REW has a report on US DOE funding for geothermal energy R&D - A Turning Point for Geothermal: DOE Funding Wins Industry Approval.

DOE's October 29 announcement awarding $338 million in stimulus funding to geothermal energy research and development projects is the largest injection of funding into new geothermal technology development in over 25 years.


“This marks a critical turning point for the Department of Energy's geothermal technology program, and responds to the clear direction given DOE by Congress when it passed the Advanced Geothermal Research and Development Act of 2007,” a leading industry group said.

With this announcement the U.S. government is now one of the largest investors in new US geothermal energy technology — a spot Google.org had held since it announced that it was investing heavily in the industry in August 2008.

The climate tinfoil world is abuzz with discussion of a large volume of emails hacked out of the University of East Anglia's email servers recently (funny how these sorts of things tend to happen just before large climate summits like Copenhagen). RealClimate casts an eye over the chatter and notes that it seems to be much ado about nothing - The CRU Hack.

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

Reuters has a report on Intel's interest in clean energy technology, particularly sensor technology to help optimise wind power generation - Intel sees opportunities in wind, electric cars.

Technology giant Intel Corp is seeing big opportunities in wind forecasting for power generation, and in information management for electric vehicles, John Skinner, Intel's director of marketing for its Eco-Technology division said on Tuesday. Intel already sells microprocessors to wind turbine manufacturers and this would be an expansion of that business.

Adoption of wide-scale wind power would rely on accurate forecasting, such as when the wind would blow and how fast, he said. "There's a lot of opportunities for sensor technology and high performance computing," he said in an interview on the sidelines of an industry conference. "We are starting to explore it."

The Guardian has a report on climate forecasts for the coming century - Global temperatures could rise 6C by end of century, say scientists.

Global temperatures are on a path to rise by an average of 6C by the end of the century as CO2 emissions increase and the Earth's natural ability to absorb the gas declines, according to a major new study.

Scientists said that CO2 emissions have risen by 29% in the past decade alone and called for urgent action by leaders at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen to agree drastic emissions cuts in order to avoid dangerous climate change.

The news will give greater urgency to the diplomatic manoeuvring before the Copenhagen summit. President Obama and President Hu of China attempted to breathe new life into the negotiations today by announcing that they intended to set targets for easing greenhouse gas emissions next month. Obama said that he and Hu would continue to press for a deal that would "rally the world".

The new study is the most comprehensive analysis to date of how economic changes and shifts in the way people have used the land in the past five decades have affected the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

"The global trends we are on with CO2 emissions from fossil fuels suggest that we're heading towards 6C of global warming," said Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia who led the study with colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey.

"This is very different to the trend we need to be on to limit global climate change to 2C [the level required to avoid dangerous climate change]." That would require CO2 emissions from all sources to peak between 2015 and 2020 and that the global per capita emissions be decreased to 1 tonne of CO2 by 2050. Currently the average US citizen emits 19.9 tonnes per year and UK citizens emit 9.3 tonnes.

The WSJ's Environmental capital blog has an interesting post on Saudi Arabia's interest in supercomputers - Peak Oil Files: Why Is Saudi Aramco Building Supercomputers?.

So, what to make then of Aramco’s recent interest in supercomputers?

The biannual list of the world’s 500 fastest computers was released on Tuesday and Aramco had two new entries at No. 119 and No. 134. Both are Dell clusters, running Intel processors and both are very, very fast.

The oil industry uses Concorde-jet speed computing to aid it understanding underground reservoirs and to look for new sources of oil and gas. Aramco used another computer cluster to build a “full field model” of the Safaniya oilfield in 2008.

Clearly, Aramco is taking a sophisticated approach to understanding its remaining oil resources. And peak oilers will likely argue that Aramco’s interest in teraflops is a sign that it needs all the help it can get to ensure oil keep flowing out of its once mighty fields. After all, why bother throwing so much muscle into understanding the reservoir if there were no worries about its future performance.

We’re not sure who is right or wrong in the peak oil debate. But the oil industry’s interest in speed computing is intriguing. It’s not just Saudi Arabia turning to computers to find increasingly elusive oil. The world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer – Tianhe-1 in Tianjin, China – will be used in part for “petroleum exploration.”

Tom Friedman has another installment of his geo-green, "green is the new red, white and blue" / "the world is getting hot, flat and crowded" sermon in the NYT - What They Really Believe.

I am a clean-energy hawk. Green for me is not just about recycling garbage but about renewing America. That is why I have been saying “green is the new red, white and blue.”

My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.

The first is that the world is getting crowded. According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion ... passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”

The energy, climate, water and pollution implications of adding another 2.5 billion mouths to feed, clothe, house and transport will be staggering. And this is coming, unless, as the deniers apparently believe, a global pandemic or a mass outbreak of abstinence will freeze world population — forever.

Now, add one more thing. The world keeps getting flatter — more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” — with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.

“What happens when developing nations with soaring vehicle populations get tens of millions of petroleum-powered cars at the same time as the global economy recovers and there’s no large global oil supply overhang?” asks Felix Kramer, the electric car expert who advocates electrifying the U.S. auto fleet and increasingly powering it with renewable energy sources. What happens, of course, is that the price of oil goes through the roof — unless we develop alternatives. The petro-dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Russia hope we don’t. They would only get richer.

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

George Monbiot is giving the peak oil story another run, in typically gloomy fashion, declaring "It’s probably too late to prepare for peak oil, but we can at least try to salvage food production" - If Nothing Else, Save Farming .

I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into freefall: the credibility of the body that’s meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets(1). Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible(2). The agency’s assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Mr Greenspan’s blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise; if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistleblowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester onto nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

Well - he could try generating biofuel (probably co-operating with other farmers in the region) to fuel his machinery - or install wind turbines and/or solar panels and look to acquire electric machinery. In both cases his need for (oil derived) diesel would plummet a lot more than 25%.

Inhabitat has a post on some pleasant looking new thin film solar panels - Uber-Thin Modular Solar Panels Energize Any Building.

The recent evolution of solar technology has been nothing short of amazing, and we are continuously impressed by all the products hitting the market that make it easier to integrate clean tech into our daily lives. One innovative company at the forefront of the solar energy bustle is Sulfurcell, the producer of a new kind of modular solar panel that add energy-generating capabilities to any building. The super-thin panels are entirely self contained, so they don’t require any substructure, and they can be applied to new buildings as well as retrofitted old buildings to provide a sleek look and plenty of power. ...

Sulfurcell utilizes copper-indium-sulfide semiconductors, which enable them to produce cells hundreds of times thinner than conventional photovoltaics, which in turn reduces the manufacturing costs. Production is said to use only half the energy used to manufacture conventional solar modules. Sulfurcell has been a pioneer in the photovoltaic industry since 2003, and the company has been named by The Guardian as one of the world’s top 100 cleantech companies for two years running.

The NYT has a post on the effect of exercise on the brain - Phys Ed: Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious.

Researchers at Princeton University recently made a remarkable discovery about the brains of rats that exercise. Some of their neurons respond differently to stress than the neurons of slothful rats. Scientists have known for some time that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells (neurons) but not how, precisely, these neurons might be functionally different from other brain cells.
Phys Ed

In the experiment, preliminary results of which were presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains. (The researchers could tell which neurons were activated because the cells expressed specific genes in response to the stress.) But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the genes. They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.

For years, both in popular imagination and in scientific circles, it has been a given that exercise enhances mood. But how exercise, a physiological activity, might directly affect mood and anxiety — psychological states — was unclear. Now, thanks in no small part to improved research techniques and a growing understanding of the biochemistry and the genetics of thought itself, scientists are beginning to tease out how exercise remodels the brain, making it more resistant to stress. In work undertaken at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for instance, scientists have examined the role of serotonin, a neurotransmitter often considered to be the “happy” brain chemical. That simplistic view of serotonin has been undermined by other researchers, and the University of Colorado work further dilutes the idea. In those experiments, rats taught to feel helpless and anxious, by being exposed to a laboratory stressor, showed increased serotonin activity in their brains. But rats that had run for several weeks before being stressed showed less serotonin activity and were less anxious and helpless despite the stress.

The SMH has an article pondering how much of the investment being made into the Gorgon gas project will be spent in Australia - Gor-gone?.

It has been dubbed Western Australia's own stimulus package. However, the value of most contracts awarded so far in the $43 billion Gorgon liquefied natural gas juggernaut will either head overseas or cannot be guaranteed to include Australian content and local jobs.

A BusinessDay analysis of the $10 billion or so in contracts awarded to date shows more than a quarter will definitely head overseas, prompting calls by unions to maximise the value of the gas project to benefit its owners, the Australian public.

The Australian Workers Union says it will monitor the flow of contracts. Another $2 billion worth are expected to be announced before Christmas. ''We think projects like Gorgon should not just be beneficial for resources workers in the north-west but for manufacturing workers on the east coast as well,'' said Paul Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union.

''No one is disputing that Gorgon is big, and there will always be things that we don't make here. But, where possible, Australian processes operated by Australian workers should take precedence in delivering this major Australian project.''

The large numbers attached to Australia's largest resource development can make you giddy. The operator, Chevron, and the joint venture partners ExxonMobil and Shell will tap into the 40 trillion cubic feet of gas in the greater Gorgon field off the north-western coast. About 120 million tonnes of greenhouse gas will be pumped into aquifers under Barrow Island, resulting in a saving of 40 per cent in emissions.

A total of 15 million tonnes of LNG will be produced each year at Barrow Island from 2014 for the 30-year life of the project. About 83 per cent of that has already been sold through sales and purchase agreements. Chevron says it will spend $33 billion on local goods and services.

A report by ACIL Tasman on the economic benefits of Gorgon puts its contribution to Australia's gross domestic product at $64 billion and revenue to the state and federal governments at about $40 billion.

At its peak Gorgon is expected to generate 10,000 direct and indirect jobs - figures Chevron says are conservative. It seems unnecessary to pump up the already colossal figures but the Gorgon spin machine, and that of the Federal Government, has been in overdrive.

Take, for instance, the hundreds of billions of dollars attached to the off-take agreements. If those are to believed, then it assumes that LNG prices will rise from current levels of about $400 a tonne to somewhere north of $1100. Analysts forecast the long-term price of LNG to reach about $600 a tonne.

A $50 billion price tag was attached to ExxonMobil's 2.25 million tonnes a year deal with PetroChina, announced in August. But even PetroChina scoffed at whether it would amount to that much over the 20 years of the deal.

''There is no such conception [$50 billion] in the total trade value of the agreement as some media reported'' PetroChina's parent, China National Petroleum, said at the time.

But the question does arise if gas prices were to almost triple. And that price is usually one-sixth of the oil price, so does that mean petrol prices are also set to zoom? Perhaps that is why the Government is reluctant to break down these numbers.

Details of the carbon capture and storage part of the project, set to be a ''world demonstration of CCS technology'' are also sketchy.

The ABC has a report on more interest in geothermal energy in Queensland - Geothermal power plans for Qld.

A Brisbane-based company wants to build a geothermal power plant in Queensland's north-west, which it says would be of national significance.

Clean Energy Australasia is planning a pilot plant south of the Cannington mine near Mount Isa. If it is successful the company says other geothermal power stations could follow in western Queensland, generating hundreds of jobs.

The managing director, Joe Reichman, says the initial pilot plant could make the region a powerhouse of the state. "We can potentially grow 500 megawatts by around 2020 and that we believe would set aside the entire baseload power needs of all the mining in the Mount Isa region," he said.

Crikey's Bernard Keane has the next installment of his series on why nuclear power is unlikely to be seen in Australia - To those who say “beaudy nuke”: why should taxpayers suffer?

What would it cost Australia to go nuclear? Good question. Excellent question, in fact, because no one really knows.

Estimating the cost of building a nuclear power plant is difficult even in countries with established nuclear industries. For a start, not too many have been built in recent years. Further, very few  — in fact, not really any  — have been built in an open, competitive, private power-supply market where the plant would face competition from alternative electricity sources. Governments indirectly or indirectly play a huge role in offsetting costs, transferring risk from company balance sheets into governments programs, tax offsets and implicit guarantees.

Worst of all, the construction of nuclear power plants is notoriously prone to cost overruns. It wasn’t Three Mile Island and Chernobyl that smashed the US power industry in the 1980s  — it was the fact that from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s the final construction cost of US nuclear plants was on average twice to four times the original cost.

Regularly blowing out your costs by 400% is not a way to engender investor and government confidence.

Currently we’re seeing the same thing in Finland and France, where costs for new nuclear plants (initially €3.3 billion, or $A5.3 billion) are currently 50-70% over budget, years out from completion.

Overruns and delays are toxic to the balance sheets of nuclear plant builders and their customers because of the cost of capital, already high due to the extended construction period. That’s why so many nuclear power advocates say low-interest government loans are necessary to make building new reactors financially viable  — they want taxpayers, rather than capital markets, to provide their capital. ...

Wind and solar power have the advantage of much shorter construction times, and no decommissioning costs. Neither requires taxpayers to take on risk  — either through lending capital to nuclear reactor builders for the decade-plus construction and 200% budget blow-out history shows they require, or through requiring high electricity prices for consumers to guarantee a return on capital, or through the acceptance of safety and storage risks by the taxpayer into infinity, or at least the next 200,000 years.

Some of nuclear power’s construction costs will come down if reactor construction significantly expands globally. By the time Australia has developed the basic regulatory infrastructure and skills base required to seriously consider a nuclear power industry, we may be able to take advantage of it. But construction costs will have to fall a long, long way before nuclear power can be remotely considered a viable economic option compared to renewables or even gas-fired power.

So next time a nuclear proponent tells us we should be “having a debate” about nuclear power, ask them a simple question: why should taxpayers fund the most expensive and slowest energy option when so many alternatives are significantly cheaper and pose less financial risk?

The SMH has part 3 of their series on peak oil and the oil price out - The case for higher oil prices.

In the first two instalments of this three-part series we considered peak oil theory, the importance of the marginal cost of production and the clear trend towards higher-cost oil discoveries. Using US Department of Energy figures, we also revealed that global oil demand exceeds current production rates.

It’s now time to consider what this tells us about future oil prices. In the short term, the answer is not much. Over the long term though, the price of oil should equal the marginal cost of production.

If the market price is lower than the price of producing an extra barrel of oil, producers will cut production to avoid losing money. But as the market price rises, new sources of oil with higher marginal costs will be developed. Marginal costs, therefore, are instrumental in determining future oil prices.

Having considered what economists call ‘‘the supply side’’, what of demand?

Whereas oil producers can adjust their output based on their marginal cost of production, consumers have less flexibility. Oil is embedded in our lives in a way that is hard to overstate.

Consider the mundane act of eating a home-cooked meal: from the fertiliser used to grow the produce, to the fuel in the semi-trailer that delivers it to the retailer; from the bag you use to carry your shopping home, to the heat you use to cook it and the knife and fork you use to eat, oil is essential.

And, while oil demand in the developed world may remain stable, or even fall thanks to lower population growth and the higher representation of services in the economies of richer countries, the industrialisation and affluence of the developing world is adding hugely to the demand for oil-based products.

Developing nations want the cars and consumables that we’ve enjoyed in the West for decades. So it’s hard to see how the demand for oil won’t rise with these aspirations.

Is there a flaw in this thesis? Perhaps. The greatest risk to higher oil prices lies in the substitution effect where, as oil gets more expensive, consumers start to change their behaviour, as occurred last year when oil hit $US147 a barrel.

Tripe Pundit has an article on Ford's use of bioplastic in their cars - Plastic Made With Wheat Straw Cuts Ford’s Petroleum Use.

For years, Ford has been experimenting with materials to cut its petroleum use, and the 2010 Ford Flex will showcase the latest fruits of its labor. The Flex’s third-row storage bin will have a 20 percent wheat straw-based plastic content.

While the change may seem small, it will cut manufacturing petroleum by 10 tons and CO2 emissions by 15 tons, and cut the storage bin’s weight by 10 percent — thereby saving the end consumer a small amount of fuel, as well. Similarly, in late September, Ford announced that it is now using soy-based foam in seat cushions and backs and interior roof covers, a change that saved 750 tons of petroleum in the manufacturing process. The soy foam is also 25 percent lighter than petroleum foam.

Bioplastics is a burgeoning industry, and the material is showing up everywhere from cell phone casing to grocery bags. But it may not be ideal for durable consumer goods like vehicles. Because of their natural fiber components, these plastics tend to absorb moisture more readily and decompose more quickly than traditional plastic — a desirable quality in plastic bags, but not in dashboards.

The BBC has a report on European plants to improve car fuel economy by assembling "road trains" of cars on long distance trips - 'Road trains' get ready to roll.

Road trains that link vehicles together using wireless sensors could soon be on European roads. An EU-financed research project is looking at inexpensive ways of getting vehicles to travel in a 'platoon' on Europe's motorways.

Each road train could include up to eight separate vehicles - cars, buses and trucks will be mixed in each one. The EU hopes to cut fuel consumption, journey times and congestion by linking vehicles together.

Early work on the idea suggests that fuel consumption could be cut by 20% among those cars and trucks travelling behind the lead vehicle.

The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their vehicle would be controlled by the lead vehicle.

Funded under the European Commission's Framework 7 research plan, Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) is aimed at commuters in cars who travel long distances to work every day but will also look at ways to involve commercial vehicles.

Tom Robinson, project co-ordinator at engineering firm Ricardo, said the idea was to use off-the-shelf components to make it possible for cars, buses and trucks to join the road train. "The goal is to try and introduce a step change in transport methods," he said. "We're looking at what it would take to get platooning on public highways without making big changes to the public highways themselves," said Mr Robinson.

Technology Review has an article on thin film solar company Solexant's process for "printing inorganic solar cells with nanomaterials" - Thin-Film Solar with High Efficiency.

Solar cells made from cheap nanocrystal-based inks have the potential to be as efficient as the conventional inorganic cells currently used in solar panels, but can be printed less expensively. Solexant, a company in San Jose, CA, is currently manufacturing solar cells to test the technology. In order to compete with other thin-film solar companies, Solexant is banking on simpler, cheaper printing processes and materials, as well as lower initial capital costs to build its plants. The company expects to sell modules for $1 per watt, with efficiencies above 10 percent.

The company has licensed methods for growing nanocrystals and making them into inks from Paul Alivisatos, professor of nanotechnology at the University of California, Berkeley and interim director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (Alivisatos is on Solexant's board of directors.) Alivisatos says the advantage of these materials is their potential to combine low cost with high performance. Solar cells made from crystalline silicon are efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, but they're expensive to manufacture. To bring down the cost, companies have been developing thin-film solar cells from semiconductors that don't match crystalline silicon's performance but are much less expensive to make.

Solexant's goal is to make cheap thin-film solar cells with relatively high efficiencies. It would not disclose what the nanoparticle inks are made of, but the company says they are suspensions of rod-shaped, semiconducting nanocrystals that are four nanometers in diameter and 20 to 30 nanometers long. The Solexant cells are printed on a metal foil as the substrate. Nanocrystal films are simple to print but have poor electrical properties. Electrons tend to get trapped between the small particles. "The trick with these cells is how to deposit the materials on the fly in a way that makes a very conductive surface," which in turn ensures decent light-to-electricity conversion, says Alivisatos. Solexant begins with nanocrystals because they're easier to print, and heats them as they're printed, causing them to fuse together into larger, high-quality microcrystals that don't have as many places for electrons to lose their way.

The remaining parts of the solar cell, including the electrical contacts and a light-absorbing layer, are also printed on the flexible metal films. This process allows Solexant to print very large areas. When complete, the cells are cut and then topped with a rigid piece of glass.

Making the entire cell using a roll-to-roll process gives the company an advantage over other thin-film photovoltaic companies that print on glass, which is heavier and limited to smaller areas, says Solexant CEO Damoder Reddy. "The cost benefit is dramatic, allowing us to produce cells for 50 cents a watt," he says. First Solar, a thin-film company that uses vacuum deposition to print its cells onto glass, has manufacturing costs of 85 cents per watt. Nanosolar, another company making nanocrystal solar cells, uses a different semiconductor that requires chemical reactions to take place during printing, which increases the complexity and expense of the process. "We print a preformed semiconductor," which eliminates such steps, says Reddy.

Dave Roberts at Grist has a blast from the past - Exxon boasting how burning fossil fuels will melt glaciers (when they changed their mind about this remains unclear) - Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers! .

From a sharp-eyed reader comes this ad for Humble Oil (which later merged with Standard to become, yes, Exxon). It may win the All Time Millenial Award for Maximal Irony. It’s from a 1962 edition of Life Magazine, available on Google Books (click for larger version):

Crikey's Bernard Keane has given up covering the CPRS but he does still have the energy to consider the nuclear power industry's long, painful attempt to maintain some relevance by claiming it is a solution to climate change - The nuclear option: too slow, too costly.

The spruikers for nuclear energy never say die. Climate change has given them a whole new lease of life. No-emission nuclear power should, they say, be part of Australia’s response to climate change. This week ANSTO chief Ziggy Switkowski said we should aim for 50 nuclear plants by 2050.

It won’t happen until the ALP fundamentally changes its policy on nuclear power. The Coalition is too scarred by their experience in the last election, when John Howard’s flirtation with the debate led to a Labor scare campaign about nuclear reactors in every backyard. Alas, that wasn’t quite how the right-wing media hoped the issue would play out when the Switkowski Report was released in 2006.

Still, hope springs eternal in Liberal hearts. In Tuesday’s joint partyroom meeting, Julie Bishop pointed out that “19 out of 20” G20 countries are pursuing nuclear power. Australia, self-evidently, is the nuclear laggard.

Tomorrow we’ll look at just how much it would cost for Australia to seriously embrace nuclear power as a response to climate change. Today, let’s consider whether the rest of the world is going nuclear in the way that proponents suggest.

First, some bald numbers taken from the German Government-commissioned World Nuclear Industry Status Report from August this year.

There are currently 435 reactors operating worldwide, nine less than in 2002. There are 52 reactors listed as “under construction” (more on that later), down from a peak in 1979 of 233 and 120 in 1987. No new plants were connected anywhere in 2008. The last plant to come online was the Romanian plant Cernavoda-2, which took 24 years to build. Reactors now provide slightly less power worldwide than they did two years ago.

By way of context, the 2 GW of nuclear power connected in 2006-07 was equal to one tenth of the wind power installed globally in 2007. More than double the amount of wind power was installed in the U.S. alone in 2007.

Clearly the nuclear industry is yet to begin recovering from the slump in reactor building worldwide after its peak in the mid-1980s.

That poses two problems for any “nuclear renaissance” and its capacity to provide a legitimate, timely response to climate change. ...

It’s not radioactivity or scare campaigns that are the nuclear industry’s biggest problem, it’s the maths. The numbers show that for decades to come, it will offer less and less of a solution to climate change, and it simply takes too long and costs too much to develop

REW reports that confidence in rolling out renewable energy projects in Europe remains high - European Commission Projects 80% Renewable Energy by 2050.

More than 550 high-level political decision makers at EU, national and regional level, representatives of the renewable energy industry, NGOs and scientists gathered in Brussels for the 3rd European Renewable Energy Policy Conference, organized by EREC as an official event of the Swedish EU Presidency. The conference showed a broad consensus that renewable energy will be the mainstream source of Europe's energy supply by 2050. ...

Looking at 2050, Christopher Jones, Director for New & Renewable Energy Sources at the European Commission, referred to a share of 80% renewable energy in final energy consumption in Europe. The Commission’s views were echoed by several Members of European Parliament present as well as by the industry.

While I remain unconvinced any of the vertical farming schemes proposed within cities will ever be viable, this latest one from Inhabitat looks like something Bucky Fuller would approve of - Plantagon.

Lots of cities have farmers markets, but most — if not all — of the produce comes from rural farmers that use oil-intensive methods of transportation to cart around their food. With 80% of all people on the planet projected to live in cities by 2050, food production will have to move into cities if it is to remain cost-efficient. A Swedish-American company called Plantagon has conceived of an incredible solution: a massive urban greenhouse contained within a geodesic dome. The vertical farm, which consists of a spiral ramp inside a spherical dome, is currently in the development stages.

According to Plantagon, the farm “will dramatically change the way we produce organic and functional food. It allows us to produce ecological [resources] with clean air and water inside urban environments, even major cities, cutting costs and environmental damage by eliminating transportation and deliver directly to consumers. This is due to the efficiency and productivity of the Plantagon® greenhouse which makes it economically possible to finance each greenhouse from its own sales.”