Sarah Palin wants to eliminate all energy subsidies, including ethanol

This presidential election cycle, Republicans are increasingly willing to take a tough stand on ethanol subsidies. The latest to stake out a potentially damaging position on the issue, which heavily effects Iowa, is former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Palin told Real Clear Politics on Tuesday that she opposes all energy subsidies. “I think that all of our energy subsidies need to be relooked at today and eliminated,” Palin said.

The possible presidential candidate continued, “we need to make sure that we’re investing and allowing our businesses to invest in reliable energy products right now that aren’t going to necessitate subsidies because, bottom line, we can’t afford it.”

Palin’s rationale will likely resonate with free market conservatives. “We’ve got to allow the free market to dictate what’s most efficient and economical for our nation’s economy. No, at this time, our country can’t afford the subsidies,” she said.

Despite the strongly-worded opposition to subsidies, Palin offered a qualifier. Referencing recent comments by President Obama, Palin said, “Before, though, we even start arguing about some of these domestic subsidies that need to be eliminated — should be — we need to look at ending subsidies and loans to foreign countries and their energy production that we’re relying on, like Brazil.”

Palin was in Pennsylvania on a cross-country bus tour of the nation’s historical sites.

The current Republican field is increasingly leaning against subsidies. Of the leading candidates, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich are subsidy supporters. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has called for the gradual elimination of energy subsidies.

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Companies look for power way, way up in the sky

The world's strongest winds race high in the sky, but that doesn't mean they're out of reach as a potentially potent energy source.

Flying, swooping and floating turbines are being developed to turn high-altitude winds into electricity.

The challenges are huge, but the potential is immense. Scientists estimate the energy in the jet streams is 100 times the amount of power used worldwide annually.

Cristina Archer, an atmospheric scientist at the California State University in Chico, said there's "not a doubt anymore" that high-altitude winds will be tapped for power.

"This can be done, it can work," she said.

The question is, when? Some companies project their technology will hit the market by the middle of the decade, but Fort Felker at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says the industry is 10 years away from making a meaningful contribution to the nation's electricity demands.

No company, for instance, has met the basic requirement of demonstrating its turbine can safely fly unsupervised for prolonged periods of time.

High-altitude wind power is similar to ground wind in the 1970s — facing questions but soon to prove its viability, said PJ Shepard of Oroville, Calif.-based Sky WindPower, which is developing a "flying electric generator."

"It's kind of like the adjustment folks had to make when the Wright brothers started flying airplanes," she said.

The lure of high-altitude wind is simple: Wind speed generally increases with its height above the ground as surface friction diminishes. Each time wind speed doubles, the amount of energy it theoretically holds multiplies by eight times.

The world's most powerful winds circulate in the jet streams, which are found four to 10 miles off the ground and carry winds that regularly break 100 miles per hour.

The dream is to eventually tap the jet streams, but high-altitude wind companies are focusing for now below a 2,000-foot ceiling, above which complex federal air-space restrictions kick in. Adam Rein, co-founder of the Boston company Altaeros Energies, said his company calculates winds at the 2,000 foot level are up to 2½ times stronger than winds that can be reached by a typical 350-foot land turbine.

High-altitude wind advocates say their smaller, lightweight turbines will be far cheaper to build and deploy than windmills with huge blades and towers that must be drilled into land or the sea floor.

Those savings would mean inexpensive energy. With wide-scale use, advocates see a range of prices, from something comparable to land wind's current 9 or 10 cents per kilowatt hour down to an astonishingly low 2 cents per kilowatt hour.

"They are projecting crazy numbers," Archer said. "I'm not saying that it's true. ... But it's really the lowest, the cheapest energy source, possibly."

As the turbines eventually aim higher, advocates say there are plenty of remote and offshore no-fly areas where they won't interfere with aircraft and have minimal interaction with people.

Still, any nearby residents must be convinced there's no danger from falling turbines while accepting a view that includes flying objects attached to long tethers that carry the energy to the ground. High-altitude turbines also won't escape the various environmental concerns that face conventional turbines, such as their effect on bird flight.

And each turbine concept awaits extensive testing on its reliability, durability and effectiveness, said Felker, director of NREL's National Wind Technology Center.

Keeping the turbines operating autonomously over long periods in changing weather may be the biggest obstacle, Felker said.

"You have powerful reasons to stay aloft as much as possible," he said. "What do you do when a thunderstorm comes by? Do you recover (the device)? Do you land? ... How do you operate in the real world?"

Different companies have proposed answering that question in different ways.

A "kite" being developed by Makani Power of Alameda, Calif., looks like a glider with four high-speed rotors that launch it into flight, then switch modes to generate electricity that's carried down the tether.

An onboard computer steers the kite in a wide circle, mimicking the path of the tip of a giant wind turbine blade. That allows the device to interact with a larger wind area, increasing the amount of energy it can capture in the same way increasing the size of a sail increases the potential speed of a sailboat, said Damon Vander Lind, Makani's chief engineer.

The kite can also stay up in high winds, and power itself to land in low winds, Vanderlind said.

"It lets us make a very reliable system, something operators can just plug in and use," he said.

Sky WindPower's generator has four rotors, each 35 feet in diameter, that transmit power down the tether. It's built to hover, rather than swoop or circle, Shepard said. While moving turbines can actually fly faster than the wind by flying crosswind, they can't fly as high, she said.

"We can get up a little higher than they can. We can get to higher velocity winds and make up for it," Shepard said.

Altaeros is developing a stationary turbine that sits inside a 60-foot tall, helium-filled shroud that acts like a wind funnel. Similar blimp-like devices, called aerostats, have long been used to keep heavy equipment aloft, such as government surveillance radar tethered up to 15,000 feet above U.S. borders.

"Our view is that our approach is less risky, because we're using a technology that's been out there for decades," Rein said.

Altaeros has big aims — no less than "making an impact on the global energy crisis," Rein said — but it's starting small. Its 10 full and part-time employees share a building with seven other start-up companies in a former wool manufacturing factory in South Boston.

Rein notes that before it tries to bring the untapped power of high-altitude wind to thousands, his company is first developing a system that could bring power to about 40 homes in remote areas.

"You start smaller... and then you scale up over time," Rein said. "We think that approach makes a lot of sense."

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GE’s big bet on natural gas

General Electric Co. (GE) is betting big on natural gas.

The $150-billion a year company, whose power plants generate about one-fourth of the world’s electricity,today announced a new natural-gas power plant that it says is more efficient and flexible than any other in the market.

By phone from Paris, where the announcement was made, Steve Bolze, president of GE Power & Water, told me:  “This is about transforming the industry over the next five or 10 years.”

GE says it invested more than $500 million in the new plant development. It will be manufactured in France and sold first in Europe and Asia, and then later in the U.S.

One key selling point of the new plant is its unprecedented flexibility: It can ramp up and down rapidly, and thus be easily combined with wind and solar power plants that generate electricity intermittently.

It’s also efficient enough to work as a generator of baseload power, Bolze said. Here’s a GE webpagedescribing the plant and its operation.

The new GE plant—dubbed the FlexEfficiency 50–is rated at 510 megawatts and offers fuel efficiency greater than 61 percent.  Competing plants burn natural gas at efficiency rates of 57 or 58 percent, Bolze said. Each percentage point of improved efficiency saves a utility about $2 million a year, he said. Capital costs are projected to be CapitaCosts should be somewhere “north of $450 million.” he said.

What this tells you is that, all other things being equal, natural gas has become the fuel of choice for the global electricity business. Wind and solar power can’t compete with cheap gas without government mandates, subsidies or a price on carbon. Nuclear is expensive and it is deemed riskier than ever, for better or worse, after Fukushima. Coal is low cost but dirty and, as a result, politically unpopular in western Europe and the U.S.

Speaking last week at a conference, GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, said : “It appears like we’re entering into a natural-gas cycle.”

GE didn’t announce any customers for the plants. The businesses that comprise GE Energy—GE Power & Water, GE Energy Services and GE Oil & Gas—employ about 90,000 people and generated $38 billion in revenues last year. GE is continuing to invest in wind and solar power, the company said.

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Japan's Softbank announces solar power plan

Japanese telecom company Softbank is to work with local authorities in a drive towards renewable energy, its president said on Wednesday after announcing the construction of 10 large solar power plants.

Since Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami sparked a nuclear emergency, Softbank CEO and president Masayoshi Son, Japan's richest man, has been a high-profile advocate for a shift away from atomic power and toward renewables such as solar, wind and geothermal.

Son and local officials from across the country told a joint news conference they would launch a "Natural Energy Council" in early July to promote natural energy power generation.

"We want to set up the council, considering how we can create initial momentum toward expanding natural energy power generation in a concrete and swift manner," Son told reporters.

"I believe we can make a significant achievement by combining various kinds of natural energy sources appropriately in each region," Son said.

Son stopped short of unveiling further details of his solar power project, saying only that his company would begin dialogue with local officials on the council on the construction of solar power plants.

Son has proposed building a string of solar energy facilities that would cost about eight billion yen ($97 million), each as part of an "Eastern Japan Solar Belt" that would also help revitalise tsunami-hit areas.

Softbank, the sole supplier of Apple products in Japan, plans to put up about 10 percent of the funding, with local governments providing about 100 million yen for each facility and Softbank likely to borrow the remainder from banks, the Nikkei business daily reported.

The firm is expected to keep the solar power operations separate from its consolidated earnings since there is little connection with its main telecommunications business, the report said.

If the project moves forward, Softbank will likely adopt solar panels produced by Sharp Corp., with which it has dealings in mobile phones.

Debate has picked up in Japan on a shift toward clean and renewable energy sources since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was hit by a monster tsunami causing radiation to leak into the air, soil and sea.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan has scrapped a national energy policy plan under which nuclear reactors would meet half of Japan's energy needs by 2030 and advocated making renewables "key pillars" of the energy mix.

At this week's Group of Eight summit in Deauville, France, he is set to outline a "Sunrise Plan" to install solar panels on all suitable buildings and homes in Japan by 2030, the Kyodo News agency has reported.

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India Balances Development against Emissions

 One of the key challenges facing fast developing economies such as India is how to fuel and sustain economic growth while simultaneously reducing emissions. Like China, India is strongly opposed to setting emission reduction targets, arguing that any constraints would adversely impact economic growth, with this resistance unlikely to weaken before the current first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol ends in December 2012. But this emission constraint resistance should not be confused with sustainable market development.

Since 2004, India has averaged quarterly GDP growth of 8.4 percent, reaching a historical high of 10.1 percent in September of 2006 and a record low of 5.5 percent in December 2004. In the fourth quarter of 2010, GDP grew 8.2 percent over the corresponding quarter in 2009, with the IMF forecasting GDP for 2011 at 8.2 percent.

In its summary for policymakers, the Energy and Resources Institute's National Energy Map for India: Technology Vision 2030 said that, given the government's plans for rapid economic growth, the country's requirements for energy and supporting infrastructure will also increase rapidly over the next two decades.

Analysts estimate that to maintain this pace of growth will require India to increase its energy consumption by about 4 percent annually, with the IEA estimating that India will need to spend approximately US$800 billion on its energy sector by 2030.

Last year the Indian government published a study based on 2007 data which showed a sharp increase in industrial activity since the last assessment in 1994, making India the world's fifth biggest CO2 emitter after China, the US, Europe and Russia.

Since 1994, emissions from electricity, cement and waste have more than doubled. India generates 90 percent of its electricity from coal, which in turn accounts for more than a third of its emissions. Yet India's emissions are some 75 percent less than those from China and the US.

Like China, India believes the appropriate measure of sustainable economic development is carbon intensity. Its emissions relative to economic output fell by 30 percent between 1994 and 2007 and the government has set a carbon intensity reduction target of 24 percent by 2020. To meet this target India will have to become more energy efficient, will have to reduce its energy intensity and, most importantly, will have to rapidly invest in its renewable energy infrastructure. And it is making good progress.

India is among the top five countries in terms of renewable energy capacity with an installed base of over 19 GW of grid interactive renewable power, accounting for 11 percent of total installed capacity, and about 2.5 GW of renewable generation being added annually.

To support this policy India recently launched the ambitious National Solar Mission with a target capacity of 20 GW by 2020 and the aim of solar energy achieving grid parity with the cheapest coal-fired capacity by 2030. With over 400 million of its population lacking access to modern forms of energy, it also has one of the largest off-grid renewable energy programmes, with more than 1.5 million decentralized solar applications, over 4 million biogas plants, and in excess of 5 million m² of solar thermal applications installed.

According to the Energy and Resources Institute, 'renewable energy resources play a crucial role in providing decentralised power to remote areas. Apart from continuing to provide support to renewable energy schemes, efforts should also be directed towards large-scale deployment of related technologies in order to further bring down their costs.'

Aside from solar power, India's government has committed to significantly increasing its hydro capacity.

But it is wind power that presents India's major growth opportunity. According to the Indian Wind Energy Outlook 2011, 'wind power must play a key role in fuelling India's growing economy, by delivering substantial amounts of clean and indigenous electricity'.

The report forecast that 65.2 GW of wind power could be installed by 2020, up from 13.1 GW at the end of 2010, with a potential of 160.7 GW installed by 2030. Citing last April's Gulf of Mexico oil spill, ongoing unrest in the oil-producing Middle East and North Africa region, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster arising from the Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami, GWEC secretary-general Steve Sawyer warned: 'A return to old-fashioned power generation cannot be the answer, not only for environmental, but also for economic reasons.

'Betting on the obsolete polluting technologies of the past is not a viable solution, and only renewable energy can fill the gap that will be left by nuclear power in a sustainable fashion.'

Scaling up wind power, said the report, would provide both environmental and economic benefits, arguing that wind is now competitive with conventional new-built power generation technologies such as natural gas.

But, it cautions, to realise the full potential of India's rich renewable resources the government needs to address several challenges and barriers, including a clear renewable energy framework at national level, incentives for repowering, and rapid up-scaling of grid infrastructure to transport increasing amounts of wind power to the demand centres.

According to the World Bank, achieving India's government's renewable energy goals for the next decade will cost between $10 billion and $64 billion in subsidies, depending on whether the government adopts a low-diversity, low-cost renewable energy resources scenario or a high-diversity, high-cost scenario. The higher cost scenario, which would include solar, will only be viable if fossil fuel prices continue to rise and are free of distorting subsidies. Yet although the government committed to removing fossil fuel subsidies at last year's G20 summit, the country's deep poverty problems make this a politically sensitive policy.

For all its support for renewable energy development, and its desire to become a world renewable energy leader, the fact remains that India will continue to be heavily reliant on fossil fuels over the next two decades.

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