Energy infrastructure

The poor in the South African townships are feeling the brunt of it already, a growing electricity crisis that will squeeze already meagre household incomes, spur inflation, add to the costs of essential foods, and raise transport costs in a country whose mass transport systems are utterly inadequate. Already saddled with a more than 30% hike in metered power costs for this year, they were told to expect a hike of a further 150% over the next three years.

Plenty of people think of metaphysics as one of those abstruse topics that give otherwise unemployable academics something to do with their time. Meanwhile the industrial world lurches toward disaster along a trajectory marked out, in part, by a common metaphysical error. The Archdruid explains, in this second post of a series.

Through September 2009, the government of India has issued a variety of statements designed to quell India's long-lived China bogey. It has done so to contain what it calls panic and scare-mongering about alleged incursions over the India-China border by units of the People's Liberation Army. The 'incidents' (as the Indian media like to call the events) have all occurred over India's north-western border with China, in the mountainous Jammu and Kashmir state.

San Antonio's new Mayor Julian Castro, in office just three months, has inherited a dilemma. The nation's 7th largest city is suffering from almost 8% unemployment. With limited resources, the Mayor and City Council are searching for ways to create local jobs. At the same time, the City, through its municipal utility City Public Service (CPS), is burning through hundreds of millions of dollars on just paperwork, to prepare to spend billions on a new nuclear power plant project some 200 miles away at Bay City, TX.

For decades the "Holy Grail" of the New Energy Economy has been to find ways to store wind and solar energy. The answers are here, and they are much more plain and simple than we thought. Like Indiana Jones in his Last Crusade, we need to see the Grail that is right before our eyes. The means to enable solar and wind energy to serve as our primary energy supplies are at hand.

A weekly round-up including:
- Prices and production
- Is China’s economy stalling?

Although the SW sunshine resource is enormous and largely untapped, critics of solar energy routinely note the sun does not shine all the time. The implication is that power is needed all the time, and since the sun is not always available, solar opponents say it would be foolish to invest in generating electricity from the sun.

Richard Heinberg’s new book Blackout tries to demolish current assumptions about the world’s remaining coal endowment: namely, that it is immense beyond belief, barely tapped and will last for centuries to come. Heinberg argues that these assumptions are off-base, misleading and not at all supported by recent studies that suggest global coal production could peak in less than two decades.

There is a well-known story about how to boil a frog. If you try to throw a frog into a pot already boiling, he'll jump out. However, put a frog into a pot and slowly raise the temperature - and you get frog legs for dinner.

More wind than we thought?
On the Brink of a New Era in Energy (interview with Siemens CEO)
Gerry Wolff at TREC-UK updates the Desertec story (video)

Renewable power? Not in your lifetime
Seven Paths to Our Energy Future
Wesley Clark: Ethanol's field general
Energy Secty Chu's alternative choice
Can I Clean Your Clock?
World`s largest cement firms slash production emissions by a third

Just a year and a half after a breakthrough Solar Grand Plan study was published in the January 2008 Scientific American, the U.S. government has begun plans to implement major elements of such a Plan.

"We’re not going to have to help the oil industry. They already have all the help they need. I wouldn’t take away what they have but I wouldn’t add to it."(Charlie Maxwell is the life-long oil industry analyst viewed by Barrons’ magazine as their energy guru.)

You can see it in the faces of those gathered to hear the latest news on the natural gas industry: Anxiety. Anger. Fear of losing everything they have. Frustration that there seems nothing anyone can do.

A weekly review including:
- Production and Prices
- Iraq
- Natural Gas
- Briefs