NASA Report Helping Scottish Windfarms, Where Now Indiana?

The Scottish Sunday Herald reports that their wind farms might make more money and energy than expected, Windfall

THE UK offshore wind industry could be worth £300 million to £400m more than expected each year after climate specialists discovered a substantial rise in summer wind speeds over the past 20 years, the Sunday Herald can exclusively reveal.

The news is likely to be a great relief to the UK and Scottish governments and climate campaigners at a time when major investors' enthusiasm for offshore wind has been waning, with multinationals including Shell having withdrawn altogether.

The new piece of research by Edinburgh-based Atmos Consulting and Nasa suggests that wind farms will produce much more electricity each year than expected.

Indiana Senate Democrats Promoting Green Industry

Take a listen to this video from our Senate Democrats. Does this not sound liek real change, a more practical change than ever was proposed by Mitch Daniels? Take a look at the video here.

Fusion Energy?

The Next Really Cool Thing - NYTimes.com:

"Last Monday at 3 a.m., for the first time, all 192 lasers were fired at high energy precisely at once — no small feat — at the target chamber’s empty core. That was a major step toward “ignition” — turning that hydrogen pellet into a miniature sun on earth. The next step — which the N.I.F. expects to achieve some time in the next two to three years — is to prove that it can, under lab conditions, repeatedly fire its 192 lasers at multiple hydrogen pellets and produce more energy from the pellets than the laser energy that is injected. That’s called “energy gain.”"

***

But, in addition, we need to make a few big bets on potential game-changers. I am talking about systems that could give us abundant, clean, reliable electrons and drive massive innovation in big lasers, materials science, nuclear physics and chemistry that would benefit, energize and renew many U.S. industries.

At the pace we’re going with the technologies we have, without some game-changers, climate change is going to have its way with us. Yes, we’ll still need coal for some time. But let’s make sure that we aren’t just chasing the fantasy that we can “clean up” coal, when our real future depends on birthing new technologies that can replace it

Talk about your energy independence and economic stimulus.....

The London Times and GM and Segway

GM and Segway plan electric two-wheeler:

"GM, the stricken car giant best known for its gas-guzzling Hummers, is to tie-up with Segway, the electric scooter producer, in an attempt to prove its commitment to reinventing itself.

Days after President Obama warned the Detroit-based company that an aggressive restructuring was the only way to safeguard its future, GM announced it is working with Segway to develop a two-wheeled, two-seat electric vehicle intended to be a green and inexpensive alternative to traditional cars."

Ok, so they know they screwed up on their electric car?

Anderson Biz Making News Wtih Electric Car

From The Indianapolis Star:

Anderson firm progressing on 100 mpg plug-in

"Anderson-based Bright Automotive will soon roll out the start-up company's made-in-Indiana plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that's capable of achieving 100 miles per gallon.

But the unveiling -- scheduled for April 21-- won't be in Central Indiana, but in Washington, D.C.

Executives of the 1-year-old company say their prototype vehicle deserves a bigger stage because of some of the landmark qualities, ranging from fuel efficiency to aerodynamics and 'clean-tech' design."

***

The company plans to create over 5,000 jobs by 2013.

Energy Systems Network CEO Paul Mitchell said he thinks the rollout "throws out the whole playbook of Detroit" in terms of the design an functionality.

Prick up your ears - Yes, we can do things like this in Anderson and in Indiana. Or to play on something from Cole Porter and President Obama, we can-can.

Good News/Bad News for Randolph Southern Wind Turbine

The Muncie's Star Press headline of Plans on hold for Randolph Southern wind turbine sounded a bit bad but it appears it was location and not much more causing the delay.

"Plans for a 330-foot wind turbine on the west side of campus are on hold after the manufacturer said it didn't want to place it too close to the school. Now, school officials and consultants from Performance Services of Indianapolis, an engineering and construction company, are hoping to find a site nearby to get the project back on track.

The ultimate goal is to build a turbine, sell the energy it generates on the grid and reap the financial benefits by blowing new money into the school's budget. Over the typical 25-year life span of the turbine, Randolph Southern hoped to net $2.5 million."

I think I saw some wind turbines coming south of Kokomo on US 31. A better idea to put money into than mainlining coal.

End of the World

My reading has been disheveled at best these past few weeks, but I have not noticed anything like Two months to save the world.

The EEA's prediction offers a vision of Earth where humans have been forced into the most far-flung areas of the world in order to rebuild civilisation, with people living in high-rise cities in areas like Siberia and Antartica which will become the most hospitable parts of the planet. Even if Scotland, Europe and the US succeed in cutting their emissions by 80%, new coal and oil plants planned by China, India and other Asian countries will still double global carbon dioxide emissions to 16 billion tonnes by 2100. This would push carbon concentrations in the atmosphere well above the danger level.

Chicken Little or Cassandra? You make your pick. I incline to the idea that doing nothing makes us look like this:

Renewable Energy News

Some news and some questions.

First, Local engineer lands wind-farm contract:

"Indianapolis-based Bowen Engineering Corp. has been selected by Horizon Wind Energy LLC as contractor for its Meadow Lake wind farm in White County, the companies announced today.

Houston-based Horizon's wind farm in northwest Indiana will consist of 121 wind turbines that can generate 200 megawatts of power. The estimated cost of the project is $500 million. Bowen declined to divulge the value of its contract."

The Indianapolis Business Journal also published Biotown USA development site acquired:

"Valero Energy will buy seven ethanol plants and a key development site in the Indiana city of Reynolds from VeraSun Energy for $477 million, the largest biofuel buyout ever in terms of production capacity.

VeraSun, the country's second largest ethanol producer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last October.

VeraSun suspended construction of a 110-million-gallon-a-year plant in Reynolds, north of Lafayette, in 2007, citing deteriorating market conditions. Reynolds is the centerpiece of 'Biotown USA,' a state-led initiative to make Indiana a dynamo in the production of ethanol and biodiesel."

Which sounds like good news compared with this from Scotland, Renewable energy in for a bumpy ride:

Galàn says, in halting English, that Iberdrola "wants to" make new network investments and is pleased that politicians see it as part of the solution for reigniting the economy, but he argues that the credit crunch has made lenders more risk averse. This has meant that the existing rate is no longer high enough to enable companies such as ScottishPower to borrow the money for the upgrades, which echoes a recent report by Ernst & Young that said that rates of return on electricity projects would have to rise by a couple of percentage points to keep investor cash viable.

"I don't know if British banks will provide the money to make the investment," he says.

He contrasts this with the US, where the Obama administration is to subsidise Iberdrola's project to build an interconnection line between Canada and Maine, as part of a $4.5 billion (£3.1bn) programme to build a smart grid' that is more efficient and produces fewer carbon emissions.

I do not believe in clean coal. I learned about coal as a small boy when a relative had a pile of coal. Still, I think human ingenuity ought to be able to find a solution to any problem and so I am piqued by Coal-to-gas system could bring 10,000 new jobs to Fife.

Here is the idea:

Underground coal gasification (UCG) does exactly what the name suggests - it turns coal into a gas while still underground. The gas is then brought to the surface and can be processed to provide fuels for power generation, ultra-clean diesel, and hydrogen.

The concept was invented by Nobel prize-winning Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay 100 years ago, but it is only in the last few years, with advances in oil and gas technology, that the concept has become commercially viable.

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If successful, the technology could offer Scotland energy security for hundreds of years, as geological studies estimate that Scotland is sitting on at least 200 years' worth of coal.

However, Thornton New Energy, the company granted the licence, admits the concept of clean coal will seem like an oxymoron to most people. Steve Walters, director of sub-surface operations, told the Sunday Herald: "Burning coal in the atmosphere will give off smoke and it will give off gases including carbon dioxide - it is the filthiest of all the fuels. So how can the filthiest and dirtiest of all these things become clean coal? The answer is quite simple:you can use oil-field technology deep underground, much deeper than conventional deep mines."

Here is the closest to a rebuke:

McLaren said: "Friends of the Earth Scotland believes this UCG is a technology with some promise - but at present it is only promise'. For the Fife project to contribute in practice to cutting our carbon emissions it cannot be permitted to progress in advance of firm arrangements for the capture and storage of the carbon emissions. If the carbon is captured and the clean hydrogen gas used to generate electricity then this would be a valuable demonstration of cleaner technology. But if the carbon is not captured, and the gas is turned into a vehicle fuel - one of the options proposed by the developers - that is a recipe for increased carbon emissions."

Would this work in our Indiana coal fields? Are there not enough engineering students at Purdue who could make this work?

Nukes and Wind

I know the Republicans think we should be putting everything into nuclear. No greenhouse gasses and all that makes it sound appealing. Not that they mention what we do with all that nuclear waster - which was my main concern till I read this from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

“Our ongoing assessment of nuclear power plant performance is at the heart of the agency’s mission of protecting people and the environment,” said Eric Leeds, director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. “The 2008 year-end results show that about 83 percent of the plants are performing strongly enough that
we’re satisfied with our basic level of inspections at those sites.”

Something about that bureaucratic babble alarms me.

Speaking of wind power, The Washington Post looks at T. Boone Pickens in The Beautiful Wind of T. Boone Pickens:

But while there are quibbles over the particulars, parts of
the Pickens Plan are -- or should be -- uncontroversial: a new transmission grid to move renewable power, better energy efficiency, and using natural gas as a "bridge" fuel to power trucks and fleet vehicles until alternatives become more plentiful.

With Pickens, the controversy rests more in the salesman than in the product. Pickens didn't mention global warming in his 45-minute talk
at the Mayflower yesterday. In fact, he dismissed the "greenies," as in: "You don't want to turn it over to the greenies, or what'll happen is they'll want to shut down every coal plant . . . for power generation and our utility bills will go through the ceiling."

Rather, Pickens is all about national security, or, as he puts it: "People around the world think we're stupid to import as much oil as we do from people who don't like us. . . . We need to get on our own resources, sit on our own bottom."

Pickens has this to say about the President:

"If we have the leader that I think we've got," Pickens said, "it's going to be a huge boost for the economy. There are going to be more ideas that are going to show up once the administration says we're going to do this. . . . Entrepreneurs will come up with ideas we never thought of."

Let's hope he's not just talking out of his bottom.

Actually, I like the way Pickens talks. I think a whole lot of people out here think the same way. He does takes wind energy away from the "greenies" and they should let him. He makes it sound a whole lot more practical than another more acceptable, less uninhibited spokesperson would to the general public. How he might sound in Washington might be different.

I think the entrepreneur remark hits close to the mark. Alternative energy has as much to do with economic development and national security as it does with environmentalism. This comes from Stimulus Dollars Energize Efforts To Smarten Up the Electric Power Grid:

To accomplish the vast national upgrade will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and require what one utility regulator called a "major paradigm shift" in the way people understand and use electricity.

"Changing light bulbs and caulking are going to be very primitive compared to what we're going to end up doing," Duke Energy President James E. Rogers said here.

But first, the infrastructure must be installed. When Obama promises "a better, smarter electricity grid," he is talking about overhauling a network that resembles your grandmother's patchwork quilt, and is about as frayed.

Edinburgh, Scotland, to be first electric car city

A bit of an oldie from The Sunday Herald :

"A CONSORTIUM OF GREEN vehicle experts has been formed to make Edinburgh the first electric car city in Britain. Last week an application was submitted by the consortium, led by former Ford marketing guru Ash Gupta, pictured below, with backing from Edinburgh City Council, to the Technology Strategy Board for a year-long trial to bring more electric vehicles to the streets of the capital. If the application is successful, the scheme is likely to be rolled out in the autumn.

Gupta, who lives in Edinburgh and has worked as a motor industry consultant for 30 years, was coy about the submission, saying that it was premature to talk too much about the plans. 'I really don't want to pre-empt any of the judging, and we're keeping the full details under wraps,' he said. 'I can confirm that we've presented our proposal and expressed our interest. We will have to wait and see if we are successful.'

The consortium has already selected the Mitsubishi i-MiEV as its preferred vehicle for testing. A four-seater saloon with zero emission, it is now being introduced in Japan. The electric battery, long a stumbling block for the development of electric cars, is guaranteed for 10 years and allows a range of 100 miles before recharging. The car has a top speed of 85mph and costs £12,500 new."

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Councillor Phil Wheeler, convener of the city's transportation committee, said: "We'd like to make Edinburgh an international laboratory to judge the performance of the electric car. It's all very well trialling them in Amsterdam, where it is flat, but the hills of Edinburgh will put the new-generation electric cars through their paces."

Making Edinburgh an electric car zone will have implications for the city's heritage. Planning consent will be needed for electricity points to recharge the batteries. The Mitsubishi can be charged to 80% capacity in half an hour, although it takes 14 hours to recharge at home. Wheeler said that the trial might be conducted along with the City Car Club, a successful car-sharing scheme with thousands of members.

Talking About Mass Transit and Transforming Our Culture

The Muncie Star-Press reports that this area could benefit from light rail (and where is the Herald-Bulletin in championing this idea?). Read the comments to the Muncie article and then read the second item from The New York Review of Books. We recognize the problems with mass transit but the TNYRB article gives a way of dealing with those problems.

Muncie-Indy commuter rail feasible:

"MUNCIE -- Central Indiana, including Muncie, is one of only two regions in the state with the characteristics and conditions to warrant an investment in commuter rail, concludes an Indiana mass transit study.
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Northwest Indiana is the other region.

'Indianapolis is the growth hub of the state, and continued expansion of the region can be supported by rail transit and commuter rail investments that connect to major commute origins as well as suburban cities such as Muncie and Bloomington,' said the study, completed in December, by URS Corp.

Major transit investment may be warranted in certain urban corridors of the state that have high density of population and/or employment and defined travel patterns that can be served by transit, according to the study.

Commuter rail service connecting Muncie-Indianapolis-Bloomington 'is feasible,' said state Rep. Terri Austin, D-Anderson, 'but it's going to take local elected officials -- mayors, county commissioners, city councils and others -- to make this happen."

Now, to the The New York Review of Books and Can We Transform the Auto-Industrial Society?:

"But there are also intimations of the deep past and the distant future. The present and impending disorder of the automobile companies is a reminder, even more than the decline of the housing and banking industries, of the desolation of the Great Depression. It is a reminder, too, of economic history, or of the rise and decline of industrial destinies. When the listing of the 'Fortune 500' began in 1955, General Motors was the largest American corporation, and it was one of the three largest, measured in revenues, every year until 2007.[2] GM was the 'largest industrial corporation in the world,' in its own description of 1989, and it was engaged, at the time, in 'the most massive reindustrialization program ever attempted.'[3] It was an incarnation of American economic change, as a GM vice-president suggested during the earlier automotive crisis of 1973: 'To say that a company that has successfully grown over a period of 65 years—a period marked by two world wars and a major economic depression—will suddenly be unable to adapt to the changing challenge...flies in the face of common sense'; it 'denies history.'[4]"

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The US has become more unequal since 1979, in income and amenities. It is less industrial, with only 9.6 percent of people employed in manufacturing in 2007, compared to 20.4 percent in 1979; more open to imports of goods and services, with imports accounting for 17.2 percent of GDP in 2007, compared to 9.9 percent in 1979; and more capitalist, with 7.5 percent of people employed in the private sector members of unions, compared to 21.2 percent in 1979. It is more feckless, with savings accounting for 0.6 percent of personal income in 2007, compared to 8.9 percent in 1979.^[9] In what Lawrence H. Summers has called the "new age of markets," it is also a richer country, of "market-led growth" in information and (until 2007) in financial services.^[10]

The automobile industry has been one of the losers in the new American economy. US consumers spent less on new automobiles in 2007 than they spent on "brokerage charges and investment counselling"; in 1979, they had spent ten times as much.^[11] In 1979, the share of the auto industry in US GDP was more than twice that of the securities and information services industries together; in 2007, it had been reduced to less than a quarter of their share.^[12] By 2007, even the expansion in sales of "light-duty trucks," including SUVs, which was one of the main marketing successes of the American automobile companies—"It has a refrigerator. And many other ways to chill" was the headline of a center-spread advertisement for the Ford Flex in TheNew Yorker, at the worst of the crisis of December 2008—had come to an end.^[13] In March 2008, General Motors and Ford were together worth about 5 percent of the value of the oil company Exxon.^[14]

But the auto-industrial society, with its distinctive organization of American space, cities, highways, social entitlement, and energy use, has continued to flourish. Some 90 percent of Americans drove to work in 2007, 76 percent of them alone. Less than 5 percent went to work by public transportation. The people who used public transportation were much more likely than other Americans to be black or poor; they were more likely to be women than men; most of them lived in New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The states in which population has increased most rapidly—Utah, Arizona, Texas, Nevada —have low population densities, and low rates of public transportation use.^[15]

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An enduring bailout, or a new deal for Detroit, would be different. It would be an investment in ending the auto-industrial society of the late twentieth century. This would involve innovation in public transportation, and in the infrastructure that would enable people to work at home or close to home. It would engage the information industries in making public transport more convenient, more enticing, and more secure. It would be open to the sorts of improvements that have been suggested in the expansion of rail and bus transportation in China, Japan, and France, for example, and in India by the information technology services companies.^[18] It would be an investment, even, in the old promise of "automotive" freedom, of owning a car but not having to use it, and of being able to go anywhere at any time, in Asia as in America. The improved public transport would be used for routine travel, such as the "work, school, and medical/dental trips" on which public transit use is already concentrated, according to the National Household Travel Survey. The new hybrid vehicles, in a post-auto-industrial society, would be available for the other trips that the survey describes as "family, personal," or "social, recreation, eat meal."^[19]

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he inequality of income has been made worse, over the past generation, by the inequality of urban amenities. African-Americans who use public transit spend more than a third longer waiting for buses and trains than white transit users; they spend the same amount of time traveling, but travel for shorter distances; African-American men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four spend even more time than white or Hispanic men in cars: 107 minutes a day.^[23] These inequalities would be further exacerbated by the increase in the costs of driving that is an unavoidable consequence of policies to reduce carbon emissions. The poorest fifth of Americans spend 31 percent of their income on transport, compared to 21 percent for the second poorest, 17 percent for the third poorest, 15 percent for the fourth poorest, and 10 percent for the richest Americans.^[24]

Investment in the infrastructure of a post-auto-industrial society would provide some compensation for the regressive effects of a carbon tax (or of the increase in prices that would result from a "cap and trade" scheme, as industries passed on the costs of compliance to consumers). It would be an investment in the technologies that are used by poor people, including buses, bus stops, and information about the departures of buses and transit vans. The innovations in information technology that could so dramatically improve public or collective transportation could be used first in the centers of cities: buses with free wi-fi, for example, or with free computers; better information about connections between buses and trains; or a program of scheduling journeys in which all patients with hospital or doctors' appointments could be collected at home, in electric or hybrid vehicles. Public policy would enhance one of the resources in which people who are poor and black are richer than other Americans: the resource of living in densely populated and information-rich cities.

***

One of the early outcomes of the economic crisis of 2008 has been a substantial reduction in the competitiveness of the financial services industry, and an increase in its political power; it has become an oligopoly of corporations that are too big to fail. General Motors is already too big to fail; I hope so, because of the consequences that its failure, or bankruptcy, would have in Michigan, Ohio, and elsewhere, and for the hundreds of thousands of people who were in a position, years ago, to negotiate reasonable wages and reasonable benefits. But a new, improved General Motors, or a General Motors–Toyota super-corporation, could be "viable" in the evaluation of financial markets, and also a monstrous leviathan of political influence. "Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters," Adam Smith wrote of the British Parliament in the 1760s, and the counselors of the US Congress, as of successive US administrations, have been the "masters" of the automobile industry.^[30] This is a failure of government, and it is also a market failure, or a failure of markets to exist.

Bullh*t from The Indiana General Assembly

I could not resist the temptation for humor when I read Statehouse update from Nuvo:

"Rep. F. Dale Grubb (D-Covington) introduced House Bill 1033. It requires the utility livestock group to explore the use of livestock waste anaerobic digestion systems as a renewable energy source in hopes that it will aid in economic development.

Grubb said this can 'enhance the possibilities of renewable energy,' which could also attract more jobs to Indiana.

This actually sounds like a great idea. Much better than the manure spills that we have every so often.

Griping About the Cost of Mass Transit

I suppose I would gripe if I lived in Indy and looked at light rail as benefiting only Hamilton County. But Indy Tax Dollars Blog's The beat goes on - and gets worse takes it all to an extreme:

"We refer to Senate Bill 497 which would allow the establishment of 'Regional Transportation Districts' (RTDs). While advocates of slimming down government in the state are hard at work, this would be a new layer at county or multi-county level.

The RTD would be operated by an appointed board which would have the power to raise funds from: property taxes from an 'allocation area' within the district; a special property tax; a food and beverage tax; a 'green tax' of $10 per automobile registration; and a county economic development income tax. Plus, naturally, any free federal funds lying around. This is NOT an 'either / or' list of options."

I need to take a look at Senate Bill 497, but does anyone else have any idea of how to get mass transit off the ground? Capital intensive at best, we have a bit of a credit crunch going on nationally. That makes the theoretical private enterprise choice even less likely than normal. (And before any free market ideologue goes off that private enterprise is the best and only way, you had better know just how many railroads were built in the nineteenth century without government subsidies. Short answer: one.)

Gasoline will remain $1.88 for only so long. I ask again, how will people get to work when it hits $4.00 an hour?

We are long past working on Indiana's mass transit.

Two For Alternate Energy

Yeah, gasoline prices are law. So what? They will go up and supply will go down. Not having an energy policy is a sucker's game. With us as the sucker.

Cities, entrepreneurs looking to hydropower:

"Many decades ago, cost-conscious Henry Ford turned to hydroelectric plants to power his car factories like the one by the Great Miami River, near the Cincinnati suburb of Hamilton. That assembly plant is long gone, but the power plant and the technology behind it isn't.

Far from it. The push to get electricity from moving water is only picking up steam.

There is mounting political pressure to get more energy from alternative sources, and developers are pushing ambitious projects to exploit America's biggest rivers for power.

'Some of these applications have been around for decades, but there's renewed interest now,' said Jeff Hawk, spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Pittsburgh district. 'We've seen a spurt of applications; we're busier now than ever.'

A new generation of low-impact hydroelectric plants is expected to light up the Ohio River Valley. Along the Mississippi River, a city and a small startup firm have separate hopes of harnessing that artery's energy potential either through a few big turbines or thousands of tiny, submerged ones.

Water is already the leading renewable energy source used by utilities to generate electric power."

Coal-gasification project ended for now:

"Plans to build a $1.5 billion plant in southwestern Indiana to turn coal into natural gas have been put on ice.

The developer, Indiana Gasification LLC, yesterday pulled its application to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, according to The Times of Munster and the Evansville Courier & Press.

The project, which was to be built in Spencer County, took a hit earlier this year when Citizens Energy Group in Indianapolis said it wouldn't buy the gas.

Then yesterday, Evansville-based utility Vectren Corp. said uncertainty over potential federal carbon restrictions presented too much risk to commit to a 30-year contract to buy the gas."

Green Energy in Trouble?

This comes from The Washington Post's New Government Incentives May Be Needed to Renew Green Development:

"Obama's economic advisers are negotiating with Senate leaders about how to revive stalled projects in the renewable sector. One issue is how to structure new incentives and whether to increase the current budget year's deficit or figure out a way to push the cost into later years.

It was only three months ago that the wind and solar industries won a long battle to extend renewable tax credits. Wind companies won a one-year extension of a production tax credit and solar companies won an eight-year extension of an investment tax credit. Every dollar of tax credit offsets an equal amount of tax owed.

But many of the banks that were using these tax credits don't need them or can't use them anymore. Lehman went bankrupt, and other investors are uncertain when they will show profits again.

In addition, the Treasury gave a special tax break to profitable banks that acquire troubled ones, thus allowing them to avoid taxation of billions of dollars of future profits for up to 20 years. Wells Fargo, for example, which invested more than $700 million in solar and wind energy projects from 2006 to 2008, may be able to shelter its next $74 billion in profits from taxation because of the tax break it received for buying Wachovia."

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Advocates of renewable energy, including solar and wind trade groups, are pushing the incoming Obama administration and Congress to make the renewable energy tax credits refundable. That means that if a company has no tax liability, the government would simply write the firm a check for the amount of the tax credit. One advantage of making the credits refundable is that it would not require a new appropriation.

Solar firms are also pressing Congress to let homeowners use federal credits even if local or state governments provide other incentives. In Berkeley, Calif., for example, the city is using its borrowing ability to lower interest rates for homeowners who install solar panels. The city gets the money back over 30 years by raising property tax assessments for solar-powered homes. Currently those homeowners would not receive federal tax breaks on the portion of the cost subsidized by the city.

***

Lastly, solar firms want Obama to back a $10 billion government effort to install solar on federal buildings. "The elegant beauty here is that you're not only creating hundreds of thousands of jobs but also saving the federal government money in electricity costs over the next 20 years," Resch said.

No mention of ethanol or bio-diesel.

For those interested in renewable energy, you might want to check out BC Renewable Energy Blog from British Columbia law firm Clark Wilson.

BioTown Making The News

I caught BioTown 'not slowing down,' state says in The Muncie Star Press.

"REYNOLDS -- In October 2007, VeraSun Energy Inc.'s plan for a 110-million gallon ethanol plant near this White County town was put on hold. The company cited unfavorable market conditions.

Then this past fall, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid the credit crunch and global economic recession.

Still, efforts to make Reynolds live up to its moniker -- BioTown USA -- have not been given up.

'BioTown is not slowing down,' said Deborah Abbott, spokeswoman for the Indiana State Department of Agriculture.

VeraSun 'is not part of the original BioTown concept,' she said, and the company's issues are having no effect on BioTown"

I agree with Thomas over at Blue Indiana that BioTown sounded gimmicky but then I always thought Mitch Daniels only capable of gimmicks. Some other good points from Blue Indiana:

I wish Reynolds and the folks behind this project all the best of luck, but until we see serious incentives for investment in the alternative energy sector, there is only a slim chance we'll see these outfits move away from the gimmick and toward reality. Much of that will depend nationally on the success of President Obama's energy plan, which has promised pretty big results on a compressed time-line.

Governor Daniels, for his part, hates recycling almost as much as he loved the photo-op back in 2005.

Green Whisky?

So reports The Observer: Scotland's distillers rush to slake world's thirst for whisky:

"At the same time the distillery - financed by drinks conglomerate Diageo - has been built to stringent ecological standards, emitting only a fraction of the carbon dioxide produced by standard distilleries. Roseisle will be Scotland's first green distillery.

'Apart from emitting only 15 per cent of the carbon dioxide of a standard distillery of the same size, we have found a way to recycle all the water that passes through the Roseisle site,' the distillery's designer, Mike Jappy, said last week. 'The important point is that this technology could one day be used at distilleries around Scotland.'

The idea of making whisky in an ecologically friendly way could be crucial if the industry is to expand to meet the demand for Scotch. In 2007 overseas sales rose by 8 per cent on the previous year, accounting for 25 per cent of all Britain's food and drink exports. The first nine months of this year saw a further 10 per cent increase."

***

Distilleries usually burn oil to distil fermented brews of malted barley and water. Roseisle will also burn the dried remains of its basic barley ingredient to generate that heat, halving its fuel bill.

In addition, liquids left over from distilling - known as top ale - will be piped into anaerobic fermenters to generate methane. This, in turn, will be burned to provide further heat. The distillery will be linked with two existing local maltings, where its waste water will be used to dampen and germinate the barley that is eventually used as its basic ingredient. This will mean there will be no overall increase in water consumption when the new distillery comes on line.

Which brings to mind a line I read years ago in book by Julian Symons. It was something about the poverty of someone's imagination. Americans once had a can-do attitude. Eight years of Bush and conservative government, it seems that attitude is on life support. Surely, someone else can see in the preceding paragraphs several ideas for businesses or business/government partnerships over here, even back home in Indiana.

About the Economics of the Ethanol Business

HBS Cases: Economics of the Ethanol Business — HBS Working Knowledge:

"What happens when a group of Missouri corn farmers gets into the energy business? With consumers paying more than double for gasoline than they did a year ago, turning crops into fuel, not food, seems like a good way to go—but not so fast.

In 'Mid-Missouri Energy,' HBS professor Forest Reinhardt, with Senior Researcher James Weber and Agribusiness Program Director Mary Shelman (HBS MBA '87), examines the complex political and economic underpinnings of the ethanol industry and the dilemma facing the farmers of Mid-Missouri Energy (MME)."

***

Reinhardt has taught the case in his Energy course in the second-year MBA elective curriculum, as well as the Agribusiness course in the MBA and Executive Education programs.

"One objective of the case is a greater understanding of the way materials and energy flow in the modern American agricultural system. As our economy becomes more information-driven, it's good to remind ourselves that we still need to eat cornflakes, or chickens that ate cornflakes, and that we still need to get around," he notes. "When commodity prices are kept low, we have a tendency to think these things are unimportant and uninteresting, but that's never been true."

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Hydrogen Car

I think Obama mentioned hydrogen cars in his Lansing speech. Here is a review (a bit dated) of BMW's hydrogen car. Funny as well as informative.

BMW Hydrogen 7 - A Sedan Fueled by the Future - Review - NYTimes.com:

"It seems that BMW drew the Port Authority’s attention when it began pumping liquid hydrogen into its small test fleet of dual-fuel sedans in Port Jersey, not far from the docks where BMWs disembark after their voyage from Germany. And historically speaking, it’s fair to say that the last hydrogen-dependent German flagship that docked in New Jersey left a lasting impression.

So while BMW designed the Hydrogen 7 to be as explosion-resistant as any gasoline car, memories of the Hindenburg zeppelin cause misunderstandings among consumers and bureaucrats, a company spokesman acknowledged.

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As with hydrogen cars from Ford, General Motors, Honda and others, showcasing hydrogen’s carbon-free potential is the BMW’s reason for being. But unlike far-costlier fuel-cell cars — which generate electricity through a chemical reaction of gaseous hydrogen and oxygen — the BMW runs on either liquid hydrogen or gasoline in a familiar internal-combustion engine."