Watch an interview with Chris Goodall about the updated version of his book, Ten Technologies to Fix Energy and Climate.
This video was originally posted on LlewTube and Treehugger.
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Watch an interview with Chris Goodall about the updated version of his book, Ten Technologies to Fix Energy and Climate.
This video was originally posted on LlewTube and Treehugger.
Tags: electric cars, politics, renewables, video, wind turbines
The UK government announcement on incentives for small scale renewables has three unexpected features:
An earlier article on this topic which looks in more detail on the incentives to take up the new ‘feed-in tariffs’ is here.
Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, housing, politics, power generation, renewables
A previous article covered the remarkable growth of Spanish wind and the success in incorporating this electricity into Spain’s grid. It focused on the periods in November when wind provided much of the country’s electricity, peaking at almost 54% in the early morning of 8 November 2009. Wind was almost 23% of the Spanish total electricity production during the month of November, beating nuclear for the first time. Solar also grew rapidly in 2009, up from 1% in 2008 to 3% of national output.
The effect on CO2 emissions from power generation was striking. Carbon dioxide output fell by over a sixth, largely as a result of the growth in renewables.
Tags: CO2 emissions from electricity generation, power generation, REE, renewables, solar, Spain, UNESA, wind power
The Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed has become the most visible developing country spokesperson on climate change. Nasheed has continued to press for radical reductions in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, most recently arguing for a 350 parts per million target in a meeting with activist and author Bill McKibben in Copenhagen.
Tags: climate change, Copenhagen, Mark Lynas, PDF, politics, PowerPoint, renewables, The Maldives
1) If you buy just one new appliance in 2010, make it a really efficient fridge-freezer. The improvements in the energy use of the best fridge-freezers have been really impressive in the last few years. If you have an old refrigerator, it may be responsible for as much as a sixth of your electricity bill. A good new machine might use less than a half as much power, particularly if it is not too large. A second benefit is that by choosing to buy a really efficient refrigerator you will be sending a clear signal to the manufacturers that energy consumption matters. An impressive new web site – www.energytariff.co.uk – allows you to compare the electricity used by almost all the appliances currently in UK shops. You can make well-informed choices from your computer.
Tags: agriculture, aviation, carbon footprint, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, electricity demand, energy efficiency, food and grocery retailing, fossil fuels, renewables, technology
One of the frequent criticisms of wind energy is that national distribution systems (‘the grid’) cannot cope with large number of turbines because of the variability and unpredictability of their output. Grids need to match supply and demand precisely, the critics say, and because wind varies so much it causes huge problems. Recent data from two meteorologically unusual days in Spain – the world leader in the management of renewable energy supplies – shows this assertion is almost certainly false.
Over the course of this year Spain will generate about 14% of its total electricity from wind and this number is likely to rise to the high twenties by 2020. Spain is showing the rest of the world that these figures are not incompatible with grid stability. Although wind is ‘variable’, ‘intermittent’ and ‘unpredictable’, a well functioning grid system can still use wind to help stabilise electricity costs, reduce carbon emissions and improve energy security.
Tags: National Grid, power generation, Red Eléctrica de España, REE, renewables, Spain

The Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed stands in the sea off Kurumba to show the threat the islands face. Photograph: Chiara Goia. Source: Guardian.
Plans for a new windfarm are set to make the Maldives the country with the highest proportion of renewable power in the world.
The 30-turbine proposed windfarm, close to the capital Malé, will deliver 75 megawatts of electricity at full capacity, enough to provide electricity for the whole of the capital, the international airport and the surrounding resorts. Excess power will be used to run desalination plants that will produce bottled drinking water from the sea.
Tags: biochar, Carbon Gold, carbon reduction initiatives, Falcon Energy, fossil fuels, GE, Mark Lynas, politics, power generation, renewables, STELCO, The Maldives
Solar photovoltaics slowly lose their generating capacity. Although some solar panels are still working satisfactorily 40 years after installation, the conventional view is that most will dip below 80% of their rated capacity within about 20 years. This will vary slightly between manufacturers and between different types of silicon.
Tags: power generation, renewables, technology
Many viable UK projects to generate renewable electricity are not being financed because of shortages of credit from banks. At the same time, individual savers are only able to get tiny returns on their savings. In recent days a number of schemes for linking the UK surplus from household savings to the deficit in renewable financing have surfaced.
Tags: investments, power generation, renewables
This article refers to the UK proposals made in July 2009. The actual feed-in tariffs will be more generous and the new rates are discussed in a follow up article here.
After months of deliberation, the UK government has announced a range of illustrative figures for feed-in tariffs (FiTs). FiTs are fixed payments made to the owners of small generating stations for the electricity that they export to the grid. Micro-generators need high payments to justify their expensive investment in buying and installing green generation.
Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, Goldman Sachs, politics, power generation, Proven Energy, renewables
Most governments in the developed world were elected on platforms that promised aggressive policies on greenhouse gas emissions. The reality has not matched the commitments made. The reasons for this are multitudinous and no one should ever underestimate the difficulties of weaning advanced societies off the use of cheap and convenient access to fossil fuels. But in addition to the standard reasons for slow progress we can see a large number of obstacles that spring from human psychology. In particular, some of the resistance to aggressive action on climate seems to spring from mental attitudes that may have helped us survive as a species in the past. Perhaps politicians intuitively recognise the existence of these barriers. So they continue to say that climate change is the most important problem facing humanity at the same time as adding new runways to the local airport or sanctioning the development of new coal-fired power stations.
Tags: aviation, Bjørn Lomborg, carbon reduction initiatives, fossil fuels, Groucho Marx, Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson, politics, power generation, public opinion, renewables, science, Stern Review

Ed Miliband, Minister for the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian.
The government wants to emphasise the affordability of climate change mitigation. It produces low estimates of the cost of low-carbon technologies. In the recent 2009 budget documents, the government estimated a cost of 1% of GDP to meet the tough new 2020 targets. In his pronouncement on carbon capture at coal-fired power stations, energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband later said that his proposals will add 2% to electricity bills.
Are these numbers reasonable? Professor Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser, says no. In a BBC interview of 26 April, he indicates that he thinks that the cost of reducing the UK’s emissions is much higher than the government indicates but also that the financial implications of not dealing with the climate change threat are far higher than even Nick Stern suggests.
Tags: carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Climate Change Committee, Ed Miliband, fossil fuels, nuclear, politics, power generation, Professor Sir David King, renewables, Stern Review, technology

The Committee on Climate Change says the most important prospective source of cuts in greenhouse gases lay in the ‘decarbonisation’ of electricity generation. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian.
The budget confirmed the acceptance of the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendation for carbon emissions in 2020. The UK will have to reduce its CO2 output by about 110m tonnes by 2020, equivalent to a 21% reduction on actual emissions in 2005 (and 34% on the 1990 figure). The proposed rate of emissions reduction is far faster than the UK has achieved thus far and the chancellor’s budget shows the government has started to recognise the scale of the challenge.
Tags: Alistair Darling, budget, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Climage Change Committee, energy efficiency, fossil fuels, Kingsnorth, London Array, motoring, nuclear, politics, power generation, renewables
The Maldives will be the first country to be overwhelmed by the effect of climate change. The republic is a collection of coral atolls with maximum heights of one or two metres above sea level. Climate change is increasing worldwide sea levels and the atolls will probably go underwater by the end of the century.
The 300,000-400,000 people who live on the Maldives are not responsible for global warming. Their emissions per head (even including aviation fuels for incoming international tourism) are less than a seventh of typical European levels.
Many countries have set ambitious targets for the reduction of carbon emissions. The government of the Maldives seeks to encourage this trend by going one step further with a plan for near carbon neutrality within ten years.
This is an immensely challenging target. Chris Goodall (author of this blog) and Mark Lynas, the prize-winning climate change author, were asked to provide a short outline of how it might be achieved and what it might cost.[1]
In the rest of this note, we show our calculations. We will be the first to acknowledge that this work is incomplete. Although it was tempting to conduct fieldwork in some of the most attractive island resorts, we did our analysis using publicly available information and with help from officials attached to the Maldives government.
Our work shows that near neutrality is possible, but expensive. It will take at least $1.1bn for this small island state. The Maldives imports almost all its fuels in the form of refined oil products. Rates of financial return to the investment therefore depend largely on the price of oil. If expectations of future oil prices exceed $100 a barrel, we judge that the plan is sufficiently attractive to be financeable by international institutions such as the World Bank.
Comments on this work will be very gratefully received.
Tags: agriculture, aviation, biofuels, carbon reduction initiatives, electricity demand, emissions trading, fossil fuels, Mark Lynas, politics, power generation, renewables, The Maldives, Valence

Power Station 571 aka the solar panels on my roof.
People like me who buy solar panels tend to become unreasonably fond of them. Many homeowners come to regard these silent blocks of silicon on our roofs as part of the family. I’m also particularly proud that our panels are registered at Ofgem, the utilities regulator, as Power Station 571. The reason for going through the cumbersome process to convince Ofgem that my silicon should be listed alongside Drax and Sizewell B was to benefit from the government incentive scheme for renewable electricity generation.
Tags: domestic, Drax, microgeneration, Ofgem, power generation, renewables, Sizewell, Southern Electric
Photograph: Christopher Whalen.
George Monbiot rightly observes that the earth’s resources of biomass are limited and cannot be simultaneously claimed for multiple uses: liquid biofuels, fuel for heating, biogas, and biochar. This presentation (available for download in PowerPoint or PDF) looks at the globe’s land and biomass production to assess how much space can be given over to non-food uses and how much energy this can generate. This is one of the crucial questions facing the world: how much energy can we use from biomass before this affects the ability of the world to provide enough food for nearly 7bn people, rising to at least 9bn by 2050?
Ten Technologies to Save the Planet was listed as one of the Financial Times Science Books of the Year 2008.
Tags: agriculture, biochar, biofuels, biogas, biomass, file, fossil fuels, George Monbiot, land use, PDF, power generation, PowerPoint, renewables

In today’s Independent newspaper (London, Monday 23 February) I argue that we may need to accept some new nuclear power stations. I put forward the view that the trench warfare between the pro-nuclear groups and those that support renewables means that progress towards ‘decarbonising’ electricity generation in the UK is too slow. We probably need to invest in many different types of non fossil-fuel generation as rapidly as we can if we are to meet the tough targets for UK emissions reduction so painfully won by groups such as Friends of the Earth. We no longer have the luxury of ruling out nuclear expansion.
Tags: Areva, Areva EPR, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Climate Change Committee, corporate emissions, Council for the Protection of Rural England, EDF, electricity demand, emissions trading, energy efficiency, FGD, fossil fuels, LCPD, Mark Lynas, National Grid, nuclear, politics, power generation, renewables, ROCs, RWE, Sizewell
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