Climate Change

California – I wrote last year about Urban Planning as a (Powerful) Tool Against Climate Change and I had the opportunity after that to do an article, also in the context of planning, about the great things that are happening with Sustainability at the Airports.  (I’m doing research now for another article on the planning ins and outs of the Smart Grid movement.)

Now California, as it often does, is taking a very big bite.  It will be requiring planners and developers to look at the implications for climate change in their work.  See State land use subject to global warming review from the “Sacramento Bee.”  The bill, passed by both the California Senate and Assembly, now goes to The Governator for his signature.  It will “…require local governments to plan their growth so homes, businesses and public transit systems are clustered together.”  It’s been an axiom in my world for many years that “density is good.”  (For more about “Smart Growth” see this website.)

Meanwhile, back in California, the press release from Senator Darrell Steinberg, the author of the new law, had this to say:  “SB 375 marks the first time major environmental organizations, local governments, major homebuilders and affordable housing advocates have agreed on a plan to account for California’s population growth and achieve AB 32 greenhouse gas emission reduction goals at the same time.”  This “LA Times” editorial strongly supports the legislation.

Smart move, California.

The Waterfront – I was reminded the other day in a mailing from the Waterfront Alliance here in the Big Apple that cities and other jurisdictions have become much more attuned in recent years to the economic, transportation and recreation opportunities afforded them by the rivers, harbors and other water bodies on which they’ve grown up.

A few posts back, I mentioned the solid waste management plan, Urban Gold, I dreamed up a few years back.  It relied heavily on waterborne transportation.  I also fancied an urban environmental utopia that made full use of the water and the waterfront that the American Planning Association saw fit to share at their website. 

When we open our eyes a bit, brush away the cobwebs from tired, old thinking engendered solely by the short-term profit motive (be it either political or economic), and imagine how life could be if we did things with a little more intelligence, planning and in tune with the rhymes and rhythms of nature, then possibilities and opportunities abound.

“The latest round of United Nations climate change negotiations took place in Accra, Ghana, from 21-27 August. The Accra Climate Change Talks took forward work on a strengthened and effective international climate change deal under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as work on emission reduction rules and tools under the Kyoto Protocol. This is part of a negotiating process that will be concluded in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. Over 1600 participants attended the Accra meeting, which was the third major UNFCCC gathering this year.”  (From the UNFCC.) 

The UNFCCC’s meetings here were deemed successful, in that they provided more good ground for substantive negotiations to continue in Poznań in December.  See this report from Reuters. 

See also this video summary from UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer.

Chokepoints – I’ve written a good number of times about various big renewable energy projects coming on line and in the pipeline, how $7 trillion is one number that a leading expert predicts is going to be the sum total of renewable business globally just a couple of decades down the road, and how distributed generation (DG) comes into play. 

The venerable Matt Wald wrote yesterday in the “NY Times” about how you can have wonderful, productive renewable farms churning out juice but if you can’t get it down the line to the consumers, then you’ve got a problem.  Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid’s Limits says “The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.”  Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico and a Secretary of Energy in the Clinton Administration, is quoted here:  “We still have a third-world grid.  With the federal government not investing, not setting good regulatory mechanisms, and basically taking a back seat on everything except drilling and fossil fuels, the grid has not been modernized, especially for wind energy.”  The article describes our grid – or more accurately, grids – as “balkanized.”

The DOE does, however, have an Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (OE) that is working “to lead national efforts to modernize the electric grid.”  Further, the new federal energy act (EISA) from late last year, specifically “Declares it is the policy of the United States to support modernization of the nation’s electricity transmission and distribution system to maintain a reliable and secure electricity infrastructure that can meet future demand growth and to achieve specified characteristics of a Smart Grid.” (Title XIII: Smart Grid – [Sec. 1301].)  See also OE’s work on the Smart Grid and the work of  the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).

What’s one of the best ways to get your product to market?  Don’t produce it so far from your market that it becomes a problem transporting it.  That’s the genius of DG.  Generate your power locally and use it on site or nearby.  With electricity, that obviates the problem of power loss in long-distance transmission.

Storage – Another theme that keeps arising is that you can’t yet store renewable power efficiently for when you need it.  MIT had a breakthrough on that recently that I referenced here.  Here’s another article from the “NY Times” from earlier this week about the idea of compressing air for release at peak use hours - Air Storage Is Explored for Energy.  Size?  “…an underground reservoir the size of Giants Stadium could hold enough compressed air to power three 300-megawatt plants.”  That doesn’t seem onerous to me.

Historical note:  The American environmental movement, and particularly the advent of the National Environmental Policy Act, received a big boost in the battle over a pumped storage plant proposal for Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Highlands in the 1960s.  There are dozens of pumped storage plants all over the world, but the Storm King idea, to be cited in a particularly beautiful part of the Hudson, spawned determined opposition that brought the modern environmental review process into being. 

Nigeria – I wrote recently about various places that renewables were finding traction.  (See Renewables - Hither and Yon.)  Here’s an article about Nigeria, an oil and gas-rich country – to say the least. 

Not incidentally, I mentioned the problem of the GHG created by gas flaring some time ago here in a previous edition of “Bits and Bobs.”  Nigeria is a prime candidate to benefit hugely from the capture of much of that flared natural gas.

Cars – I live in a bubble in the world.  It’s called Manhattan.  Hard as it may be to believe, we don’t own a car.  Subways, buses, commuter trains, walking and the occasional taxi get us 100% of the places we need to go on a regular basis.  Walking does a lot of the job.  Occasionally, I’ll rent a car (insanely expensive in Manhattan) or borrow one from the in-laws.  So, I forget about driving from time to time. 

Nevertheless, I have been writing here about electric cars and plug-in hybrids and other “game-changing” approaches to surface transportation.  Here’s an article from the “FT” on electric vehicles in Japan - Japan fuels electric car revolution. 

People definitely drive.  Three trillion vehicle miles traveled (VMT) a year in the US!  See this new initiative on driving to save fuel, reduce carbon output, and have more fun in general.  (I know:  Lots of people drive just for the sake of driving.  Go figure.)  It’s EcoDriving USA.  (For me, I’d rather go Surfin’ USA.)

The IPCC says “Post-consumer waste is a small contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (<5%) with total emissions of approximately 1,300 Mt carbon dioxide-eq in 2005. The largest source is landfill methane …”  Still, that’s a lot of GHG.  (See the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group III Report “Mitigation of Climate Change” - Chapter 10: Waste management.)

With solid waste management, as with any sector, there are ancillary benefits to reducing GHG:  increased energy efficiency, fewer hazardous wastes for disposal, etc., etc.  The AR4-WG3 Glossary defines Co-benefits as “The benefits of policies implemented for various reasons at the same time, acknowledging that most policies designed to address greenhouse gas mitigation have other, often at least equally important, rationales (e.g., related to objectives of development, sustainability, and equity).”

Another way of looking at this is in having “no regrets” in your climate mitigation policy.  The IPCC glossary describes it this way: “No-regret policy (options/potential) - Such policy would generate net social benefits whether or not there is climate change associated with anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. No-regret options for GHG emissions reduction refer to options whose benefits (such as reduced energy costs and reduced emissions of local/regional pollutants) equal or exceed their costs to society, excluding the benefits of avoided climate change.”

I devised a plan a few years back for New York City’s municipal solid waste.  I articulated my ideas, gleaned from the best concepts and practices in urban sustainable development, in a comprehensive proposal for New York City’s modest 25,000 tons a day of municipal solid waste and called the plan, Urban Gold.  The heart of the strategy is to co-locate a materials recovery facility (MRF) and other waste disposal facilities, such as pyrolysis or gasification plants, with industries that would use the recycled materials as feedstock for their manufacturing.

Another way to feed a MRF is to use recovered materials from a landfill.  The idea of “landfill mining” has been kicking around for a number of years and has found some traction.  See this article from Reuters - Could US$100 Oil Turn Dumps Into Plastic Mines?  (See also this Reuters “factbox” on landfills.  The IPCC’s Waste Management piece cited above is also full of useful information.)

There are thousands of opportunities all over the world to mine landfills for plastics and metals for recycling, and organic materials for use as soil additives or for conversion by pyrolysis or similar processes to char and useful gases such as hydrogen.  (See the previous post below on this.)  The first global conference on landfill mining will take place in October in London.  Obviously, this movement is building.

All sorts of “best practices” are coming into greater prominence as a result of our having to confront the climate change crisis.  One should have little or no regret at all about this.

We were talking about the ocean.  Now let’s talk about the earth.  More specifically, let’s focus on the soil – that which gives us the food that all of us need.

There is a truly terrific piece in the latest “National Geographic,” Our Good Earth.  It looks at all manner of good news and bad news in how we use the earth.  In the developed world, one way we degrade our food-producing soil, among a number of ways, is through compaction by great honking harvesters and other gargantuan machines.  In the developing world, we cut down the forests and grasslands for cropland.  This practice, of course has enormous implications for exacerbating global warming.  See Are Biofuels A Bummer?  But let’s stick here now to the impacts on agricultural productivity. 

The NGM article says “In the first—and still the most comprehensive—study of global soil misuse, scientists at the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC) in the Netherlands estimated in 1991 that humankind has degraded more than 7.5 million square miles of land. Our species, in other words, is rapidly trashing an area the size of the United States and Canada combined.”  The article details some of the practices that have led to this massive degradation.

It also looks at some extraordinarily hopeful developments like the Keita Project in Niger sponsored by the Italian government, the use of cordons pierreux (long lines of fist-sized stones) to trap rainwater and silt, and the use of zaï – foot deep holes in the fields that are then salted with manure.  Read this great article and also see NGM’s companion “geopedia” on soil for more information.

Perhaps the most fascinating focus in the article is on the terra preta do índio – the “black Indian earth” of the Amazon.  Wim Sombroek, the Dutch soil scientist, went to Amazonia in the 1950s and found hugely fertile pockets of soil in oases amid the acidic, poor soils of the rainforest.  Sombroek was something of a giant in his field, becoming director of ISRIC for a time and SG of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS).  He devoted much of his life to studying the terra preta and fostering a movement to adopt the same approach to soil enrichment.   

What is terra preta?  It’s the result of an ancient Amazonian practice of using charcoal and other carbon-rich inputs to build up the soil.  This soil retains its richness for centuries and is stunningly productive.  In an outstanding article from “Nature” in August of 2006, Black is the New Green, we learn all about the ins and outs of terra preta.  “Everyone agrees that the explanation lies in large part with the char (or biochar) that gives the soil its darkness. This char is made when organic matter smoulders in an oxygen-poor environment, rather than burns. The particles of char produced this way are somehow able to gather up nutrients and water that might otherwise be washed down below the reach of roots.  They become homes for populations of microorganisms that turn the soil into that spongy, fragrant, dark material that gardeners everywhere love to plunge their hands into.” 

Sombroek saw so much potential in this that he created a movement for terra preta nova.  Research into this area has exploded since his book in 1966 on Amazonian soils, and scientists and others have been gathering force to help promote this approach not only for the wholesale restoration of degraded soils all over the world, but to sequester massive amounts of carbon.  In this Cornell University “Science Brief,” Terra Preta:  Soil Improvement and Carbon Sequestration, we note that “Bio-char (biomass-derived black carbon) is highly stable in soil and can persist hundreds and thousands of years. It is much more stable than even the most stabilized carbon in soil.  It therefore constitutes a much longer carbon sink than most other sequestration options such as no-tillage, manure applications, or afforestation.”  Cornell scientist Johannes Lehmann is doing a lot of work in this field.  For more, see his website.

Eprida, a “technology development company and social purpose enterprise,” is doing cutting-edge work in developing this sort of approach not only to sustainable agriculture but to renewable energy production and carbon sequestration.  See their flash animation on the “Eprida cycle.”  See also this “Scientific American” special report from last year.

This is but one more way for us to mimic nature’s way.  As Stewart Brand noted in the Whole Earth Catalogue a good many years ago now, “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it.”  It has always seemed to me that the “godlike” approach to life is the simple one.  As you will have noted at this blog, the low-tech, decentralized, KISS (keep it simple, stupid) approach wins my heart more often than not.  (See my posts, for instance, on Habitat; Green Tech, Low Tech, Clean Tech, New Tech; and Black Carbon and Solar Cookers.)  I am, after all, one of those old hippies still dreaming of Aquarius and all that happy jazz.  But as no less a personage than Kevin Hydes, the chairman of the World Green Building Council, pointed out to me, the counterculture produced a tremendous amount of creative thinking that has borne fruit in many ways. 

These photos are too good not to put up here.  They come courtesy of Bill Romatzick.  We met Bill and his wife, Sue, both experienced divers, on our vacation.  The first is the flying gurnard which I spotted in the sand on a snorkel trip.  The second is a sea turtle.  The third is a spectacular picture of a spectacular creature:  a spotted eagle ray. 

Bill, not incidentally, is on the energy efficiency beat, having had a big hand in building a cogeneration facility at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

While on vacation, we spent, not surprisingly, a ton of time in the water.  There were some perfectly lovely rock reefs right off the beach from where we were staying and that was a great way to get my daughter (7½) going on snorkeling.

Here’s the thing:  When John Muir started the Sierra Club in 1892, he knew that the best way to get people excited about preserving the wild places of the earth is to get them out seeing, feeling, tasting and touching nature.  He took folks from San Francisco to Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy, then when they were back in town, they worked to protect these places.  When I was a kid, I skied in New England and hiked in the Adirondacks.  I came to appreciate these wonderful places and when I was old enough, I set to work as an environmental activist.  I turned pro later, working for 11 years for the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, and I’ve been writing all the way along.

It’s the same thing with the ocean.  Once you get people into the ocean to see the reefs and the fish and the extraordinary beauty and vitality, you’re going to make environmentalists of them.  If you are just going to the beach or the lakes to vacation and swim, you’re still going to feel the ineluctable emotional gravity of nature.  You become – and maybe it’s trite – part of nature. 

In St. Martin, there’s a growing environmental movement.  The French government, for their part, have created a marine preserve.  Here’s Creole Rock, a sweet little snorkeling and dive destination that’s part of the preserve.

We had several dive and snorkeling trips and saw all sorts of wonders:  stingrays and eagle rays, sea turtles, scorpionfish, octopus, eels, barracuda, starfish, snakefish, trumpetfish, even a flying gurnard, plus the more prosaic but still entrancing array of parrotfish, sergeant majors, wrasses, and all the others.  The coral formations are also, in many places, stunning.

We went out a couple of times with a great crew from Octopus Diving, our second dive on our second trip climaxing with a full-tilt boogie thunderstorm.  This was my first time being 45 feet down and seeing pelting rain and flashing lightning up above.  Nobody else seemed too concerned so I was relaxed about it.  I was concerned however about my kid up top in the boat.  When we surfaced, there was the kid, though, and one of the fabulous pair who run the shop, jumping up and down and hootin’ and hollerin’ in the pounding rain, the boat rockin’ and rollin’.  Back on board, I was assured that we had an “anode” to protect us from the lightning.  (Phew.)

If you want to know more about the ocean and climate change’s impact, you couldn’t do better than to start with Betsy Kolbert’s article in “The New Yorker” from two years ago, The Darkening Sea.  You can also see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change material on the ocean from its Fourth Assessment Report.

We were in St. Martin for vacation.  The southern part is Dutch and the northern part is French.  The whole island uses desalinated water, so I’ve been thinking about that some more.

Here’s a succinct piece from “Scientific American” on desalination:  Why don’t we get our drinking water from the ocean by taking the salt out of seawater?  It turns out that many do:  “The International Desalination Association says that as of 2007 there were about 13,000 desalination plants operating around the world. They pumped out approximately 14.7 billion gallons (55.6 billion liters) of drinkable freshwater a day.”  But why don’t we use more?  The short answer is energy.  It’s an energy-intensive process.  My answer?  Use renewables.

I’ve referenced the very exciting Desertec project here a few times.  The concept is to provide a very significant bit of Europe’s electricity and most of North Africa’s from solar power from the Sahara.  I mentioned it here last month in the context of the “SuperSmart Grid.”  It’s an exciting prospect:  the idea of supplying virtually limitless amounts of power from solar arrays in the Sahara Desert.  See the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) project. See also this informative UK website on this concept.  Solar power for massive desalinization projects? Why in the world not?  See this recent article from “The Guardian” too.

I talked to the manager of the beach resort where we stayed.  I wanted to pitch renewables to him:  sun, wind, ocean power.  It turns out he was on it.  They are well along in researching and deploying a big PV arrangement.  Since they also have a reverse osmosis plant for the hotel, the solar arrays would presumably help power that.

For another perspective on desalination and freshwater use, see this from the Pacific Institute where Peter Gleick, the author of the short “Scientific American” piece, is president.

Now don’t go away because while we’re on the subject of desalination, here’s another angle:  use seawater in an industrial process that takes waste heat and carbon dioxide from power plants to make cement.  The seawater is stripped of calcium and magnesium making it ideal for desalination technologies, according to this exciting article, also from “Scientific American.”  One of the companies referenced in the article, Calera, claims that it can take more than 90% of the carbon dioxide from power plant emissions to, for all intents and purposes, sequester it in concrete.  This company and some others are working now to pilot this process.

It’s one more hugely exciting prospect for getting to the zero-carbon society that we have to realize, and sooner rather than later.  

Here are some items to begin to pick up some of the slack from the past two weeks.  We’ve been away – and there’s some interesting stuff to say about that in a day or two.  For now, here are some morsels, I hope, for your delectation.

More Renewable Stories – I wrote last week about some renewable projects around the world.  (See the last post below.)  Now here are two more items, this time from the Pacific.  In this story from the AFP (via the WBCSD), Indonesia’s President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, announces an initiative to increase both energy efficiency and the country’s use of renewables, including geothermal.  One has to think that Indonesia has a plentiful resource in the geothermal department.  See this recent article, for instance, from the IHT.  As of now, “Indonesia supplies just 850 megawatts of an estimated 27,000 megawatt potential from geothermal sources, or about 3 percent of its current power output.”  The pace of development seems sure to increase rapidly with the new government focus.

Meanwhile in Brunei, Mitsubishi and the government have agreed to build a pilot solar facility.  See this from Reuters, also via the WBCSD. 

Sun, wind, geothermal, ocean power!  Every nation in the Pacific ought to be on a renewables development spree.  Having just come back from a more southerly clime, I can testify that the sun alone could power these countries.  Throw in the other modes, as appropriate, and you would never have to so much as think about oil or gas prices again. 

Very Green Development in British Columbia – There’s an exciting project in Canada, Dockside Green, that will, when it’s all phased in, be a 26-building, 1.3-million-square-foot mix of apartments, restaurants, stores and offices.  See this article from Bloomberg News.  I’ve written a fair bit about Green Building at the blog and I can say this is one more very exciting project. 

The project will feature, among other things, a biomass gasification plant, an onsite sewage treatment plant that will have effluent clean enough to serve as water for gardens, and a passive cooling system. 

I do take exception to one sentence in the article:  “Conservation and efficiency have generally been treated condescendingly in the U.S. energy debate, like the bright but annoying student whose hand always shoots up first.”  If you look at the new federal energy bill from December of 2007, developments in energy efficiency in many areas, not the least of which in green building, and the trends, the truth of the sentence pretty much evaporates.  (See Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency here.)

Perceptions – I’ve had a few items over time about Public Opinion.  Here’s an article from ABC News about a recent poll of theirs.  This is a mixed bag.  Although a surprising number, 63%, of those polled “favor oil drilling in coastal waters where it’s currently prohibited,” most of the respondents also “support higher taxes on oil company profits” and “stricter fuel efficiency rules for cars.”

On climate change, many Americans, it seems, are concerned about the issue and are taking some action, such as reducing energy use.  The reduction in energy use, of course, may well be more of a pocketbook issue than environmentally driven.  The disparities in concern and desire for action are quite striking between Democrats and Republicans and between men and women.  Look at charts and more information here.  See also the video segment. 

Going a little deeper, the American Psychological Association discussed climate change at its recent annual convention in Boston.  In this APA release, we get a taste of what some researchers have been seeing on the public perception of climate change.  “With climate change in the news and on peoples’ minds, psychologists have been studying human behavior and attitudes to determine how people feel about global warming, what psychological changes might result from a hotter planet and what would best motivate people to conserve.”  There’s contact information at the release for getting more information on the various studies.

Two Great Opinion Pieces – The peerless Betsy Kolbert wrote about the continuing American cultural and political obsession with gas prices in “The New Yorker” recently.  See Changing Lanes in which she notes John McCain’s recent emphasis on offshore drilling as a panacea for high prices at the pump.  Sadly, Barack Obama, seems to have succumbed to this same short-sighted political tomfoolery.

The “Financial Times” calls both of their cards in this terrific piece from today’s paper, Strategic choice for US energy policy.  The bottom line here:  a price on carbon is critical to averting the worst of the climate change crisis.  The next administration can face that reality and get on with the work at hand or it can choose to “disguise or deny the vital role of prices, and be forced to rely entirely on fiscal and regulatory micro-management – with the limitless opportunities for picking losers and falling prey to special interests that this path entails.”  For some basic insight on what the American people, among others, and their political candidates must recognize and acknowledge, read these two pieces.

Green Dancing – Last but certainly not least, my colleague, Cassandra Clifford flagged this compelling article from Der Spiegel.  (Cassie writes passionately and well about Children for the FPA.)  Dutch Club to Recycle Dancers’ Energy is about how a dance floor, through “electromagnetic induction,” can convert movement into energy.  Beyond that, it’s about the Sustainable Dance Club (SDC) initiative being coordinated by Dutch-based Enviu, “innovators in sustainability.”

Party on!

The Ocean of Renewables – I came across this fascinating “Salon.com” post recently, Exajoules of Hope, by Andrew Leonard. Leonard writes “How the World Works,” a regular “conversation about globalization.” In the piece, we learn that “A joule is one watt of power for one second. An exajoule is 10 to the 18th power joules. Current estimates are that the world demand for energy in a year is 428 exajoules.” That’s succinct!

Now for the really good stuff. In researching carbon trading, Leonard came across a paper on “The Potentials of Renewable Energy.” He finds a chart saying that the technical potential for hydro in the world is 50 exajoules, biomass is 250, solar 1,600, wind is 600, and geothermal is 5,000. That’s about 7,500 and doesn’t count ocean energy.

The conclusion: the total technical renewable potential is 17 times current demand. That, my friends, is one of the messages I’ve been trying to convey: we are swimming in renewable energy. Let’s get on it!

Leonard cites another study, “The price of power: poverty, climate change, the coming energy crisis and the renewable revolution” from the New Economics Foundation. The conclusion here? As Leonard says, “… small-scale renewable energy installations are increasingly appropriate for deployment in impoverished nations where millions still live far from the electricity grid.”

Kenya Geothermal – Which brings us to this: Kenya energy goes green to meet electricity boom. In this AFP story, courtesy of the WBCSD’s “Energy & Climate News,” we learn that Kenya intends to triple its 1 gigawatt energy output in the next ten years, with 85% of the new capacity coming from geothermal. I’ve written a number of times about geothermal, including here and here.

I’ll quote in full from more than a year ago at the blog on a study done for the US: “On geothermal, in January [‘07] a major new report found enormous “… potential for geothermal energy within the United States” and “… that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.” See this from the M.I.T. news service and the report itself.”

Nepal – The headline from a recent issue of “The Hindu” is Nepal to raise climate change at SAARC meet. SAARC is the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and has Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as members. Nepali Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat is quoted in the article as saying “The glaciers are melting in the Himalayan region faster than before; mountains are melting and agricultural cycle is also affected, we’ll be raising these issues at the Summit.” He called for regional cooperation on energy and climate. He also noted Nepal’s considerable hydropower potential.

And how! See this paper on hydropower’s potential in Nepal from a few years back from the South Asia Regional Initiative for Energy (SARI/Energy) and USAID. The report notes: “Nepal has a huge hydro-power potential of 83,000 MW, out of which 42,000 MW is considered to be economically feasible in the present condition. The present hydro-power capacity is about 500 MW. Only 18% of the population has access to electricity.” Sound evocative of what Andrew Leonard was saying?

China Green – Besides all the smoke (literally) and mirrors of the attempt by the PRC to mask their massive, killing pollution ahead of the Olympics, there’s an ongoing story, noted here among other places at the blog, about how China is trying to break through to a new, clean tech era. Now see Reuters’ recent article, Green Revolution Emerges in Smokestack China. The article notes that a new report from The Climate Group, “China’s Clean Revolution,” says that China is now “… the world’s top maker of solar power panels, is set to become the top exporter of wind turbines and has two-thirds of the global market in solar water heaters. China is also a leading producer of energy efficient domestic appliances and rechargeable batteries.”

Can you say leapfrogging?

IEA Database – What exactly is going on throughout the world on renewables and energy efficiency? You can find out a lot about projects and policies here with the International Energy Agency’s comprehensive and interactive database. Have fun.