that an 8% loss during the hottest times of the year when power demand for air conditioning cooling would be at its peak, starts to seriously cut into generation and the usefulness and return on investment of these types of panels.

Having said that, there are a number of companies which have designed Silicon based concentration modules which reduce the amount of active material by changing how the sun focuses on the panels.

JX Crystals has a 3 x concentrator which uses mirrors to focus on silicon to produce the power.

Stellaris has a 2 x concentrator.

Solaria has a 3 x concentrator.

Solaria's technology platform enables the solar industry to produce two to three times the number of PV modules from the same amount of silicon material used in today's conventional modules.

There are a number of others listed here which do something similar.

CPV, Pt. 2: Low-Concentration Photovoltaics

What does this mean?

Well with different optics by concentrating the sunlight, the value of active silicon PV material in terms of rated power output being manufactured each year increases.
In the instance of 2 x concentration we go from 6.37 GW to 12.74 Gigawatts.

Using the 3 x multiplying effect of concentration we end up with around 19 Gigawatts of generation capacity worth of Silicon cells being manufactured each year.

Starts to look a lot better when you consider the 80GW being installed by China each year.

Solar hot water

In the majority of cases this is where solar energy is used to heat water or other transfer fluid in a panel located on someone's roof. These systems are normally closed loop augmented or backed up with another system which kicks in if the water temperature falls below a certain value.

The typical 50 gallon electric water heater uses 11.1 barrels of oil a year, which translates into the same amount oil used by a typical 4 door sedan driven by the average consumer.

As you can see from the above quote, installing a solar hot water system would it seems equate to removing a car off the road in terms of carbon footprint and less oil needed to be imported.

What if silicon PV was combined with a solar water collector system? Could it keep the temperature of the silicon cell low enough that it continued producing electricity and the efficiency levels were not badly affected?

20 x concentration unit

For those that have been following my diaries, you will know that I visited the United States in August and travelled across the country stopping in at a few tourist destinations but also some out of the way places where new solar technologies were being developed.

Back in the 1990's a firm called Entech Solar were working alongside Boeing and NASA to produce solar arrays which were sent into space. These were able to reduce the weight of satellite solar wings by reducing the amount of Silicon used through the use of thin film acrylic lens manufactured by 3M.

Stretched Lens Array

Back in the early 1990's, the first refractive concentrator array was flown on the PASP Plus (Photovoltaic Array Space Power Plus Diagnostics) space mission. The array was composed of ENTECH's "mini-dome" focusing lenses over Boeing's mechanically stacked multi-junction solar cells.

The lens was able to refract the sunlight hitting it, with a high error tolerance, so that a small strip down the centre of the heat sink was the only silicon required. This was a major cost and weight saving reducing silicon by 95% for the same power output.

Entech wrote a contract report on pricing of these units to bring this technology back to Earth for terrestrial applications. Even back in 1995 with the 95% reduction in expensive silicon they were able to engineer into their panels, the cost per watt for quantities over 30MW manufacturing would have been around $1.20.

This was the module Entech produced from the technology they had designed with NASA.

Two unit configuration.

Photos taken outside the Entech building of a 2 unit array and the tilting and tracking mechanism.

Entech built a 100kW air cooled array at 3M in 1990 using the 22 x concentration technology.

This comment from an article at Treehugger on these modules sums up why this technology is extremely important.

For example, 50 kilowatts of solar cells used in conventional flat plate solar modules generates one megawatt of electrical energy using the Entech modules.

Entech photos of projects throughout the years

Link to full report

==========================================================================

Back in August I met with Dr Robert Walters, Entech VP of marketing, at their Fort Worth facility located in the Alliance Gateway estate in Texas. Dr Walters with 35 years in the industry, has a long association with solar technology development being the co-founder of Entech along with having served on the Advisory committee for the DOE and on the Texas Energy Co-ordination Council boards.

He was able to show me the curved stretched lens design Entech have designed and explained its significance is in the ability to refract sunlight to its targeted area with a very high level of error tolerance.

ENTECH's Fresnel lens concentrators possess a shape error tolerance more than 200 times higher than other reflective concentrator approaches, making mass production, installation, and long-term operation in an outdoor environment far more practical than for other comparable systems.

Some of the other concentration systems, because they concentrate sunlight up to 1,500 times, often require error tolerance of less than 0.1?.

"All these technologies require minimum pointing errors (pointing accuracy better than 0.1?) under demanding operating conditions with which energy production is guaranteed and, therefore, the profitability of the installation," said Garrido.

Many developers, including Emcore who I also visited in August, are working and succeeding improving this error tolerance through advanced optics, but it seems with what Entech have developed in their 20 x concentrator and what Dr Walters showed me in their display, they are already there.

This organisation has also shifted, like many others, to a modular, stand alone system which reduces the prospective construction costs by eliminating much of the need for heavy machinery. Their initial product has made way for a new unit which, according to Dr Walters, is currently undergoing certification.

The most significant thing about this technology aside from the massive saving in amount of Silicon required, is the fact we have a combined solar hot water system and electricity generating PV unit combined in one.

These modules below were the prototype from when Entech worked with NASA developing this lens and low weight satellite array.

Entech's new module design minimizes weight and improves installation ease through a much more manageable sized unit.

The efficiency in terms of energy capture from the sun goes up by a factor of 4 or 5 using Entech's combined heat and power unit. In fact they suggest these units will act as a hedge against high gas prices by offsetting both electrical and heating requirements.

Although we only discussed this in passing, the potential for these modules to be used in solar Air conditioning is being pursued. This is where hot fluids heated by the sun, are able to be used in a system like the one below. Where hot fluid via an absorption chiller is able to cool another fluid circulating throughout a building and cooling the air down. Many organizations use similar designs.

Solar Airconditioning

==========================================================================

Tubular Skylight

One of the products which Dr Walters showed me Entech have developed was a skylight. I have done a lot of industrial installation work and have seen a lot of ducting installed in ceilings for HVAC, so could instantly see the advantages of this technology. Basically with a relatively small roof mounted enclosure, Entech have designed a skylight which simplifies the installation of a skylight, particularly in commercial and industrial buildings, by reflecting the sunlight. These I could see being installed by any HVAC installer as the skill set is identical.

The skylighting in this room is from Entech's technology.

This company is located in the Alliance Gateway insdustrial park, whose tenants include LG Electronics, Nestle, Texas Instruments, Mitsubishi, Lockheed Martin, Ford Motor Company, Motorola, AT&T, General Motors, Safeway, General Mills, M&M Aerospace, Bell Helicopter. Imagine the prospect for using these products when you see what the roofs of the estate's buildings look like.

Something went awry with my imagination when I got back to the airport that afternoon because of the prospects for these technologies I could now see in so many applications. So much so I think I freaked the guy out sitting next to me when I proceeded to take a photograph of the airport false ceiling. Where the skylight and the air conditioning ducting, along with providing the power for the artificial lighting, I knew could be serviced by the products I'd just seen at Entech's facility. In other words, the hour I spent at the offices of Entech change my whole outlook on how we achieve the things we have become acclimatized to doing a particular way.

==========================================================================

Conclusion

These technologies have incredibly disruptive potential in our pursuit of replacing conventional means of doing the same old things. The cost of the solar skylighting, if low enough, would be ideal for installing in place of artificial light saving significant amounts on electricity cost for a commercial establishment as shown in the shots above. Not to mention the heat saving factor if electric lighting is reduced, will lower artificial air conditioning costs as the HVAC system will not need to work as hard.

The combined heat and power solar panel is what impresses me the most even now. With this company having 25 years worth of performance data in the concentrating field, they have a proven and reliable product to sell utilities which are normally risk averse.
Couple this up with the low cost to entry to build a manufacturing facility for this technology as an Entech manufacturing facility capable of producing approximately 40 MW of panel costs around $5 Million.

But it most certainly is the 20 x concentration on silicon which has me most excited. With worldwide production of silicon at around 6 GW multiplying this by a factor of 20 makes it all seem possible.

When China is installing 80 to 90 GW of new electricity generation per year, 20 x 6 GW = 120 GW of potential electricity from this one technology alone.

The United States as of 2007, had approximately 1,087 Gigawatts of electricity generating capacity.

With 120 GW of solar PV being produced each year, installing solar seems a lot more practical and achievable.

Truly disruptive.

Maybe this is not such a far fetched possibility after all - running the world on today's sunlight, not yesterdays.

Maybe that is where some of your stimulus money should be going.

Build the factories. Create the Jobs. Insure our future against the ravages of climate change.

Moore's Law for Solar - 30c watt in years to come

Unenergy — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:54:36 GMT

"We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present and call it GDP (Gross Domestic Product)" Paul Hawken

The United States as of 2007, had approximately 1,087 Gigawatts of electricity generating capacity.

China had around 624 Gigawatts of Electricity Generation capacity.

Australia has approximately 48 Gigawatts of generating capacity.

India has 147 Gigawatts of electricity generation capacity.

Cheating a little here, but Stranded Wind describes three kinds of electricity Generation better than I could, they are:

Baseload is a word that is used to describe both the minimum level of power required to keep a system going and the type of generation that provides it. Coal and nuclear are the classic examples here - they're slow to warm up but once they're moving they're kept at a certain operating range for months on end. You may also hear 'spinning reserves' - this is a baseload type generating facility that is 'spun up' but unloaded, running in reserve for demand peaks. Hydroelectric can also be considered baseload generating capacity if it's got a steady flow of water behind it.

Dispatchable is a word used to describe generating sources that are quick to react to new requirements. Natural gas generating using 'peaker' plants is the classic example. These systems maybe only run for a week total out of ever year but electric rates are such that they're profitable when servicing demand spikes. Hydroelectric power is also counted as dispatchable - simply open the gate, the turbine spins up, and power begins to flow.

Intermittent sources produce irregularly (wind) or periodically (solar). Natural gas or hydroelectric dispatchable power coupled with these renewables can make for a smooth, trustworthy flow of power.

The need for electricity is not static as you would imagine. When there are more air conditioners turned on, more factories operating, power demand is higher, when people are sleeping, power demand drops right off.

Below is a representative snapshot of California's electricity demand which you can see from the thin red line, is around 21,000 Megawatts or 21 Gigawatts at 2am until 5 am, peaking at 31 GW around 6pm in the evening. That's a full 10 Gigawatts swing or around 1/3 of the installed generation supply being there to account for these changes in demand.

The loudest argument I hear against investment in Solar and Wind power is that they are not base load. Well as you can see from this graph above, baseload power is not always required and in fact 1/3 of the entire grid is made up of dispatchable if not intermittent forms of power generation.

Installed assets only required to respond to demand. And the structure of power generation is such that if you don't generate power, you make no money.

China is adding significant amounts of Generation. According to this article, they were at 713 Gigawatts by 2007, and 793GW by July of this year. That would be 90 GW added 2006-07, and 80GW 2007-2008.

1.6 GW is one of these

so 80 GW, what China is adding each year in new generation assets, is 50 of these.

Total manufactured Solar panels in 2009 (not just for China's market) was 6.37 Gigawatts.

In other words solar is a minor part of a giant energy market.

But can it increase and fast?

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Desert Knowledge

Located in the desert of Australia is a $3.1 Million solar demonstration project installed to allow real time and historical monitoring data for different Solar technologies and different mounting mechanisms.

Real time data is available here.

Technology installed per graphic above

1. Large Scale Tracking

2. Concentrating PV Dishes - Not installed

3. Roof Mounted Array

4. Solar Forest Hydraulic

5. Solar Forest 1 Axis

6. Solar Forest 2 Axis

7. CdTe Thin Film

8. Amorphous Silicon

9. CIGS Thin Film

10. Back Contact Silicon

11. Silicon Polycrystalline

12. Silicon Monocrystalline A

13. Silicon Monocrystalline B

14. Solar Forest Fixed

15. Solar Water System

Two of the most important factors I can ascertain in relation to the suitability of solar generation as part of a grid supply, are efficiency and tracking. Efficiency being the amount of sunlight which hits an area being converted into real electricity.

The link here takes you to an interactive real time data chart recorder where you can turn on or off the different solar generation methods and track the output against a whole series of parameters including temperature, wind, rainfall, solar insolation or simply against each other. By clicking inside the chart you can raise these windows which show output in numbers, but also what is called the Solar insolation or Watts of Sunlight hitting an area of 1 square meter.

Insolation is a measure of solar radiation energy received on a given surface area in a given time. The name comes from a portmanteau of the words incident solar radiation. It is commonly expressed as average irradiance in watts per square meter (W/m2) or kilowatt-hours per square meter per day (kW?h/(m2?day)) (or hours/day). In the case of photovoltaics it is commonly measured as kWh/(kWp?y) (kilowatt hours per year per kilowatt peak rating).

As you can see in this case above, Solar insolation between 08:00 and 12:00 averaged 864.14 W/m2.

Solar Tracker

The second major factor determining output of a solar panel is whether or not the panel tracks the sun. A fixed panel is one which would be installed on a slanted roof and doesn't move. Which means that it will generate most power when the sun is pointing directly on it and less as the sun moves across the sky.

A panel which follows the sun across the sky can be one or two axis tracking.

Single axis tracking the Sun usually from East to West.

Dual axis on the other hand can track the Sun wherever it is in the sky.

Without tracking - Fixed Arrays

Below you will see at the top of the graph the amount of solar insolation striking the earth at any given time during the day. The first two charts at the bottom reflect the amount of electricity generated by different technologies.

Polycrystalline, Monocrystalline and Amorphous silicon - fixed

CIGS (Copper Indium Gallium Selenide) and Thin film - Fixed Array

As you can see fixed panels very closely follow the output of the sun during the day.

Dual Tracking panel
In the case of dual axis tracking panels, we see a different output which produces maximum panel output from almost the minute the sun breaks the horizon until it sets in the evening.

Now if you remember back to the start of this article, you will see that power required in that 1/3 swing in grid demand in California starts around 6am. If we have solar panels which can start operating as soon as the sun is up and people are awake needing power, and which stays at a relatively stable maximum solar output, this matches the demand on the grid more closely than those which peak only in the middle of the day.

Do you remember also what Stranded Wind said about dispatchable power:

Natural gas generating using 'peaker' plants is the classic example. These systems maybe only run for a week total out of ever year but electric rates are such that they're profitable when servicing demand spikes.

In other words there are installed assets which are relatively expensive to run which meet these swings from 21GW to 31GW. Reducing the need to operate by installing large scale solar panels which burn no fuel, and in the case of photovoltaics, little to no ongoing water demands, seems sensible if we can get the price to install down close to what other fixed generation assets cost in terms of capital.

Estimated capital cost to build a coal fired power station:

Construction costs, as of 2004, run to US$1,300 per kilowatt

In May 2005, the company told regulators it wanted to spend $2 billion to build twin 800-megawatt units. But 18 months later, in November 2006, Duke said that it would cost $3 billion. Then the state utility commission said to build only one of the plants.

And in May of this year, Duke said that would cost $1.83 billion, an increase of more than 80 percent from the original estimate....
He estimated that in the past 18 months, the price of a coal-fired power plant had risen 25 percent to 30 percent.

Estimate cost to build a nuclear power station:

commodity prices shot up in 2008, and so all types of plants will be more expensive than previously calculated. In June 2008 Moody's estimated that the cost of installing new nuclear capacity in the U.S. might possibly exceed $7,000/kWe in final cost.

Both these plants require major mining and fuel processing operations, consume large quantities of cooling water, often drinking quality water, create pollution during fuel processing and consumption, and leave a legacy of toxicity in the environment we have no way of economically dealing with. The consumption of additional resources to keep these plants operational also bears an ongoing cost.

Let's ignore the ongoing costs for the moment and focus only on the capital cost with the end result being approximately $1.50 - $2 per watt of capital cost for coal and although this capital cost for Nuclear is high, Wikipedia does site precedence of around $4-$7 Watt.

So what does solar power cost?

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Remember I talked about solar panel conversion efficiency as a mechanism to ascertain cost per kWh produced?

If we look at the different types of panels above we see recent efficiency records as follows:

Sunpower - Silicon panels 20.4%

Suntech Breaks Solar Panel Efficiency Record - Again 16.53%

CIGS at 19.9%

Flexible CdTe Thin film at 12.4%

About a week ago Jamess had a diary on the reclist about a subject which has long been an area I am interested in. He discussed the efficiency increases achieved by Boeing in improving the amount of sunlight converted into electrical power.

Solar Cell 40% Efficiency Breakthough, becomes Product Ready
Well if the current Solar Cell break-through at Boeing-Spectrolab can be mass-produced, and improved upon, we just may have something that can finally compete with Fossil Fuels.

And the best part about it the "Fuel" from the Sun (ie. "non-concentrated" Fossil Fuels)

IT IS FREE !!!

Free for the taking.

Agree with these sentiments wholeheartedly. In fact, and this is showing a little national pride here, Australia has recently announced the record from this form of cell, Triple Junction or III-V cells was tested at 43%.

Triple Junction III-V cells at 43%

In other words, unlike the mature technologies of coal, gas and oil where major efficiency improvements are difficult to obtain, this solar technology continues to make great strides with more research. And of course with efficiency of the cell improving, this means more power for the same capital outlay, thus less cost per unit of power generated.

This link takes you to a theoretical set of projected costs I spent a few hours on a while back.

Similar to Moore's law but for solar power. It may seem relatively expensive now, but within a few years with investment in this technology, costs will come down well below existing fossil fuel generation.

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My visit to a III-V cell manufacturer

Back in August I visited the United States and as part of that trip I visited a numnber of Solar companies. One of my stop overs was a trip to Alburquerque, New Mexico, where the Sandia National Labs are.

I wrote of a portion of my trip, visiting the Nuclear Museum, in this diary.

An Aussie Visiting America - American ingenuity

However, the specific reason for visiting this city was to try to arrange a meeting and possible walk through of a company who has designed and is manufacturing the heart of these new solar panels, an organization called Emcore.

What the technology both Spectrolab and Emcore have developed is taking the very best attributes of their satellite based III-V triple junction cells, and bringing them back to Earth.

Costs for these types of cells per sq cm is currently more than standard silicon, Cadmium Telluride or CIGS solar cells. However because Emcore and Spectrolab cells are able to tolerate high temperatures (remember they use these cells in space), they have designed their cells to be used where lots of sunlight is focussed on a small area.

This allows them to have built solar cells which look just like a circuit board. In other words much less active material than other solar cells need to produce similar output.

Because of this focussing of sunlight up to 1200 times normal levels onto the one chip, and because of the excellent conversion efficiencies of triple junction cells, this small cell is equivalent in electricity output to this many silicon cells.

My interest in visiting Emcore however was not to figure out how the technology worked as I have covered it in this diary quite comprehensively. No my intent was to see what direction Emcore was headed now with their technology and what it would cost to build a factory and start producing this form of solar technology in large amounts, as clearly it is well matched to the grid demand and able to provide stable power.

After getting caught up visiting the Nuclear Museum just down the road from Emcore, and dodging the rain as a monster sunshower came through about 2:30pm, I was met by Emcore's Chief Technology Officer, John Iannelli PhD around 3pm in the foyer of Emcore.

The cell you see above is the main component of Emcore's technology and is manufactured in what is called an MOCVD (Metalorganic Chemical Vapour Deposition) reactor.

Metalorganic vapour phase epitaxy (MOVPE) is a chemical vapour deposition method of epitaxial growth of materials, especially compound semiconductors from the surface reaction of organic compounds or metalorganics and metal hydrides containing the required chemical elements.

The way I understand this process, and I don't work in the field, is that under pressure elements turned into gases or vapours are passed through this machine where they contact with the cell and react/bond with whatever element is on the exposed cell, thus creating the desired layer of solar cell. These cells are very thin, but are made up of a complex number of different layers as shown by this example diagram below.

But what does it cost?

One of the major costs in building solar farms is building the factories which will produce the cells. In the case of the 10 GW gap in California, if one wanted to build factories to produce enough cells to do this in ten years, we would be looking at a cost of around US $1 Million per MW of manufacturing facility for Silicon or $2 for thin film. This is $1 to $2 Billion alone before any solar panels have been manufactured. Large up front costs.

According to Solar Buzz: A rule of thumb guide to the capital investment in building a solar cell plant is US$1M/MW for crystalline silicon and US$2M/MW or more for thin films.

July 23, 2009
First Solar to Build 100MW Factory and Sell to EDF
First Solar is set to build a ?90 million factory in France...
The factory would have an initial capacity to produce at least 100 megawatts of thin-film solar panels per year.

However what Dr Iannelli told me was that each MOCVD reactor cost around $1 Million and was capable of outputting 100MW worth of cells per annum.

In other words the up front cost to build a factory to manufacture 1GW of solar cells comes down by a exponential factor if the machines to make the cells only cost around $10 Million.

After the MOCVD reactors you would need to add in a cell receiver line and a module manufacturing line. However because the cells are produced much like computer boards, contemplate for just a moment companies like Intel getting into this space, manufacturing the cells and shipping them to module manufacturers for installation. Much like a PC maker would do.

Solar Power International interview 2009
CPV is just at the beginning of its cost curve.

Concentrix' Lerchenm?ller sees CPV achieving costs of 30 cents per Watt in a few years.

CPV with high-efficiency triple-junction solar cells behaves better than silicon in high temperatures.

CPV doesn't require water like CSP and unlike CSP scales to smaller deployments.

Notably, the price of capex for CPV is much less than that of other PV technologies: $0.10 to $0.15 per Watt compared to First Solar at about $1 per Watt and a-Si at about $3 per Watt.

So going on what the people who have actually built the manufacturing facilities for CPV modules, total cost for a 1GW factory, using the 0.10 per watt figure is around $100 Million. In other words if California wanted a 1 GW factory to produce this form of solar panel, and wanted to meet that 10GW load in 10 years, it would cost them $100 Million for CPV factories as opposed to $1 Billion for other technologies mentioned above. A difference of $900 Million to spend on the panels themselves.

Remember China adding 80-90GW per year. This technology is ideal for them this would cost them $8 Billion to build enough to provide 80 GW of new generation every year. Note at the low end 80GW would be costing them $160 Billion per annum in new coal fired power stations anyway.

Did you also take note of this comment?

Concentrix' Lerchenm?ller sees CPV achieving costs of 30 cents per Watt in a few years.

Dr Iannelli told me that current cost of their module was at about $1.65 per watt but significant improvements were bringing this cost down. Efficiency improvements as I mentioned before were one. Improved optics as Emcore have now adopted a Silicon on Glass method for their lens. This is where a special silicon is spread on a layer of glass and pressed into a lens configuration. They have also simplified and refined their large scale module into a smaller, 2 person install module. This will result in significant installation and construction cost savings.

Transition of Emcore module development

Current module below - construction costs significantly reduced as heavy machinery such as cranes may no longer be necessary. These arrays are also better for spacing in this configuration getting more generation per acre than the previous large array.

Other players.

What is most exciting about this technology, is the major players who have backed start up systems manufacturers include some of the world's biggest names.

Solfocus

This group manufacture a larger scale version of the module, similar to Emcores large scale array.

They are backed by a VC firm called NGEN partners whose members include the group below.

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Energy Innovations

This company has settled on a design similar to Emcore with a fresnel lens and two axis tracking mechanism.

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Soliant

This group again have migrated to a similar design as Emcore and Energy Innovations. They have some investment VC backing from General Electric.

Soliant Energy aims to deploy its concentrator panels in 50KW to 1MW distributed-generation arrays on millions of square meters of commercial, industrial, government, and carport upper-deck real estate in the sunny, dry American Southwest and, eventually, similar climatic regions on the planet.

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Sitting on the table in the foyer as I waited for a taxi to take me back to my hotel, was a magazine. I am fairly sure it was called 'Photonics'. There was an article in there about the amazing advances being made in optical technologies at the college of optical Science at the University of Arizona. I think of all the things most impressed on me, that I took away from those few hours at Emcore how great it would be to be a student at this college. Where what they are developing could lead to the next efficiency gain through improved optic lens, mirrors or coatings. That they are learning the skills and will be at the leading edge of science in years to come as we further develop technologies which make the best use of the Sun or light.

I kind of felt a bit jealous because I know these American students could be the ones who get to change the world all over again by reinventing and improving on the solar technologies I have discussed above.

When Siemens, GE, Schott, Unilever, Dupont, Boeing, Honda, Bayer, BASF all have a stake in the success of this relatively new form of terrestrial solar power generation it gives me hope. For the CEO stating he sees short term prospects of this technology being able to bring the capital cost of solar power down to 30 cents per watt, this gives me hope that we can afford this. Remembering that coal and nuclear capital costs are much greater and ongoing fuel and running costs also.
But it is when I see the low cost to entry into this field where I am most excited. If we can build Gigawatt manufacturing facilities for $100 Million per Gigawatt, the risk factor investing in this field starts to significantly reduce.

That is where some of our stimulus money should be going.

Build the factories. Create the Jobs. Insure our future against the ravages of climate change.

"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere. The biosphere provides everything that makes life possible, assimilates our waste or converts it back into something we can use."

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Overcoming Apathy in Australia - Project Omelas

Unenergy — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:09:24 GMT

2006-07 Australian bushfire season
The 2006-07 Australian bushfire season was one of the most extensive bushfire seasons in Australia's history. Victoria experienced the longest continuously burning bushfire complex in Australia's history, with fires in the Victorian Alps and Gippsland burning over 1 million hectares of land over the course of 69 days.

January 2009
The early 2009 southeastern Australia heat wave was a heat wave that commenced in late January and led to record-breaking prolonged high temperatures in the region. The heat wave is considered one of, if not the most, extreme in the region's history. During the heat wave, 50 separate locations set various records for consecutive, highest daytime and overnight temperatures.

According to a Monash University study of funeral notices, more than 200 people died as a result of the heat wave. A 45% increase in the death rate was noted during the time. A subsequent report by Victoria's chief health officer, Dr John Carnie, put the final figure at 374.

February 2009
As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on 7 February. Following the events of the 7th of February 2009, that date has since been referred to as Black Saturday.

173 people died as a result of the fires and 414 were injured.

November 2009
Senior climatologist Blair Trewin said 68 long-term weather stations recorded their highest November maximum temperature and 39 stations recorded their highest overnight minimum temperature.

''That represents 10.2 per cent of Australia recording record highs, including 41 per cent of NSW and 29 per cent of South Australia,'' Dr Trewin said.

In Adelaide, the eight consecutive days above 35 degrees doubled the previous November record. It also had a record high of 43.

So records are broken, two years later they are broken again. Not the kind of record you want to break though. When temperatures are causing multiple heat related deaths and bushfires causing loss of life and property, you'd think we'd realize something is up with that. And just as Australia is about to head into Summer, we see the same conditions occurring at the start of Summer which we just saw at the end of Summer immediately prior to the worst bushfires in Australia's history earlier this year.

Scary stuff hey?

Yesterday I wrote of my visit to a solar thermal power station in the Nevada Desert, at Boulder City, near Las Vegas. The plant produces 65 MW of electricity which, during the day, would be close to supplying the needs of 65,000 homes.

The accumulation of CO2 emissions we have been told for over 20 years would create conditions like those described above. So from a risk management point of view, seeking alternatives to where the source of those emissions comes from makes sense. In other words reducing or replacing the source of those emissions is the optimum outcome without eliminating the benefit of the plant itself.

What I would like to talk about is what I think Australia can do to meet energy generated from some of these types of means.

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Similar technology to Nevada Solar One is being used at Liddell power station in Australia where mirrors reflect onto steam pipes heating water to steam in this case. The system is connected up to an operating power station saving them money by pre-heating some of the process water for the plant. The temperatures and pressure of the steam is enough to turn a turbine.

We produce steam at 275?C, 50 Bar, the type of steam necessary to operate a turbine.

There are a number of Australian grown technologies which have been reported on in this documentary.

The company which supplied the system to Liddell, Ausra, has also been negotiating with the Queensland government for a grant to put a much larger version of this trial technology in a new installation at Kogan Creek.

Solar thermal energy company Ausra Inc. and the Queensland state government have applied to the federal government for funding to develop a proposed A$200 million upgrade to a coal-fired power station in Queensland.

The project involves using Ausra's solar thermal technology to preheat the 750-megawatt Kogan Creek power station's feedwater system, increasing its efficiency and generating over 23 megawatts of extra electricity a year - enough to power about 25,000 homes.

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Why is this plant important?

I guess it would seem a little unusual to some having such a keen interest in where new energy technologies are going to lead, but this has been my field of employment in the past. Plus a number of Australia's largest organizations have indicated an interest in this form of electricity producing technology.

$34 Billion of solar thermal proposed plants to be built by 2020 in Australia by BHP and Rio Tinto

WorleyParsons, Australia's biggest engineering company, is studying the construction of the world's biggest project producing power from the sun's heat, tapping incentives for renewable energy generation.

An initial 250-megawatt unit may start up in 2011 at a cost of about $1 billion, Peter Meurs, managing director of WorleyParsons' EcoNomics unit, said today in Sydney. Some $34 billion of projects may be built by 2020, by companies including BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, he said.

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Can this be achieved and should it be pursued in Australia?

For those who have an interest and a bit of time on their hands, I'd invite you to read extended article on the building of Australia's energy infrastructure.

Building a country's energy infrastructure

One of the main points I made in the article was that the power industry in Australia started with government financing and owning much of our electricity infrastructure. In fact many states still own significant power assets. Most important was that the bulk of these assets were built in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. Respectively these assets are 20, 30 and 40 years old.

New Fossil fuel MW	New Total MW	Decade	Australian population
215MW	1,227.7MW	1950's	8,178,000
3,880MW	6,594.5MW	1960's	10,275,000
9,395MW	11,752.6MW	1970's	12,507,300
12,186MW	13,227MW	1980's	14,695,400
6,133MW	6,371MW	1990's	17,065,100
5,037MW	5,124.1MW	2000's	19,157,000
36,846MW (total)	44,296.9MW (total)
	48,541 MW	2009	22,031,000

Table above showing the electricity generation capacity build by MW per decade in Australia

So what we experienced in Australia was a boom in electricity plant construction during the 1970's and 80's followed by a sharp drop off to half the number of new MW built per decade.

Name	Operator	Plant type	Primary fuel	Year commissioned	Capacity (MW)	State
Morwell	Energy Brix	Steam	Brown coal	1959	195MW	Victoria
Thomas Playford B	NRG Flinders	Steam	Brown coal	1960	240MW	South Australia
Anglesea	Alcoa	Steam	Brown coal	1969	160MW	Victoria
Munmorah	Delta Electricity	Steam	Black coal	1969	600MW	NSW
Kwinana WPC	Verve Energy	Steam	Multi-fuel	1970	880MW	WA
Hazelwood	Hazelwood Power Partnership	Steam	Brown coal	1971	1600MW	Victoria
Liddell	Macquarie Generation	Steam	Black coal	1973	2000MW	NSW
Swanbank B	CS Energy	Steam	Black coal	1973	500MW	Queensland
Yallourn W	TRU Energy	Steam	Brown coal	1975	1480MW	Victoria
Vales Point B	Delta Electricity	Steam	Black coal	1978	1320MW	NSW
Wallerawang C	Delta Electricity	Steam	Black coal	1980	1000MW	NSW
Gladstone	Comalco/NRG	Steam	Black coal	1982	1680MW	Queensland
Eraring	Eraring Energy	Steam	Black coal	1984	2640MW	NSW
Bayswater	Macquarie Generation	Steam	Black coal	1984	2640MW	NSW
Northern	NRG Flinders	Steam	Brown coal	1985	530MW	South Australia
Muja	Verve Energy	Steam	Black coal	1986	1040MW	WA
Tarong	Tarong Energy	Steam	Black coal	1986	1400MW	Queensland
Loy Yang A	Loy Yang Power	Steam	Brown coal	1987	2120MW	Victoria
Callide B	CS Energy	Steam	Black coal	1989	700MW	Queensland
Mt Piper	Delta Electricity	Steam	Black coal	1993	1320MW	NSW
Loy Yang B	IPM Eagle	Steam	Brown coal	1996	1000MW	Victoria
Stanwell	Stanwell Corporation	Steam	Black coal	1996	1400MW	Queensland
Collinsville	Transfield Holdings	Steam	Black coal	1998	188MW	Queensland
Collie	Verve Energy	Steam	Black coal	1999	330MW	WA
Callide C	CS Energy	Steam	Black coal	2001	900MW	Queensland
Redbank	National Power	Steam	Black coal	2001	150MW	NSW
Millmerran	Intergen	Steam	Black coal	2002	852MW	Queensland
Tarong North	Tarong Energy	Steam	Black coal	2002	443MW	Queensland

Listed above are the coal fired base load power stations for Australia.

What is important to note here is that many of these assets are over 20 years old. So irrespective of all the fear mongering over Australia's electricity sector 'suffering' were an emissions trading system bought in, these assets will need refurbishing or replacing. In fact in about 2002 I worked on one of the power stations above in a refurbishment effort.

It is claimed plans for a $100 million upgrade to the Playford power station at Port Augusta, north of Adelaide, are secure, despite a takeover bid for NRG Flinders' parent company.

This project, a refurbishment of a 40 year old station, I will use as a metric for the rest of the industry. The boilers, of which there were 6, were stripped down, the entire bottom of each boiler replaced. There was a massive amount of corrosion and rust throughout the plant due to its age. The entire flue gas handling duct work even now, was significantly corroded. The turbines were stripped down along with a replacement program for much of the automation, including electric, pneumatic actuators and a new control system. In all a project slated to cost $100 million cost $180 million. Although there was talk this amount was higher at $240 million, I cannot find a link to corroborate this.

About $180 million was spent on refurbishing the Playford Station

So going on those metrics, if every 40 year old coal fired power station need to be refurbished at a cost approaching $1 Watt, is there value for money going down this path? Remembering the end result at Playford, may only extend the life of the plant by 10-15 years.

Based on these rough figures, beginning in 2010 - 2020 11,752.6MW of coal fired power stations turn 40. At $1 per watt this is almost $12 Billion. And in 2020 - 2030 13,227MW or $13 Billion. In the next 2 decades we are looking at around $25 Billion needed to refurbish what we already own NOT including additional generation capacity we are bound to require.

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High temperatures and water shortages

Victorias electricity grid is being badly affected in places with the excessive high temperatures they have been experiencing. During the February 2009 heatwave the electric grid suffered a number of failures:

2 out of 3 major transmission lines fail which feed Melbourne

Major transformers are blowing up

And forced load shedding affecting 3 states with blackouts

So there are potential benefits of incentivizing the de-centralization of power generation. This makes a lot of sense particularly in areas like Victoria which are already feeling the effects of climate change.

There is a secondary concern and this equally applies to nuclear power generation which it appears will be the new Federal Opposition parties position after a week of turmoil in Australian politics.

Already population centres around Australia are being forced to adopt expensive mitigation efforts due to water shortages. The fast tracking of Desalination plants has occurred in many places. With Perth x 2, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane/Gold Coast, Adelaide, all now having built or building desalination plants.

These desalination plants are not a cheap thing to build either, with many with a multi-billion dollar price tag.

Upcoming Projects in Australia
Project	Investment AUD	Employee numbers construction
Sydney Desalination Plant	$1.9 Billion	600
Wonthaggi Desalination Plant	$3 Billion	3180
WA Desalination Plant	$1 Billion	500
Adelaide desalination plant	$1.83 Billion	2000

And they will need to be operated constanly in order to provide a return on investment, bumping up people's water charges. Further the desalination process is a massive user of electricity and without going into detail, I expect will increase the demand on the grid potentially triggering the need for new generation assets.

But not only are we building fresh water plants, a large amount of water is required to cool our existing coal fired plants. In other words we are using massive amounts of water producing electricity to desalinate water, to produce water.

Massive amounts of clean cooling water which evaporates off in their Rankine cycle coal power stations.
Here are the links to the major power stations supplying Victoria.

Yallourn

Loy Yang

Hazelwood

In 2006, Loy Yang Power used 23 gigalitres from its allocated catchment areas (Latrobe River and Blue Rock Dam), and 11 gigalitres from artesian supplies - a total of 34 gigalitres.

This is one of 3 major power stations which averages out to 93 Ml per day. Know how much water the new $3.1 Billion dollar desalination plant will make?

150 Gigalitres per year.

So the question I have been asking myself :

is solar generated electricity a feasible alternative? Either on every roof or in large stations in order to retire these power stations, freeing up the water wasted and not require refurbishment.

Power stations have a voracious appetite for water, and the shortage is affecting production in NSW, Victoria and Queensland, despite an abundance of coal and gas supplies.

"Australia has never factored in the cost of water, which is why it has some of the cheapest power in the world," the market expert told the Herald.

"Eventually, where there is not enough water for power in the Snowy, they will not be able meet their contractual obligations."

==========================================================================

Does it always have to be base load?

Australia's population is unevenly distributed.

State	Population
New South Wales	7,076,500
Victoria	5,402,600
Queensland	4,380,400
South Australia	1,618,200
Western Australia	2,224,300
Tasmania	501,800
Northern Territory	223,100
Australian Capital Territory	349,900
Australia Total	21,779,100

Although the populations vary greatly, each States power demand reflects the other. What you can see by the New South Wales power demand is at about 8,000 MW at 6am. This rises to a peak of around 10,000 MW at 6pm and rapidly drops off.

Victoria is around 6,000MW at 6am up to 7,000MW at 6pm and then back down.

Queensland is pretty much the same as Victoria at 6,000MW at 6am, but its peak is higher at 7,800 GW.

Real time data is available at Australian Energy Market Operator site.

So what we have during daylight hours is about 4,800 MW of extra load which is not required during the evening/night. If you look at the power generation capacity, our generation capacity in Australia has been designed that we have predominantly 'base load' coal. In fact if you look at the first 3 power stations which will turn 40, you find Hazelwood Power Partnership in Victoria at 1600MW, Liddell in NSW at 2000MW Swanbank B in Queensland at 500MW. 4,100MW of generation.

So what could we do instead to generate power from 6am to 6pm in alternative ways?

==========================================================================

Solar coverage

If you look at the map of Australia above you will recognize it is a pretty large country. In fact there are three time zones with a difference of 2 hours across the country.

If we look at Brisbane sunrise and sunset times we have an earliest on 1 December at around 4:45am with the latest sunset at 6:48pm on 10 Jan. Latest sunrise on 1 July at 6:39 with earliest sunset at 5:00pm on 10 July, however....

Remembering that the country is in three time zones with a difference of 2 hours, this extends the upper end of sunlight in the Western State to an equivalent 8:48pm and 7pm equivalent time in the Eastern States.

sunrise/sunset
The further West you go, the better the time. For instance Perth on 1 December sunset is at 7:07pm which would equate to 9:07pm in the Eastern States.

What this means is that with an electricity grid which ran from the Eastern States to the Western States, capable of carrying these levels of power, the coverage window for Solar power would be much better if significant assets were installed in the Western States to supply the Eastern States with evening load. Alternatively for early morning load in the Western States, install solar to provide this in the East.

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Transmission

A great map of Renewable energy potential has been put together by the Australian Government. You can find the map here via a link.

Below is one of the layers extracted to show the transmission lines as they currently stand for Australia. As expected, what you see is the East Coast where much of Australia's population lives, well serviced by an electricity grid, with large breaks from Adelaide area to the North and to the West where our other major population center is, Perth.

If a transmission line were to be built across to the Western states enabling better coverage for generation methods such as solar, how much would it cost?

If you look closely at the map above you can see that to the top right of Adelaide a number of transmission lines converge. These lines go across to Sydney and Melbourne. The area is known as Mildura and would be a great area to build solar power stations, with two solar companies I know of having indicated they were planning on building there.

Mildura to Perth is 2,937 km. There will be transmission losses, however from a brief look on Google, a transmission line of this length would be cost effective.

As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for electricity was 7,000 km (4,300 mi), although all present transmission lines are considerably shorter.

And as a very raw estimate, it would cost around $1 Million per km to build a line over this distance. Depending on where costs are incurred, it may be less than this as the route across Australia is largely unihabited, flat land making applications for permits and land preparation for transmission tower footings a little less complex.

$1.5 million per mile for 345kV lines and upward from there

So based on 1 mile = 1.6km and factoring in US/Australia exchange rates, $1 Million is close enough for these purposes.
So to build a transmission line across Australia, if we use the 2,937 figure, we'd be looking at around $3 Billion.
Which is of course the cost of just ONE of those desalination plants mentioned above. But the economic benefits from it would be immense for opening up new areas for geothermal, solar, wind and wave power prospects.

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Solar Resource

One of the great things about the Renewable energy map is the ability to apply layers which show the potential for different technologies. Below in this layer is the Solar power potential for Australia.

Map of Renewable potential

As you can see much of Australia has good prospects for solar power. Located in the Center of Australia, the Australian Government has had an operational test bed for solar technologies running for a number of years.

This has real time data of various forms of solar power including

CdTe Thin Film

CIGS Thin Film

Amorphous Silicon

Back Contact Silicon

Solar Water System

Solar Compass

Roof Mounted Array

Silicon Monocrystalline A & B

Silicon Polycrystalline

Solar Forest Fixed, 1 & 2 Axis, Hydraulic

Large Scale Tracking

This site is a great resource for anyone wishing to do either a real time or historical dataset comparison of the various types of solar panel.

Desert Knowledge Solar

I will come back to discussing a few more solar technologies in upcoming diaries but here is why solar, along with other renewable energy is something we should be researching.

World Energy use = 16TW per year

Non-renewable resources estimates remaining:

Natural Gas 215TW

Petroleum 240TW

Uranium 90-300TW

Coal 900TW

Renewable, non-depletable resources all per year:

Wind 25-70TW

Waves 0.2-2TW

Biomass 206TW

Hydro 3-4TW

Geothermal 0.3-2TW

Tides 0.3TW

Other Technologies 3-11TW

SOLAR 23,000TW

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Can Australia afford a new electricity system?

According to the Energy Supply Association of Australia current installed electricity assets for the entirety of the country are $109 Billion as at 2004/2005.
Total installed capacity of grid connected generation is 48,541 MW with a grid circuit totalling 888,735km.

Now referring back to the statement that many of Australias coal fired power stations will reach the 40 year old mark in the next 10-20 years, and that refurbishment will cost upward of $1 per watt, it seems prudent to prepare for this eventuality.

We have just had a mechanism put up in Australian parliament which would have bought additional funds into the electricity sector through investment because of a price on carbon. In fact it would have equated out to around $12 Billion per year. As the Asset base as it stands in the next 20 years will seriously deteriorate, this $12 Billion would, it seems, have been enough inflow into the sector to replace the $109 Billion of generation over the next 10 years.

However we now have an obstructionist opposition who are going to avoid making long term energy policy in consultation with the government, instead opting to become the party of 'NO'.

The new Opposition Leader will harness discontent in the community over the emissions trading scheme and turn the Coalition into an obstructionist force prepared to block Labor's agenda at almost every turn.

So I'll briefly detail two possibilities for bringing investment into the electricity sector. The first would be a tax incentive. Where we currently incentivize long term investment in forestry by allowing a tax deduction straight up on the capital cost of planting a lot of trees, we could introduce a similar policy for investment in sustainable energy.

Plantation tax deduction
Because of the nature of growing a forest crop, by far the biggest proportion of tax-deductible expenditure in a plantation cycle occurs in the establishment years (i.e. years one and two), with much lesser costs also arising at significant intervals over the life of the plantation.

The other possibility is Australia has a pension scheme where 9% of people's wages are invested until they reach retirement age. The scheme is a government mandated, privately operated one where in 2008, during the economic downturn, still managed to receive $120 Billion worth of new investment.

Superannuation contributions to June 2007 totalled $166.9 billion.

Superannuation contributions to June 2008 totalled $120.4 billion.

Total superannuation assets decreased by 2.1 per cent during the year to 30 June 2008 to $1.17 trillion.

So all it would take to raise the $12 Billion necessary to ensure Australia's electricity future would be government incentivizing shifting but 10% of these superannuation flows into long term investments in energy infrastructure.

Alternatively an increase of 1% on the base superannuation rate with the express intent on investing in energy infrastructure would raise similar funds.

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Overcoming Apathy

I've been reasearching the issue of energy and climate for well over a year. It is not an easy thing to wrap your head around for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the extraction and combustion of hydrocarbons is such a big industry and so well established, entrenched in every part of the economy, that instead of seeing an opportunity to shift their energy business to new forms of generation out of necessity, the fossil fuel organizations appear to have declared war on science, scientists and sustainable energy practices.

I have written in my last diary of a group of firefighters, front line defenders who fought those bushfires I wrote about at the start of the article here, who have banded together to raise funds for a group which will look at possible solutions to the upcoming energy and climate crisis we are being rushed headlong into because of short term, short sighted thinking.

Despite the ongoing attacks and demonization of scientists by the climate skeptics, it doesn't matter to these firefighters. Because you can't argue with what you see with your own eyes. What you have fought by putting your own safety and life on the line.

I'm on their side on this one as this fire season is shaping up to be 'catastrophic'.

We cannot pretend doing nothing is a solution when all of these things I have just described above are the future which is here already.

Close to the end of their 6,000km (3,728mile) run around Australia one of the participants said this, which explains the title of my diary.

In the long run for the planet ... do we care?

But the runners did encounter apathy and were disappointed with how few people turned up at the community events.

Many people, they said, did not know much about climate change. ''No one cares, seriously,'' says Senior Constable Hynes. ''They just brush it off.'

I've written about this excellent example of getting active over these myriad of issues in this article.

Rain to Save Our Earth

Which at the end I declared I'd be selling what I could to raise funds for this group who will look for climate solutions. Well the developments of the past week have increased the urgency to become involved so although current bids for the items I'm selling have reached about $250, I'm upping the ante and adding higher value items over the next few days.

Here is my cause:

Project Omelas - Finding a cause to support

But there may be something people can do to help.

Thinking about the fires which ravaged Victoria and took all those lives earlier in the year, and the impending signs that it could be even worse this year, what I thought I'd do is if anyone wants me to donate the books and DVD's I've currently got up on Ebay, to the fire stations on the front line, to help them fill in the time between emergencies, I'm willing to take the items to their front doors. And I will get photos as well if you do this.

==========================================================================

Below is a map of where the worst fires have been over the past decade in Victoria. You will see the 2009 fires were mainly to the North East of Melbourne and a place called Morwell.

Below is a map of the fire divisional areas.

There is an interactive link on this page here

Map of victorian fire stations.

If anyone wishes to buy any of the items and donate them to a fire station, please check out what I have listed on

Sell your stuff For a safe climate

The items are on Ebay.

And keep an eye out as I am about to start adding some larger items as I feel that our political system has failed over the past week in Australia.

This is the only way I can think of overcoming apathy.

But maybe it is one which you can help me help others who do believe that making the right choices for our climate future is important.

Because I don't think half of our politicians do.

An Aussie Visiting America - Boulder City Solar

Unenergy — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:13:23 GMT

During a trip in August, across the United States, one of the things I had planned was to visit a number of solar installations. Just out from Las Vegas, not far from the airport at Boulder City which flies people to/from The Grand Canyon, there is a substantial solar trough power station. Its output is 65 Megawatts, which using rule of thumb of 1,000 people per MW, can supply enough power for 65,000 homes whilst the sun is shining.

For a city heavily dependent on the Hoover Dam for its power and water, any means to potentially reduce water flow for power generation out of Lake Mead, makes sense. Particularly when you consider the drought and massive drop in water level in the lake since 1999.

It is estimated that by 2012, the lake's surface could fall below the existing pipe that delivers 40 percent of Las Vegas's water.

Although the Acciona plant was commissioned in 2007, the United States has had an operational solar thermal trough power station for well over 20 years at a place called Kramer Junction.
Description of Power Plants

5 fields of 33 MW each

Operational and commercially viable since 1985

Excellent reliability

Displaces over one million barrels of oil

15 additional years working life expected

...fast-tracking the concept to the point where it was a viable, job-creating, clean source of electricity. Kramer Junction power station employs 125 people - managers, operators, maintenance staff... and mirror cleaners....

Page 51 The Big Switch, Clean energy for the 21st century, (c) 1994, Gavin Gilchrist

In Luz's design, the solar trough heats a working fluid that circulates to a power station where water is super heated into steam, which then powers an electricity producing turbine....

The power plant built at Harper Lake, California, in the Mojave desert in 1989
....produce enough power for about 170,000 homes for as little as 9ckWh

Page 145/146 Power Surge (c)1995 Christopher Flavin, Nicholas Lenssen

This diary is a bit of a follow on from a couple of others I have written and there are more to come.

An Aussie Visiting America - Las Vegas

Oz Solar Technologies

I'd scheduled a trip to the Grand Canyon leaving out of Las Vegas early in the morning and returning back to the Boulder City airport around lunch time. This I had hoped, would give me enough time to hail a cab and drive out to where the Solar power station was. For those that don't know how this Rankine type of power station works, below is a graphic of the heating and cooling cycle of steam from Wikipedia.

Rankine cycle

When water is heated to steam it expands over 1600 times its volume. In the instance of a power station, by keeping the steam contained the pressure of the steam increases. By then allowing this high pressure steam to flow to a lower pressure environment, as it passes through the blades on a turbine, like a great big fan with many blades, it turns.

In the graphic above you can see at 1, cold water from a condensor via a water pump, entering a heating chamber at 2. As the water heats above 100?C it changes state from a liquid to gas, so its volume expands. Because it is contained this volume of gas becomes compressed and at 3 the pressure of the steam is high enough to drive a mechanical turbine. The turbine is attached to an alternator or machine which produces electricity.
The steam re-enters the condensor at 4, where because it passes through cooling water tubes Q out, condenses the steam which had been expanded over 1600 times, back to a liquid.

Note at this point also, the condensor operates under a vacuum because of this collapsing gas.

Usually the heat is provided in modern power stations by a combustible, most often coal or gas or other fossil fuel. However in a solar thermal trough station, the heat is provided by the sun with the other basic theory of operation remaining the same.

Nevada Solar One

Nevada Solar One uses 760 parabolic troughs (using more than 180,000 mirrors) made by Flabeg AG in Germany that concentrate the sun's rays onto thermos tubes placed at the focal axis of the troughs and containing a heat transfer fluid (solar receivers).

These specially coated tubes, made of glass and steel, were designed and produced by Solel Solar Systems as well as by Schott Glass in Germany. Motion control was supplied by Parker Hannifin, from components by Ansco Machine Company. The plant uses 18,240 of these four-meter-long tubes. The heat transfer fluid is heated to 735 ?F (391 ?C). The heat is then exchanged to water to produce steam which drives a conventional turbine.

Below in my first two shots are an aerial photo where you can only just make out the shimmer of the plant from the air. The purpose of this shot was to demonstrate just how much suitable land there appears to be in this area. The second is a shot of the plant from the road. I'd talked my way into someone from the airport driving me down to look at the plant which I'd estimated was about 10 minute drive. Turned out it was closer to 20 minutes one way.

These shots are not very good as I was on the other side of a chain link fence. However in the close up you can see what appear to be heat transfer medium tanks or maybe water for mirror washing, and in the smaller close up you can just make out the troughs themselves.

Because I was disappointed in the photos I was able to take, below are shown the parabolic troughs, heating fluid lines, and a means for washing the mirrors.

Link to Google Map

Aerial Photograph from Treehugger

Video of the plant from others.

One would think I'd have been disappointed driving all the way down to this plant and not being able to get much more than outside the gate, but not really. Because there were a few things I took from this. The first is this power station is located right near a massive high voltage distribution switchyard.

Obviously one which distributes power from the Hoover Dam to Las Vegas and beyond. Secondly there is a massive amount of land in the valley which would be subject to the same solar insolation numbers as Nevada Solar One. Third Vegas could get behind a project like this which would put its construction workers, who at the moment have no work, back into a job - its only about a 1/2 hour drive.

But Fourth and the most important is there are already 86 projects on the books for Southern California which mean 200 times this sized plant.

That's right if built the same that is -

200 x the 180,000 mirrors

200 x 760 parabolic troughs

200 x the construction jobs

200 x the manufacturing of turbines, mirrors, framework, steel jobs

200 x the maintenance jobs for operators, mirror cleaners, engineers and managers.

Below I've given a short tally of some of the solar projects slated for Southern California. Taken from this list for South East California on the Solar Energy Industry Association website.

Developer	Project Name	Electricity Purchaser	Location	Technology	Capacity
Abengoa Solar	Mojave Solar	PG & E	San Bernandino County	Trough	250MW
Abengoa Solar	Solana	Arizona Public Service	Gila Bend Az	Trough	280MW
Acciona Solar Power	Ft Irwin Solar Power	US Army	Ft Irwin CA	Trough	500MW
Brightsource Energy	Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating	Southern Cal Edison	Nevada	Tower	1200MW
eSolar	Gaskell Suntower Ph I&II	Southern California Edison	Kern County	Tower	245MW
Harper Lake LLC	Harper Lake Solar plant		California	Trough	250MW
Solar Millenium	Amargosa Farm Road	NV Energy	Nye County	Trough	484MW
Solel	Mojave Solar Park	PG & E	Mojave Desert	Trough	553MW
Tessera Solar	SES Solar One	Southern Ca Edison	Victorville	Dish-Engine	850MW
Total projects	86			Total Megawatts	13,570MW

So there are a LOT of solar power plants going through the engineering and approvals process for Souther California. In fact so many I'd suggest that they would go a long way to meeting a significant part of California's electricity demand of around 33,000 Megawatts. At least during the day.

Not to mention the jobs. Seeing things like this happening in the United States gives me hope that you are going to help lead the world to a cleaner and greener energy future, and start giving back some hope to young people again that there will be work, there will be a future by moving in this direction.

Continued tomorrow....

An Aussie Visiting America - Americas ingenuity

Unenergy — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:33:11 GMT

Albert Einstein
Old Grove Rd.
Nassau Point
Peconic, Long Island
August 2nd 1939

F.D. Roosevelt
President of the United States
White House
Washington, D.C.
Sir:
Some recent work by E.Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem
to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America - that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium,by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
In August of 2009 I travelled across the United States, stopping overnight at a place called Albuquerque, New Mexico (just down the road from Roswell) and read a copy of this letter hanging on a wall of the National museum of Nuclear Science and History. This letter written almost a month to the day before the onset of World War II and eventually read by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in October of 1939, was the spark that initiated one of the largest scientific endeavors ever attempted anywhere in the world.

The Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb.
...the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people
...Project research took place at over thirty sites across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The second part of Einsteins letter dealt with the prospective threat of a nuclear weapon being developed, as difficult as this subject is for some people, it was a reality of the time. An agressive regime which had built an incredible war machine had been working on nuclear science technology which could lead to a Weapon of Mass Destruction being unleashed on the world. So at the insistence of its most senior scientists, the President of The United States took the advice seriously and so began an enormous international collaborative research and development effort which led to some of the greatest breakthroughs of the 21st century.

Nuclear Power
In the United States, where Fermi and Szilard had both emigrated, this led to the creation of the first man-made reactor, known as Chicago Pile-1, which achieved criticality on December 2, 1942
After World War II, the fear that reactor research would encourage the rapid spread of nuclear weapons and technology, combined with what many scientists thought would be a long road of development, created a situation in which the government attempted to keep reactor research under strict government control and classification. In addition, most reactor research centered on purely military purposes. Actually, there were no secrets to the technology. There was an immediate arms and development race when the United States military refused to follow the advice of its own scientific community to form an international cooperative to share information and control nuclear materials. By 2006, things have come full circle with the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (see below.)

X-Ray
Radiation Therapy
Medicine Today, about one-third of all procedures used in modern hospitals involve radiation or radioactivity.
Industrial Use of Nuclear Technology
Space - Whether we need a satellite to track hurricanes on earth, run a space station in orbit, send spaceships to explore the moons of Jupiter or send people to Mars - these missions require large amounts of power and knowledge of the effects of natural radiation in space.

So in the search for answers to one scientific question, the world was able to discover many which have helped shape our modern world. Our scientists bringing about such change that our lives, overwhelmingly, have improved. Listening to the science community, heeding their advice, making them a partner, made this possible.

There was a quotation of Albert Einsteins which I particularly liked as well which was:

Imagination is more important than knowledge...

One of the scientists responsible for the development of nuclear technology credits a science fiction writer for some of the inspiration to pursue this area of research, which although it lead to a technology which could decimate the people of the Earth, what has been the experience so far, with the uses mentioned above, is the treatment and diagnosis of disease amongst other things. Many people over many years have been saved because of the work these scientists did.

H.G. Wells included air-dropped "atomic bombs" in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. Le? Szil?rd later commented that this story influenced his later research into this subject.

The Nuclear Museum itself has (IMO) an incredible display on man's search for our energy needs. It doesn't just cover Nuclear power but Hydroelectric, Solar energy, fossil fuels - coal oil and natural gas, Wind Power as well as dealing with efficiency measures and recycling. The great thing about it is it is up to date information with displays from PNM and triple junction solar cells, write ups on the current areas of Generation IV nuclear reactor research including:
Very High Temperature Reactor
Super Critical Water Reactor
Molten Salt Reactor - Also Molten Boron and Zirconium
Gas-cooled fast reactor
Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor
Lead Cooled Fast Reactor

But what may turn out to be the most impressive thing of all of this museum, this celebration of technological and scientific advances and the men and women who helped develop these things, which had been installed out the front, possibly because it is not a museum piece but a sign of the future, was this item below.

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NASA Kennedy Space Center
I had tried to time my trip to Orlando to coincide with the launch of one of the modules for the International Space Centre, the one carrying the C.O.L.B.E.R.T (Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, STS-128. The launch was due on the 17th August, so I'd allowed 3 days in Orlando, hoping that even if the schedule slipped, I'd have until the 20th before it took off. I mean this was my one and only trip to the US after all, so to see something like a launch would be something one does not ever forget.
Unfortunately leading up to the launch date there were a number of fairly big storm warnings and the launch was delayed by a week. Still I was booked to stay over at Merritt Island, so a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre is one of the few things of interest out that way.

A timeline of development
Space exploration would not have been possible without the development of the vehicle capable of freeing a payload from the gravitational pull of the Earth and breaking free of our atmosphere.
Early rocket technology in America was being developed by Robert H. Goddard who worked to develop the first liquid fueled rocket in 1926. It was in Germany though that the writings in 1923 of Dr. Hermann Oberth spurred the formation of many small rocket technological societies, of which Goddard was involved in the US and which led to this technology attracting the interest of capable and motivated people.
A man by the name of Wernher Von Braun working with Oberth in 1930, moved on from this association to eventually develop the V-2 rocket, which used alcohol and liquid oxygen as a fuel and which could carry a 1,650 pound (~75kG) pay load 225 miles. This rocket was used extensively in World War II against the allied forces and in the bombardment of England.
It was following World War II that the US military sent a group of US scientists to Germany in Operation Paperclip, to "collect information and equipment related to German rocket progress" as well as bring back many of the German scientists who had been working on this technology to America to work on rocket science there.

Wernher Von Braun worked on the American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program before joining NASA, where he served as director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. In the words of NASA, he is "without doubt, the greatest rocket scientist in history. His crowning achievement ... was to lead the development of the Saturn V booster rocket that helped land the first men on the Moon in July 1969.
In his 20s and early 30s, von Braun was the central figure in Germany's pre-war rocket development program, responsible for the design and realization of the deadly V-2 combat rocket during World War II. After the war, he and some of his rocket team were taken to the United States as part of the then-secret Operation Paperclip. In 1955, ten years after entering the country, von Braun became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

August 1953 - PGM-11 First Redstone Rocket launched
October 4 1957 - Russians launch Sputnik the worlds first orbiting satellite
November 3, 1957 - USSR launch the first animal, Laika the dog into space
December 6, 1957 - Vanguard rocket TV-3 exploded a few seconds after lift-off. "This was accordingly viewed, at least in the eye of the general public, as a major embarrassment and a disaster for the U.S. space program."
January 31, 1958 Payload of Juno 1 Rocket was the first US orbiting satellite
This success turned the focus of national attention onto Von Braun's team of scientists for the success of being responsible for this remarkable achievement. Going on to be involved with numerous other successes.
October 1, 1958 - National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) became operational
April 12, 1961 - Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space in Vostok 1

Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth.
The program was basically designed to determine if man could survive in Space.

1964 - 1966 Project Gemini was the second human spaceflight program of NASA, the civilian space agency of the United States government.
This program was a pre-cursor to landing man on the moon

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon... (interrupted by applause) 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, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
President John F Kennedy, 12 September 1962.

July 20, 1969, Apollo 11, NASA's Apollo Program landed the first humans on Earth's moon.

A history of launch vehicles in the Kennedy Space Center Rocket Garden next to one of the incredibly complex engines which had to be imagined, designed, built and tested for these ships to take flight

The development of US rockets from yesterday through to today

And compartive at scale models

The various stages of the Saturn V launch vehicle
Apollo/Saturn V

Saturn V First Stage (S-IC)
Boeing involved in the manufacture

Saturn V Second Stage (S-II)
North American Rockwell responsible for the structure
Rocketdyne for the F-1 Engine

Saturn Instrument Unit (IU)
IBM manufactured

Saturn third Stage (S-IVB)
Built by McDonnel Douglas

Saturn V Lunar Module (LM)
Manufactured by the Grumman Corporation

Saturn Command Module (CM)
North American Rockwell

Saturn Service Module (SM)
North American Rockwell

Story Musgrave talking about the shuttle

It is not without risk or sacrifice that great achievements are made and this bronze plaque remembers those who have lost their lives so that others may continue pursuing this dream

A summary
I'd not sought this information out. My visit to the Nuclear Museum was to fill in time before a meeting, the Kennedy Space Center was to be an add on had I seen the launch. But this history of the Nuclear and Space programs in the United States was fascinating. I'd heard the names of Oppenheimer before and Einstein, but did not know the role they played. The co-operation between the science community, the military, the political and business communities along with the US university or tertiary education sector to make these incredible things happen, just amaze me. That these efforts could not have been accomplished without drawing on collective expertise of people from a country America had just fought and some American allies, all the more astounding. To me it seems this must have been an age of discovery, where the possibilities for young people incredible, discovering new things, having to find solutions to complex problems which did not exist before they tried to do these things, surely an exciting time to be alive. Knowing that most everyone was working to the same goal. The mind boggles at the complexity and ability for so many different groups to work coherently and co-operatively towards such noble causes. Fostering this a strength the United States once were champions at.

Boeing, IBM, Rockwell, McDonnel Douglas, Grumman, Rocketdyne working with NASA, working with Astronauts from the Airforce, Navy, working with politicians to gain funding and research labs with Universities to prepare students and conduct important research on specialist areas, parts of an almighty puzzle.

And it was young people, long enough out of College/University but not old enough to become to cynical or jaded with the world who were tasked with using that imagination which Einstein spoke about above, who created so many of these new things which had never been necessary before people decided to go into space.

America's young people will rise to the challenge if given the opportunity - if called upon to join a cause larger than themselves. And we've got evidence. The average age in NASA's mission control during the Apollo 17 mission was just 26. I know that young people today are ready to tackle the grand challenges of this century.

America held such promise back at the end of the 1960's and yet for some reason it seems to have taken a slightly wrong turn back then in certain areas. Yet the promise I saw when I visited Albuquerque and Kennedy Space Center, the things the country is capable of have set my imagination on fire.
What if...
What if...
What if America could figure it out, that the reason people look back at the past with a sense of nostalgia is that the major institutions were all pulling in the same direction and the US was the better off for it.
Is it going to be possible for the United States of America to find that spirit of shared purpose again? I think so...

We knew how to profit, not how to protect.

Unenergy — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:01:08 GMT

Researching the natural disasters which have impacted people around the planet recently I found a page up at Wikipedia which allows people to reference all the major natural disasters for a given year.
Category:2009 natural disasters

2009 Georgia (U.S. state) floods, At least $500 million, 10 deaths

2009 northeastern Sicily floods and mudslides, at least 20 deaths

2009 Afghan avalanches, ten people were killed

Cyclone Klaus - France, Spain, Andorra, Italy, 27 deaths, 600 million Euros

2009 southeastern Australia heat wave, 374 deaths, cost $100 million

Australia Black Saturday bushfires, 173 deaths, $500m + 450,000 hectares, 1.1 million acres + 3,500+ structures in total, damage still being assessed

Turkey 2009 Zigana avalanche, 11 deaths

The past month alone

Southern California wildfires, two deaths, Millions of dollars to fight and in property lost

In Australia last month in a one week periodHail, thunderstorms, dust storms, floods, bushfires, tornado, earthquakes

25/26/27 September - Philippino tropical storm Ondoy (Ketsana), 240 deaths, $2.4 Billion Philippino

29 September Vietnam, Cambodia - Ondoy, 99+ deaths, $120 Million

29 September Tsunami Samoa, Western Samoa, Tonga, 164 deaths

1 October Padang, Sumatra (Indonesia) Earthquake, 1100 deaths, Ongoing with 60 missing Australians

Or we go back to the beginning of the year and we had
Drought and Heat Waves Batter Three Continents
wooden power poles self-igniting
Firefighters pleading with the public to "Face global warming or lives will be at risk"
Some of the most magnificent beach front in Australia being washed away in Climaticide - Black Sand Event

One of the most prestigious sea-change retirement real estate areas is being washed away in Australia. The council have a policy in place as climate disruption erosion events were expected and they have a 'ready to go' land abandonment policy.
Byron Bay to be abandoned to the waves

Wintersun - Photo diary More destruction of Australias Gold Coast.

Natural Disaster early warning sites
Tropical Cyclone, Typhoon, Storm Centers, Hurricane warning centers
Link to Earthquake monitoring centre
National Buoy Centre early warning tsunami system

With these natural disaster events causing loss of life and incredible damage to property, it got me thinking about what parallels can be drawn between natural disasters which increasingly may be influenced by our changing climate, and man-made disasters.
As a follow on to my previous diary, I've put these disasters into a group. They were mostly preventable had unbridled greed not been a dominating factor. In many cases below, maintenance was neglected ensuring production was never disrupted or pollution not managed effectively. All to ensure the money made was as much as possible irrespective of negative externalities.

==========================================================================
Planeview Events - Energy industry related disasters

Chevron in Ecuador 1964-1990, Toxic waste estimated equivalent to 30 Exxon Valdez, potentially $16 Billion in damages

Coode Island, 21 August 1991

On 21 August 1991, approximately 8.5 million litres of chemicals burned following an explosion caused by lightning striking a storage tank at Victoria's largest toxic chemical storage facility at Coode Island, Melbourne, creating a very hazardous situation.
Huge clouds of toxic smoke and fumes threatened nearby suburbs but fortunately were largely dispersed by high winds in the area. Over 250 people were evacuated from nearby factories and ships. Of the 150 firefighters who fought the inferno, 2 were injured. A total of 14 storage tanks containing about 600,000 litres of chemical each were destroyed and 230,000 litres of fire-suppressing foam were used against the blaze (at a cost of $1.5 m alone). Damage to the facility and clean-up costs were estimated at over $20m (1991 values)
.

Longford 25 September 1998. 2 deaths, cost $1.3 Billion to Victorian industry (1998 dollars).

BHP Billiton and Australia history
Exxon and Australia Longford plant
Exxon celebrates 40 years of Longford Gas plant in 2009

Moomba Santos gas explosion 1 January 2004, $30 Million cost to company
Note: When this event occured there was footage and photographs. I have had no luck locating any images despite this having occured only 5 years ago.

Texas city refinery explosion March 23 2005

http://www.fromthewilderness.c...

Sidoarjo mud flow Indonesia, 28 May 2006, potentially $276.8 Million in damages, 50,000 villagers homes uninhabitable/buried

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Japanese Nuclear plant 16 July 2007
The 8,212MW plant was completely shut down for 21 months following the earthquake. This sized plant would be capable of providing power to over 5-8 million people working on a 1MW per 600-1,000 people estimate.

Details of plant
...caused TEPCOs stock to plummet 7.5%, the largest drop in seven years, which amounted to around 4.4 billion USD lost in stock capitalization.[33] This made the event even more costly to the company than the 2002 data falsification scandal. Additionally, Tepco warned that the plant closure could cause a power shortage during the summer months.
Reports of the leak caused thousands of cancellations at resorts and hotels along the Sea of Japan coast, even as far as Murakami, Niigata (140 km northeast) and Sado Island. Inn owners have said that rumors have been more damaging than direct effects of the earthquake.

Other Japanese Nuclear plant incidents of note
- the fast breeder Monju Nuclear Power Plant sodium leak in December 1995
- the Tokai reprocessing waste explosion in March 1997
- the criticality accident at the Tokai fuel fabrication facility in September 1999
- shut down all of Tokyo Electric Power Company's 17 nuclear reactors. Tokyo Electric's officials had falsified inspection records and attempted to hide cracks in reactor vessel shrouds in 13 of its 17 units

Apache Varanus oil plant, 3 June 2008, Potentially $6.7 Billion in damages
THE West Australian Government will prosecute oil and gas producer Apache Energy for failing to maintain and repair a gas pipeline that exploded last year.
The report said the explosion was the result of ineffective anti-corrosion coating, insufficient protection of a transition zone of the beach section of the pipeline, and not enough inspection and monitoring of the 17-year-old pipeline.

Tennessee Valley Authority Coal Ash disaster 22 December 2008

How UK oil company Trafigura tried to cover up African pollution disaster

Montara Oil leak off WA coast August 21 2009
Disaster 15,000km2 and growing

Oil spill from rig in Oz waters nearing shores of Rote Island
What the oil spill would look like if it occurred in US waters around Virginia
These are some of the endangered marine animals from this area.
h/t to Haole in Hawaii
Green Turtle

Spinner Dolphins

Latest update
Second attempt to plug oil leak 'delayed'

There are disasters which are recurring as a result of safety or extraction standards not at the level they should be or still being developed.

Chinese coal mine explosions
2001-2004 China coal accidents
China produced 35 percent of the world's coal last year, but reported 80 percent of the total deaths in coal mine accidents, according to statistics with the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS).
Among accidents occurred from January 2001 to October 2004, there were 188 each with death toll of more than 10, about one death every 7.4 days, said SAWS Wang Xianzheng at a national meeting on coal mine safety.

December 7 2007 105 Killed in China Mine Explosion
February 22 2009 China coal mine blast kills 73, 65 still trapped
September 8 2009 Gas Explosion Kills 35 Miners and Traps 44, China Says
Deadly blast in China coal mine

Gas extraction
New Studies: Natural Gas Development Releases Amazing & Very High Levels of Toxins into Air

Water worries threaten U.S. push for natural gas
People living near gas drilling facilities in states including Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming have complained that their water has turned cloudy, foul-smelling, or even black as a result of chemicals used in a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking."

==========================================================================
So not only can natural events cause immense damage to life and property, our relentless pursuit of energy also can have incredible impact if those responsible for the mobilization of that energy put profit over any other priority. Rushing a new plant without it being properly completed, taking short cuts, ignoring alarms, deferring into perpetuity necessary maintenance, dumping toxic pollutants rather than paying for the processes to treat them, failing to train staff and implement and enforce good, safe operational policy can all lead to these tragic events costing billions of dollars and costing lives as detailed above.

As our energy economy has been designed to extract and combust/burn carbon based fossil fuels, the release of stored or buried carbon dioxide we are witnessing, is altering the stability of our climate. A climate which humans have been able to survive well. Changing this will will change our capacity for survival.

Some recent headlines and articles with respect to climate change include:

Time to Tell the Truth About Global Warming
Climate change odds much worse than thought
Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes - 4?C Temperature rise
Earth's Temp. To Increase 6.3 Degrees By 2100

Australias Great Barrier Reef
"The future is horrific," says Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist who is widely regarded as the world's foremost expert on coral reefs.

UNEP: Climate worse than we thought. A lot worse.
100 Effects of Climate change

CO2 now highest in 15 million years: catastrophe looms

Two meter sea level rise unstoppable-experts

Oceans Turn Acidic & Hypoxic in Fertile Zones from Arctic to Antarctica

My point would be this: Natural disasters are increasing in intensity and are expected to do so as the lag effect of carbon dioxide release from early in the century slowly impacts the climate. Every time one of these hits massive amounts of aid are required to address those impacted through death, disease, losing homes and property.
Our pursuit of energy, being a carbon based one, is intensifying the impact of these natural disasters. Further, when something goes wrong and an energy related disaster occurs, the impact can be devastating on an economy as well as impacting many more people negatively.
So why have we not challenged the status quo? Why do we continue pursuing the majority of our energy needs through the extraction and consumption of stored carbon or fossil fuels? Wouldn't the 'energy' companies recognize the harm their industry can cause and get actively involved in transitioning to cleaner forms of energy production?
But if this is not incentive enough, the increasing frequency of warnings of fossil fuel depletion coupled with the wildly fluctuating energy prices in oil, coal and gas, would it not make sense to pursue stable forms of energy which can be produced within a countries own borders?
We are about to hit an energy crisis of epic proportions

Era of cheap, easy oil is over, warns study

==========================================================================
See I think we have been warned plenty enough about the multitude of serious dangers facing us over our addiction to fossil fuels. What has stopped action over these developing scenarios of disaster?

Jason and the secret climate change war
A shadowy scientific elite codenamed Jason warned the US about global warming 30 years ago but was sidelined for political convenience
"Right on the first page, the Jasons predicted that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would double from their preindustrial levels by about 2035.
Today it's expected this will happen by about 2050.
They suggested that this doubling of carbon dioxide would lead to an average warming across the planet of 2-3C. Again, that's smack in the middle of today's predictions.
They warned that polar regions would warm by much more than the average, perhaps by as much as 10C or 12C. That prediction is already coming true - last year the Arctic sea ice melted to a new record low. This year may well set another record.
"Nor were the Jasons frightened of drawing the obvious conclusions for civilisation: the cause for concern was clear when one noted "the fragility of the world's crop-producing capacity, particularly in those marginal areas where small alterations in temperature and precipitation can bring about major changes in total productivity".
More information on this

Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate
....But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
"The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied," the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups....
....George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had. ...
....Others, like Exxon Mobil, now recognize a human contribution to global warming and have largely dropped financial support to groups challenging the science. ....

Just like the tobacco industry did, the scientific research in 1995 laid out a long term future where carbon dioxide would cause damage to the stability of the climate. However, just like tobacco, the profits were just too attractive to the existing businesses who made their money from the extraction of fossil fuels, so how to maintain profit levels for a toxic product, if not confuse and distract with your own counter argument, science and media campaign.

A few books laying out in detail the vast effort to maintain an addiction to fossil fuels.
Crimes Against Nature
High and Dry
Climate Cover Up Crusade

==========================================================================
Continuous consumption of cheap energy has been the mechanism by which the standard of living of people around the world has increased. First the consumption of coal in Europe kicking off the industrial revolution, followed by Americas recognition of the vast advantages using stored sunlight, oil, could bring.

I have talked about this in a previous diary, laying out the need for energy and how much we use each day.
DK Greenroots: The Grain Store Keepers

As you can see by the flow chart below, without energy, modern society stops.

So we need energy, it needs to be affordable and it needs to be available to all without discrimination.
I have discussed once before that our appetite for energy is voracious. In the clip shown here it shows that if we were simply consuming the energy we needed to keep our bodies functioning, we would consume 8 mars bars equivalent for women, and 10 for men or 2,000 and 2,500 calories respectively. However on average we each actually consume, in the US, Canada and Australia, almost 100 times this amount.

Or if you like we need this much in terms of energy for our bodies to function.

Or this much for us to live as we have become accustomed in the developed countries.

As we use so much energy to live our modern lives, you would think that the number one priority would be to ensure that the energy we use is as sustainable as possible, in other words if we can grow it, harness it, harvest it or capture it as opposed to digging up a finite resource and burning it, then government policy should make this a priority.

However what appears to have happened is what I have just demonstrated to you above. A small group of people figured out a long time ago that if they have something you need each and every day of your life, and they are the only ones that have it, they can pretty much charge what they believe you can afford?

I'll not get into this too much, as it starts down a road best travelled by others, but here are a few choice links which build a picture for you.

1870-1911: Standard Oil was a predominant American integrated oil producing, transporting, refining, and marketing company. Established in 1870 as an Ohio corporation, it was the largest oil refiner in the world[3] and operated as a major company trust and was one of the world's first and largest multinational corporations until it was broken up by the United States Supreme Court in 1911.

1879: Karl Benz, working independently, was granted a patent for his internal combustion engine, a reliable two-stroke gas engine, based on the same technology as Nikolaus Otto's design of the four-stroke engine. Later, Benz designed and built his own four-stroke engine that was used in his automobiles, which were developed in 1885, patented in 1886, and became the first automobiles in production.

1911: The Seven Sisters of the petroleum industry

1900: Rudolf Diesel demonstrated the diesel engine in the 1900 Exposition Universelle (World's Fair) using peanut oil fuel (see biodiesel).
29 September 1913: Diesel boarded the post office steamer, He was never seen alive again. Ten days later, the crew of the Dutch boat "Coertsen" came upon the corpse of a man floating in the sea. The body was in such an advanced state of decomposition that they did not bring it aboard. Instead, the crew retrieved personal items (pill case, wallet, pocket knife, eyeglass case) from the clothing of the dead man, and returned the body to the sea.

1931 Thomas Edison: not long before he died, the inventor told his friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone: "I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."

1962: Theiss Peabody Mitsui opens Moura mine, the first major Australian export coal mine in the Bowen Basin, Queensland.

1969: Australias first oil and gas starts flowing. Gippsland Gas Processing and Crude OilStabilisation Plant officially opened by Sir Arthur Rylah,Deputy Premier of Victoria...
..the Longford gas plant was owned by a joint partnership between Esso and BHP. Esso was a wholly owned subsidiary of US based company Exxon

1974: Democrats, opened impeachment hearings against the President on May 9, 1974...
Nixon resigned the office of the presidency on August 9, 1974

1974: Rupert Murdoch and the Australian opposition party refuse to work with the existing Australian government after a policy of government oversight of Australia's oil, gas and mineral assets is proposed.
In 1972, Murdoch acquired the Sydney morning tabloid The Daily Telegraph from Australian media mogul Sir Frank Packer, ... Murdoch threw his growing power behind the Australian Labor Party under the leadership of Gough Whitlam and duly saw it elected... in 1972 on a social platform that included universal free health care, free education for all Australians to tertiary level, recognition of the People's Republic of China, and public ownership of Australia's oil, gas and mineral resources. Rupert Murdoch's flirtation with Whitlam turned out to be brief. As the Whitlam government began to lose public support following its re-election in 1974, Murdoch turned against Whitlam and supported the Governor-General's dismissal of the Prime Minister.

Murdoch had become close to Gough Whitlam, then leader of the Australian Labor Party, and gave A$75,000 to the party's advertising campaign in 1972. If this was a return to Murdoch's earlier radicalism, it was short-lived. Within three years his papers were attacking the Labor Party again, with The Australian, for example, using raw figures, rather than seasonally adjusted ones, to suggest, wrongly, that unemployment was rising.

1975: On 11 November 1975, the Governor-General dismissed Whitlam as Prime Minister and appointed Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister

1977: James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. (born October 1, 1924) served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981...
He established a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology.
He encouraged energy conservation, installed solar panels in the White House.
He wore a sweater on April 17, 1977 and delivered a fireside chat where he famously declared that the energy situation was the moral equivalent of war while clenching his fist.

1979: The Iranian hostage crisis was a diplomatic crisis between Iran and the United States where 53 Americans were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981

1981: January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan succeeds Jimmy Carter, as the 40th President of the United States. Minutes later, Iran releases the 52 Americans held for 444 days, ending the Iran hostage crisis.

1980: Carter, a former peanut farmer and naval nuclear engineer: How to solve an energy crunch in a nation utterly dependent on fossil fuel?
Then Carter lost re-election to Ronald Reagan in 1980. The solar panels at the White House eventually came down - and Reagan and his aides gutted the solar research program.
"In June or July of 1981, on the bleakest day of my professional life, they descended on the Solar Energy Research Institute, fired about half of our staff and all of our contractors, including two people who went on to win Nobel prizes in other fields, and reduced our $130 million budget by $100 million," recalls Denis Hayes, the founder of Earth Day, who had been hired by Carter to spearhead the solar initiative.
Reagan and Congress stopped aggressively pushing new auto efficiency standards, acceding to Detroit's desire to leave them at Carter-era levels. They let the solar tax benefit expire, and the nascent solar industry went belly- up.

1984: Amoco Oil pulled factory loan to takeover of Solarex Corporation factory in Frederick, Maryland.

1985: On 4 September 1985, Murdoch became a naturalised citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only United States citizens could own American television stations

1986: the Metromedia deal closed, and the Fox Broadcasting Company was launched.

Machinations of Mr Murdoch

Murdoch praised the work of its chairman and promised that the station would retain total independence without interference. Two weeks after the tribunal approved the change of ownership, the chief executive was replaced by a News Ltd. director with no television experience; two months later the chairman resigned.

During 1985, Murdoch and his closest advisers planned the removal of all the News International papers from the Fleet Street area, the traditional base for national newspapers, to a plant at Wapping, in east London, where troubled relations with the print unions could be superseded by a single union agreement with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU). Electronic typesetting equipment was ordered, but kept hidden from the print workers; the EETPU recruited new production staff, and then, when the plant was ready, the journalists on the four newspapers were given from one to three days to move or to leave the company and the plant began producing papers in January 1986. It was not only the 5,500 sacked print workers who felt somewhat betrayed after this dramatic move. The EETPU never did get a single union agreement, and News International did not recognize any trade unions.

Another way was to restructure the subsidiaries so that a higher proportion of group profits could be made in tax havens, such as Bermuda. In 1989, 25 percent of profits were attributed to tax haven companies; in 1990 the proportion was 54.5 percent, and News Corp.'s effective tax rate was 1.76 percent rather than the statutory 39 percent.

1988: James Hansen ... testimony on climate change to congressional committees in 1988 that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to limit the impacts of climate change.

1988-1991: AMOCO/Enron used Solarex patents to sue ARCO Solar out of the business of a-Si

1993: Tony Snow, a conservative columnist on the payroll of Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV, introduces New York City literary agent Lucianne Goldberg to Linda Tripp, as Goldberg is seeking contracts for anti-Clinton books

1995: Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

1995/96: Newscorp key events
Australias cable TV service Foxtel begins
Fox News channel launched
Star TV Japan Launched
Britains BSkyB enter the FTSE 100 Index
BSkyB signs an extension of its Premier League rights for ?670 million
Newscorp begins a Rugby Superleague war A new competition, to be called Star League, was announced on 1 April 1995

1996: John Winston Howard, AC (born 26 July 1939) was the 25th Prime Minister of Australia from 11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007.

1996: Shutdown of the very promising Aquatic Species Program - Algae based fuels.

1997: The treaty was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, opened for signature on 16 March 1998, and closed on 15 March 1999.

1998: Bill Clinton, President of the United States, was impeached by the House of Representatives on December 19, 1998, and acquitted by the Senate on February 12, 1999.

1999: GM Kill the Electric Car EV1

2000: with some 85% of the votes counted in Florida and Bush leading Gore by more than 100,000 votes, the networks, starting with Fox News, declared that Bush had carried Florida and therefore had been elected President.

2000: The United States and Australia have failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, even though they both signed it in 1997.

2001: The Enron scandal, revealed in October 2001...Its ties to the Bush administration

2005: In 1995 American drivers burned about 17 million more gallons of gasoline a day than the country produced, according to the government's Energy Information Administration. The difference was made up for by imports.
By 2005, the latest figures available, the gap had widened considerably to about 36 million.

2005: In October 2006, Peabody completed an acquisition of Excel Coal Limited, an independent coal company in Australia. Peabody owns five other mines in Australia, which are all located in Queensland.

2007: BP is Back to Petroleum. Britain's oil giant is returning to the fold and quietly shedding its emphasis on alternative energies. Mr Hayward, it seems, is more focused on value investors than environmental campaigners.

2007: Shell, the oil company that recently trumpeted its commitment to a low carbon future by signing a pre-Bali conference communique, has quietly sold off most of its solar business.

2007: A $6 million lawsuit has been filed against Chevron Technology Ventures, the oil giant's technology investment and commercialization arm...is alleging that Chevron breached their limited partnership agreement, undermining the project and causing revenue losses. The suit also claims that while Chevron used its involvement to "green wash" their media image they withheld financial and technical assistance.

2007: Unlike its rivals, Exxon Mobil doesn't much care about alternative fuels and doesn't try to please the greens. Is CEO Rex Tillerson nuts - or shrewd?

2008: Shell sees coal still a key energy source over coming decades.
LONDON (Thomson Financial) - Coal will remain one of the world's main sources of energy over the next 40 years, even replacing oil as the dominant fuel once supply "plateaus" after 2015, said Jeremy Bentham, vice president of Royal Dutch Shell PLC.
He told reporters in a news conference coal demand will continue to grow but oil and gas supply is likely to peak sometime between 2015 and 2020. This will occur even at the back of mounting pressure to reduce the use of coal as a measure to curb carbon emissions.

2008: New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. During the Jan. 5 debates in Manchester, N.H., he said, "We haven't built a refinery, I think, in 30 years."
It's been more than 30 years, said Bill Holbrook, communications director for the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, an industry trade group. The last spanking-new refinery built in the United States was the Marathon Oil refinery in Garyville, La., in 1976.

2008: Fred Thompson - We want people refining that oil and we want people -- and there hasn't been a refinery built here in a long time in this country.

2008: BP shuts Sydney solar plant

2008: Shell Ditches British Wind Farm, Mere days after reporting first-quarter profits of ?4bn

2008: Exxon has long adopted a stance that renewable energy will be a negligible part of the energy mix for the foreseeable future, and that operational and market conditions will remain static and relatively unchanging.

2008: BP to Invest $90M in Cellulosic Ethanol Producer Verenium
2009: Verenium and Aventine Are Circling the Drain

2008: Shell to quit wind projects
Shell, Danish firm Dong Energy and Scottish Power have cancelled the ?800m Cirrus Array project off the northwest coast after five years and millions of pounds in investment.

2009: BP Gives up on Jatropha for Biofuel

2009: BP shuts alternative energy HQ
? Renewables budget will be reduced by up to ?550m this year

2009: The 1GW Solar Factory, a Dream Deferred. A year ago, it seemed like gigawatt-sized solar factories were just around the corner, with companies such as Sharp and Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary Showa Shell Sekiyu unveiling plans to build 1 GW thin-film solar plants.

2009: Utegate fake controversy to avoid Australian politicians discussing dealing with carbon dioxide emissions.

2009: Blankenship "But as long as we're wasting such huge amounts of money on renewables and nonsense--like CCS [carbon capture and sequestration] or whatever--we're not going to have those funds."

2009: TRUenergy pulls plug on Solar Systems. Solar Systems' $420 million, 154-megawatt project near Mildura was touted as the world's largest and most efficient solar photovoltaic power station when TRUenergy came on board last year.It signed a $285m development agreement for the Mildura project, as well as paying $40m for a 20 per cent stake in Solar Systems.
But TRUenergy's Hong Kong-based parent, CLP, has decided to write off its entire $HK346m ($53m) investment in Solar Systems.
TRUenergy's generations assets include the Yallourn Power Station, the third largest generator in Victoria. This 1450MW power station supplies 22% of Victoria's electricity and 8% of national market needs. The Yallourn mine is the largest open cut coalmine in Australia with reserves to meet the projected needs of the power station to 2032.

2009 List of top 10 companies by revenue
1. ExxonMobil
3. Royal Dutch Shell plc
4. BP plc
6. Total S.A.
7. Chevron Corp.
8. Saudi Aramco
10. ConocoPhillips
This was the list in 2000.
1. Exxon Mobil
2. Wal-Mart Stores
3. General Motors
4. Ford Motor
5. General Electric
6. Citigroup
7. Enron
8. International Business Machines
9. AT New York
10. Verizon Communications
Notice anything strange about the two lists above?

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Lets say you have built a business, one selling about 900 chocolate bars per day to every single person in your country. There are only a certain number of chocolate bars in your country, and by the middle of the century, 1950's or so, you are running out. No problem really as you know there are plenty of chocolate bars in other countries. You just have to figure out a way to make sure you control the sale of them to the people in your country. Now lets say after you have established import relationships with the country which owns the chocolate bars someone comes on the market with apples and wants to grow them sustainably and replace the unhealthy chocolate bars. You know that the profit margin is not there in growing and selling apples, you can't control them, so the best thing to do is make sure apples never become a replacement for the chocolate bars. Your new friends you get the chocolate bars will help you as well.

You will have to get hold of the most effective advertising guy/s who can continue to sell your chocolate bars. Because you sell 900 to each person each day, a few chocolate bars worth to him/them to keep people buying your products is not so much. Buying radio stations, Cable TV news and opinion shows doesn't even cost one chocolate bar per person per day.

Stymie any attempts for the apple marketeers to gain a foothold. This includes demonizing those 'poison apples', showing interest and investing long enough to figure out where they are going to grow the trees and how and then buy up all the rights to the land, sue them out of business, or withdraw funding just when they need it the most.

Pay off the politicians who favor chocolate bars over renewable apple trees. Make sure they get out there telling everyone that the chocolate bar workers will lose jobs, that apples cost too much money, they will use too much land, too much water, will not do the same job nor taste as sweet as chocolate bars.

That is kind of what the fossil fuel industry have done with renewables. Consider just how effective they have been with current primary sources of energy looking like the chart below.

If we go back to 2007 we see overwhelmingly of the oil used, the United States uses the most.

We then need to consider that when the fact became known that the United States used so much oil from overseas would become more and more, when the problem was identified in the 1970's people fought tooth and nail to keep America addicted to oil. And they weren't nice and fair about it. America is importing more oil than it is producing internally and things are looking to get worse.

And now that the apple trees have been ploughed into the ground after years of effort, the only thing left in the market are chocolate bars. Guess where all the remaining resources of oil are. Just when Americas dependence could not be any greater.

World reserves of oil - Saudi Arabia 22.3%, Iran 11.2%, Iraq 9.2%... USA 1.8%.

So you don't own apple trees, you don't have many chocolate bars left, and the reason you got to this situation was on purpose. Really quite simple, once government policy is in place to promote oil, coal and gas alone, it needs politicians from both sides to co-operate to improve it. If the oil, coal and gas guys can control just one side enough to prevent any change to policy, nothing will change.

An Aussie Visiting America - LA

Unenergy — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:45:06 GMT

During the month of August I had my first visit to the United States of America. I was visiting for a few reasons one of which to see if America is anything like what you see on TV, Cops or Fox News for instance, or if it was somewhere you could live without fear. In the year 2001 I was working for an American company in Vietnam and applied online for a Green card through the lottery. In 2004 I won, but decided not to follow through as by that stage, I felt that the USA no longer seemed like the land of opportunity.
My visit there lasted 28 days, visiting 10 States and at the end I have to say, I found the place somewhere I could easily return to, even to live. I always felt safe despite travelling most of the time by myself and because I wanted to make it a part of the experience, often on public or mass transport. To use an expression from Australia if asked about the States and what it was like, "No worries, mate" certainly sums it up.
So maybe the only thing about my decision in 2004, not taking up the green card, was that it was the wrong time for me because 'opportunity' is something I now instantly relate when thinking about the US of A.
I was born and raised in rural Australia but started moving about at the age of 20, chasing construction projects and have since lived all over the country - in Melbourne, near Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, many local towns and the "Australian Outback" with a few overseas places thrown in. This included about 3 years in Vietnam. But I really wasn't prepared for just how big LA actually is. When you consider that one city, Los Angeles, population has about 14 million people and the entire population of Australia is around 20 million people, you can see why I thought this.
Although I have visited big cities before and I can remember visiting Tokyo around 15 years ago for about a month on a 'study tour' facilitated between a local college and an engineering college in Tokyo, who reciprocated year on year with their students visiting Oz. Aside from the taste of rice wine, sake and that you could buy beer from vending machines on almost every street, what I can remember most of Tokyo, with its 12.4 million people was how big the city seemed when we flew in at night and how busy the subway system got. From the plane, the lights seemed to go forever and travelling the subway the expression 'wave or wall of people' is easy to experience if you try walking against the flow of a disembarking subway train. Tokyo is a city which goes mostly up (and down with its excellent subway system) with skyscrapers and high rise, high density living, whereas LA is incredibly spread out and trumps the footprint of Tokyo by a large margin. LA is a city set up for driving everywhere, a city of carparks and roads where the car parks take up almost as much space on prime real estate as the buildings they serve.

This makes the Los Angeles metropolitan area, with roughly 1.8 cars per person, the world's most car-populated urban sprawl in the world.
There are more cars in California than people in any of the other states of the United States. The Los Angeles freeway system handles over twelve million cars on a daily basis.
Link

My flight landed early in the morning, and after paying for the second time for a shuttle bus (gotta love travel agent stuff ups), I got dropped off at my Anaheim hotel around 9am in the morning. The first thing I found out was that check in time for hotels in the US, if they do not have a cleaned room immediately available, is 3pm. So after a flight of 12 hours, catching little sleep on the plane, and dressed in jeans and a jacket, unfortunately I was unable to catch a few minutes shut eye, take a shower or even get changed and freshen up.

My hotel was just over from Disneyland, so to fill in the 6 hours or so until I could get into my room, I decided to go over for a look. By the time I arrived at the Disneyland gates after a 15 minute walk, I was wondering why everyone else was wearing shorts and light clothing... except me. From the hotel I was staying in there was a courtesy bus available, but as I could see the rides of Disneyland across the eight lanes of road and it looked close enough, I figured it would only be a five minute walk and that people catching the bus might be just taking it extra easy on their holiday. However this was something I'd learn later on - nobody walks in LA, it is just too big and too far to get around.

View from the front of my Hotel to Disneyland

When I walked over to Disneyland the sky was overcast it seemed and a relatively cool wind was blowing so I figured I was dressed OK - what I had not yet learned was that overcast was what is known in LA as the "Marine layer" which lifts or burns off as midday approaches.

A semi-permanent area of high pressure dominates the eastern Pacific from May through October. That feature helps prevailing onshore winds trap ocean-cooled air throughout the metro area in summer. This "marine layer" lowers temperatures, raises humidity and helps form low clouds and fog near the coast during overnight and morning hours.
Link

Disneyland I found to be at least 10 times bigger than I'd imagined. I spent more than 6 hours getting around trying to see as much as possible stopping to go on only a few rides. The Tom Morrow and other robots and electronics at Innoventions and I think it was a Yamaha instrument music display probably my favorite part, as being both a robotics programmer at one point and growing up playing in school Rock bands, both held a particular personal interest for me.

Being able to have 3 kids picked at random from the audience, completely unknown as to their musical capabilties, produce some semblance of an in time, in tune version of a song from the Lion King, is pretty impressive.
I didn't have a video camera, but I was able to find two videos taken by proud parents of this display at Innoventions to give an idea, albeit a little difficult to watch, of what I am talking about. One kid on guitar, another on the electronic drums.

In experienced hands equipment like the electronic drum pads, keyboard and stringless guitar could be made to do some pretty impressive things. Although, I must be getting old as I think I am from the 'old school of thought' in this regard, where I learnt the hard way studying Mel Bay and Carcassi and guitar books from Berkeley. So whether the kids were instant musical prodigies is a matter of opinion. I'm sure their parents thought they were which is a good thing if followed through on. Plus 'in the right hands' nowadays, with computerized everything, may just mean a champion at 'Guitar Hero', not actually someone who is yet able to play a Fender Stratocaster or Maton acoustic.

Since I got home I have seen a segment on TV promoting the Beatles Rock Band Game, so I guess the future of music which was on display at Innoventions at Disney is here, now.

Posters in a shop window just off Sunset Boulevard

Walking back to the hotel about 5 pm I realized I'd been sunburnt by the harsh LA sun. I live in a very sunny area of Australia, but LA's heat and UV once the marine layer lifts is something else and prompted me, after the fact, to buy some sunblock on my way back. Although it only took me about 15 minutes to make it to Disneyland from the hotel, I lost my bearings on the way back finding myself wandering the streets of Anaheim around the massive park for a good 90 minutes before I found the original hotel I'd walked through to get into the park. This was not such a bad thing though as it made me appreciate something about Anaheim, and in fact most of LA, that is the extraordinarily clean streets and very well tended gardens. An after school job as a teenager for me was as a garden center or plant nursery worker, I know the effort that goes into maintaining a great garden and so appreciate seeing well tended gardens with not a blade of grass or leaf out of place. As big as it was, in the case of LA, Americans take good care of their cities.

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Day 2
The following day, my first full day in the United States, I was booked on a bus tour of LA and Hollywood 'star' homes. The tour was booked to give me an idea of LA and surrounds, as I would eventually be spending about 9 days in LA. So this tour was more to orientate myself with the city, not so much to see the homes of the rich and famous which I didn't really have much interest in. But as it turned out, this part of the trip was actually one of the most interesting. The bus driver gave us a lot of history associated with LA which was pretty informative. She talked about Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo being the first to land at San Diego, mentioned even that the first European, the same guy credited with Australias discovery, Captain James Cook, also mapped the Californian Coastline.

The first European to explore the California coast was Juan Rodr?guez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator sailing for the Spanish Crown. He landed on September 28, 1542 at San Diego Bay, claiming what he thought was the Island of California for Spain.

James Cook
Captain James Cook, FRS RN (7 November [O.S. 27 October] 1728 - 14 February 1779), was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer, ultimately rising to the rank of Captain in the Royal Navy. Cook was the first to map Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean during which he achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands as well as the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand...
He explored and mapped the coast from California all the way to the Bering Strait, on the way identifying what came to be known as Cook Inlet in Alaska. It has been said that, in a single visit, Cook charted the majority of the North American northwest coastline on world maps for the first time, determined the extent of Alaska and closed the gaps in Russian (from the West) and Spanish (from the South) exploratory probes of the Northern limits of the Pacific.

The bus driver also told us how important to California's development, the large immigrant population had been which had come over during the Gold Rush.

The Gold Rush resulted in massive foreign immigration to California from virtually every area of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. At first, immigrants were accepted by almost everyone, as land, gold, and other resources were plentiful.
Link

But even back then there was considerable intolerance.

As those resources became less abundant, however, a minority of white racists played on miners' fears of foreign competition and came to dominate the legislature, setting up barriers to foreign immigrants. While some immigrants left, many others persisted, and set the stage for the vast cultural diversity seen in California today.
... as soon as the civilian legislature came along in 1850, a minority of racist white miners, who feared competition with foreign immigrants, influenced the government to abandon laissez-faire and institute the Foreign Miners Tax.

As soon as I got on the bus, a young lady travelling alone, who had just arrived from Orlando and sitting just in front of me on the bus turned around and introduced herself. She said she was visiting to see if LA was a place she would like to move to for work and to live. We chatted most of the day and had lunch together at a Mexican restaurant in the Kodak theater with another girl we'd met from Australia who was also travelling alone on the same bus. The number of Mexican restaurants in So-Cal was a fairly distinct difference from Australia, as where I am from back home I'd suggest no-one would consider refried beans as a breakfast food. This nice young lady took my photo at the Bee Gees sidewalk star on Hollywood Boulevard which my old man might get a kick out of. Sometimes I am sure he thinks he is a long lost Bee Gees brother after he has had a couple of beers, as he is pretty good at singing all the old Bee Gees songs word for word.

During the tour we visited Santa Monica beach and the pier, Hollywood Hills, Pacific Pallisades, Brentwood and Bel Air, Amalfi Drive and the Kodak theater where they hold the Academy awards. As far as houses go the driver pointed out a large 10 acre estate which she explained belonged to Arnold Swarzenegger, who she then went on to tell us is not that appreciated at the moment in California. She told us that Joan Collins, Demi Moore, Jack Black, Sly Stallone and Tom Hanks have homes close to each other, with Bill Cosby and Steve Martin across the road from each other. That Tom Cruise and Adam Sandler live next door to each other.
We went past Riviera Golf Club where I am sure she said he coaches but when I checked that Tiger Woods has never won the tournament there. We had the Gettys museum and UCLA pointed out to us. Saw where Nick Cage, Al Pacino supposedly live, Leonardo Di Caprio's new place with Clint Eastwood a near neighbor. Were shown where Hughes playboy mansion is along with homes of Michael Jackson and Elvis eerily opposite each other. And Mick Jagger and Matt Damon also live on the same street. Now I can't really say for sure whether this tour guide was just coming up with names of famous people and pointing out houses, but I will say it was an interesting tour and she certainly did 'spin a good yarn'. In fact she told us she was also a casting agent in Hollywood and kept singling me out asking which soap show I was from on Australian TV.

The tour guide talked about how California had one of the largest agricultural and dairy industries, had a massive oil boom which drove a lot of growth in the area.

LA is a great, big freeway," go the words to the song. It is also one of the world's great oil provinces, with historical oil extraction over the past 110 years of something near 9 billion barrels, and still counting. This volume easily places the oil production from the Los Angeles Basin in the ranks of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska (near 10 billion barrels), and about 50% greater than the East Texas field (about 6 billion barrels).
Link

The guide touched on the creation of the gated community of Bel-Air where a lot of famous people now reside and discussed how oil money had a hand in its creation as an exclusive estate at a time when there was some animosity directed at the oil barons. Now I have tried to find some more information on this, as it seemed like an important part of LA's history with oil money being responsible for much of California's wealth and growth, however the best I could find was a short interview about Upton Sinclair and a movie I will talk about in a future diary.

Los Angeles during the 1920s was a laboratory of the future. It was the first city created to serve the needs of the automobile -- it's where the car culture was born. And for a brief period, it was the center of world oil production.
Link

We stopped mid afternoon at the Los Angeles Music Center plaza and I took a photo of the fountain in the square, however was much more interested in the solar roof carpark which had been installed across the road at the department of water and power. I think all cities should look at ideas like this as it is an excellent use of urban space.

We all went our seperate ways at the end of the tour with a few of us being dropped at the Universal Studios to wait for a bus back to Anaheim. I filled the 1 ? hours here with a few beers at a wild west saloon bar.

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Day 3
The following day I decided to venture out and see if I could get out to a place called Lancaster via public transport. As Americans drive on the wrong side of the road (in Australia we drive on the correct side, the left hand side of the road), I was not keen on trying to drive around LA, nor did I have enough loose cash to pay for a taxi out to the area as Lancaster from Anaheim is a long, long way. So I did a Google map search to find that the guys at Google had created yet another excellent free tool which allows people from LA to get directions to their destination via public transport.
Check it out here.

This had me at the correct bus stop at the correct time and on time to catch a train at the metrolink railway station at Anaheim. The ticket machines are not so self explanatory, but someone was kind enough to help me here. What I wasn't prepared for is how much security there is at a Metrolink train station. At each entry point to the platforms were two security staff stopping people to check their bags and person, with another couple of guards patrolling the platform. After a while, this probably does provide peace of mind and is a necessary thing on the metrolink, but it was one of the few times a striking difference between our countries has made me a little nervous. The reason being it brings the prospects of what can happen right to the front of your thoughts.

The Metrolink train line finished at Union Station where I had an hour or so to kill before the train to Lancaster was due. So I walked the streets of LA finding an underground mall and had a scrambled egg breakfast. I took a few photos of Union Station and what I think is the LA courthouse right in front of where a number of homeless people were pushing their possessions, their homes and furniture around in shopping trolleys they had borrowed. Then boarded the train to Lancaster.

From the bus to the double decker train to Union Station, through to the train to Lancaster, I have to say I never felt worried, or threatened by anyone. Finding my way was easy thanks to Google maps, people went out of their way to help and the train was one of the cleanest, well air conditioned, comfortable, reasonably priced metro systems I've been on. With limited bias, I'd say on par or slightly better than the city or suburban trains in Sydney, Australia (not so much other capitals). It was a very scenic trip out to Lancaster through the mountains. Below are a few pictures of the landscape from the train heading out to Lancaster.

My trip to Lancaster was for a reason - to visit a brand new thermal Solar installation being built by a company called E-Solar. Note : I'll leave the plant visit and pix for the end of this diary.

When I got off the train at the end of the line at Lancaster I thought I would need a cab to get to the E-Solar plant. According to my recollections of the Google map it was only a couple of miles to the plant. I told a cab driver the address and asked whether he knew where the plant was.
He pointed me up the road and seemed to think I could walk, without a cab, to the street I had quoted. However, I think he misinterpreted my Australian accent (our G's and J's must sound the same) and I ended up walking in the wrong direction for half a mile or so. After not seeing the E-Solar towers I knew should be there, I stopped at a Mexican restaurant on the main road, ordered a coke and asked the young lady serving if she'd seen a solar plant with lots of mirrors and towers on the road we were on.
She didn't seem to know, but started a conversation in Spanish with her two Aunts who worked in the kitchen out back. After much discussion and after I'd finished my second coke, we finally figured out I'd have to walk back to the train station, catch a cab and go the other way to that which I was walking.

The original cab driver was gone, so I checked with another one if he could take me to the streets I mentioned and pointed in the general direction, and jumped in the cab. My intent from Lancaster was to check out the E-Solar plant, which we did (see the end of this diary) take a few photos and then have the cab driver take me to Palmdale 15 - 20 miles away to check out what I thought was the E-Solar factory.

On the way to Palmdale, the driver who was more conversant in Spanish than English told me that the road I wanted to visit was not being found by his GPS. Once again the family social knowledge network went into overdrive. As had happened getting directions from the two Aunts and their niece back at the Mexican restaurant in Lancaster, this cab driver rang three of his friends or relatives in succession to try to see if their phone-a-friend directions would get us close to the E-Solar Palmdale building. One of the home contestants came through with the goods, and I was able to take a couple of photos and figure out what I think the E-Solar building located in Palmdale purpose was.

The cab driver dropped me off at the Palmdale railway station for a couple of hours wait before the next train back to Union station and connection to Anaheim was due.

I've told the next story before in a couple of comments but will relate it again here as it was probably the strongest good memory of this day.

Being on lots of planes, buses, trains and automobiles, I bought a book before departing Australia called "Dreams from my Father". I wont go into the book in this diary, as I would hope most Americans have taken the time to read the book as it is about the life of your President. I am very aware of the polarization within American society in relation to this president, and have been concerned that carrying this book around may start a conversation with someone who decides to start an argument. Not something I seek, particularly on vacation, so I often also carried a newspaper to hold the book in so no one could read the cover.
As my wait for the train from Palmdale back to LA Union Station was about 2 hours, I let down a bit of my guard and I returned to reading the book openly in public.
An African American young adult about 15 or 16 or so sat down with his sister opposite me on the train benches. He had the obligatory baseball cap, short sleeved tank top and tatoos on both arms.
He must have seen what I was reading as he said something I missed but I looked up to see him and his sister staring at me. His sister then said, "my brother wants to know what that book is like".
He again said something to his sister and she added "do you think we could have a look at it?".
So I handed over the book which she read the back cover in about 20-30 seconds, he took a little longer, maybe 2-3 minutes.
He then asked me where I'd purchased it. I told him Australia but maybe Barnes and Noble sells it in the US.
If I had not been marking the book up for the passages I want to come back to, likely in another diary, I'd have given the book to this guy on the spot because it is a life changing story.
To me it was a demonstration of the change which is possible when a teenager with tatts on his arm asks his sister to ask a stranger to look at his book because he is genuinely interested in what the President of the United States had to say about his life.
If I had been quicker I'd have figured out to ask for their email address and I'd send it to them when I was back in Australia, but I somehow suspect that he has by now gotten hold of a copy of the book and is reading it as we speak.
Why I thought about this exchange all the way home was because not only did this young man talk to a stranger he would otherwise have no reason to, but he also changed my perspective on having any concern about reading this book in public areas. This interaction in some small way made us both think a little differently about the world. And that possibly it is through an accumulation of these small changes in the way we think which may be cause enough to at least keep trying to reach out to others. Because if we think differently about these things eventually we will act differently towards each other. Maybe it is possible for civility and tolerance without fear between neighbors, between all Americans, to be something everyone respects, if experiences like this are actually do occur.

Later that evening after returning to the Anaheim hotel, I decided to turn on the television. It was automatically tuned to Fox with Sean Hannity and something he had labelled the 'Great American Panel'. He had on three guests including Rickey Medlocke from Lynryrd Skynyrd, the new CEO of Greenpeace, Phil Radford and a Republian Strategist, Noelle Nikpour.

As is the current debate, the discussion went to health care reform. With the guests that agreed with Sean Hannity's position that Medicare for all is some form of social evil, Sean was courteous and polite. However, preconception of his guest from Greenpeace had seriously tainted Sean's capacity to be even the slightest bit impartial and he was impolite, insulting and I would have to say disrespectful towards the man from Greenpeace.
Go to the 2:10 mark for where Sean goes after Phil labelling him a 'you Liberals'.

This interview ruined the day for me. I had arrived home believing in the capacity of Americans, to be considerate, helpful, kind, generous and respectful to others, particularly strangers and here was someone from Fox News spewing venomous talking points at a guest for no other reason than he was the leader of an environmental organisation. Trying to get Phil to admit to being a 'Liberal' as if there was something to be ashamed of, something there that made this American less than the other members on that panel. It made me wonder whatever happened to the American ideal that if you study hard, work hard you can achieve great things. I would say becoming the international president of a sustainable environmental organisation qualifies as a decent aspiration. Particularly achieving this position at age 33.
So what annoyed me most is this - Sean Hannity it seems does not want people to believe they should pursue great things, things which are important to them, that they should not try to achieve, particularly if it can be construed that it may be a career that is doing something to improve our living environment. It appeared to me that Sean Hannity does not respect generosity of spirit, that there is something wrong with this concept, that trying to do something good for the environment means that you have no positions worth respecting, that you should not be heard but talked over and at all times ridiculed.
This interview and the way he treated Phil Radford in comparison to his other guests, made me realize something, Sean Hannity, but more specifically, Fox News proved they want to destroy the concept of the American dream - The one that says that 'if you work hard at something which is important to you in America, you can be whatever you want to be'.
What ever happened to respecting achievement, no matter the political spectrum it had come from?

As Grassroots Director, it was Phil's vision and leadership that built Greenpeace's $9 million Grassroots Program and our cutting edge online to on-the-ground organizing, as well as a robust student organizing and training program and the national street and door-to-door canvass program. "Greenpeace is the organization that works with people rather than paper," Phil says. For many years, Phil was leading the team that was out in the field, talking to the people, gaining their support, and building stronger alliances for the environmental movement to march onward.
Link

Maybe to some people, this will seem thin skinned, but at the time I wanted to throw something at the television. It just didn't sit well with me. Sean Hannity and Fox News did not reflect the reality on the ground. Where people were just trying to get on with life, make things better for themselves. Not existing only to find things to criticize relentlessly , judging people on a sound bite not their entire character and contribution they have made to make the world better, complaining about everything wrong with America without trying to find realistic solutions.

For the remainder of this trip I decided to pay special attention to the two messages, the one that I saw and interacted with on the ground such as the story about the waitress in the Mexican restaurant getting her family to help me find the place I wanted to get to, the taxi driver drawing on his social network to do the same or the teenager asking about the book his President wrote. Contrast this with the intolerance on television for other Americas, for the President, the incitement to hatred coming from Fox News. I am a tourist in America and this one segment made me feel bad for Americans, that you have to have these people going out of their way with the express intent of tearing down other people. Only one of these Americas would any rational, caring human being, those just wanting to get on with living a productive life which contributes to the well being of a community and Americans, ever wish to be a part of.
Fox News is creating an intolerant society with shows like this.

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E-Solar
For those who have not read any of my other diaries, I am a control system commissioning technician and have spent many years in control rooms on all sorts of process plants, mainly power stations, getting them operating for the first time. One of the things I have been trying to ascertain over the past few years is whether burning the stuff that comes out of the ground, be it coal, gas or oil is the only way we can obtain electricity. Whether cost competitive, renewable or sustainable means of electricity production is feasible. Whether it is possible to meet our energy needs without consuming finite and polluting resources.
So part of my trip to the US was to see what newer technologies were out there, which if scaled up could make a dent in the fossil fuel/electricity co-dependence model we currently operate under and have done for a hundred years plus.

The E-Solar plant at Lancaster was one such plant I wanted to see for myself whether this was for real or just a whole lot of great PR.

Backed by venture capital, a major utility and Google, the E-Solar concept design is a modular solar thermal plant with a field of heliostats or moving mirrors, reflecting and concentrating sunlight onto a nominated target. Working on the premise of approximately 1MW of generation per 1,000 homes, the first plant E-Solar have built, a 5MW pilot plant, should be capable of providing enough electricity for 5,000 homes when fully operational.

The first plant comprises 24,000 mirrors, according to the NY Times and Fox Business network, and began operation in August. Below is a picture with reference to the NY Times article from 6 July where E-Solar programmers have programmed the mirrors to form a patter which looks like the US flag and the continents.... or the statue of Liberty.... or Jimi Hendrix?

E-Solar have teamed with NRG and appointed Fluor Corp, a major industrial plant design and construction firm, to design the first modular 46MW plant. Each 46MW block will consist of 16 towers and mirrors spread over 200 acres. The process itself replaces the fuel heated boiler component of an ordinary power station with a sun/solar heated boiler. NRG will operate up to 11 plants throughout the SW of the United States as they would 'coal fired' power stations without the 'coal fired' component.

Coming up on Tuesday 29 September is a National Geographic "World's Toughest Fixes" episode featuring the tower assembly, mirror tracking and alignment programming and turbine installation.
Link to a promo video of this episode can be found here.

E-Solar have also struck a deal with an Indian technology firm, ACME, to build, own and operate up to 1,000 Megawatts in India over the next few years with the first 100 MW getting started on later this year.

So to get those figures into perspective, that is 1,500 Megawatts of generation capacity and if we add those 3 zeros again to the MW part, we get total homes covered as 1.5 Million homes. But the Indian homes capable of being supplied with this technology, will likely be much higher than 1.5 Million as per capita, Indians use much less energy than the average US citizen.

My visit was at the very start of August. I had contacted E-Solar and had originally intended visiting their Pasadena offices, but when I started researching whether they had an operational plant, the Lancaster facility returned a search and it was a spur of the moment decision to test out LA's public transport and see if I could make it out into the desert unscathed.

Here are my photos of the site. All have been reduced to a small size, but are bigger on my website.

The first 3 shots show the boiler towers and what appear to be secondary frame towers. There appeared to be no piping to these secondary towers and yet there were a lot of them. The mirrors were pointed both at the boiler towers, the big ones, and the smaller structures. I have a theory on the smaller towers and sent the theory through to the E-Solar PR email address, but did not receive a confirmation whether the purpose of the smaller towers was correct or not. I'll come back to my theory in another diary.

The second 3 photos show the Sierra Tower constructors as well as the power block. The power block being the place where the steam and water side of a rankine cycle turbine alternator set come together and where the power comes out. From what I could gather, it appeared the condensor cooling will be evaporative air cooled. But I could be wrong and couldn't walk the site to confirm this.

The last 3 shots show the expansion of the site with the construction already underway on the smaller towers. And of course the office/warehouse in Palmdale which I had suspected was a factory, but now think more likely a distribution point and possibly design and administration office. The office is in what appears to be a new technology park with some other high tech neighbors. Lockheed Martin one of the other major tenants so there are some big names in the area.

So first impressions were that there are two distinctly different Americas. One where people are trying to get along, doing what they need to make a dollar, people learning something new, talking with other people without expecting to be judged, and where new technologies are providing jobs and opportunity through new industries into the future.

And the other one being created by the media, Fox News, the direct opposite of the above.

As a tourist, in fact as a human being, I prefer the first America, thats the place I'd be happy to call home.