The UK Guardian also has a great article on it here. The article talks about how the UK is seeing an uplift in green knowledge in the workplace (i.e. more jobs).

I’ve been thinking about all the money that the US and Europe in particular are throwing at bailing out banks and carmakers. Why isn’t this money (trillions) being put toward sustainable future industries like this one?.

I’ve often thought that if these car companies constantly need subsidies to continue, how are they even profitable? To be viable only through subsidies does not sound like a successful business to me.

Anyway, instead of throwing billions of dollars at these companies, why not redirect that to a comprehensive system of:
- making houses and businesses more energy efficient (and thus lowering their power bills and CO2 footprint)
- retraining millions of workers for “green collar” jobs
- subsidising homes and businesses to install solar, grey water, water tanks and better insulation as well as power control systems (control lighting etc)
- public transport (NOT more roads)
- R&D into clean/greentech industries including grants for small startups, including a loading for small eco-focussed businesses based on how many employees they hire

If CO2 emissions were taxed in someway, then personal and company tax could be lowered with the carbon tax replacing that. Of course, as CO2 output declined, tax would need to be increased somehow.

Ecogeek has a great article about Spanish windpower and how Spain plans to get 30% (!!) of it’s power from renewables by next year.

Beyond just wind, Spain hopes to have renewable energy sources making up 30 percent of their energy demand within the next year.

Next year!!

There’s hope for this planet yet, I’m sure of that.
Meanwhile ClimateProgress has a great article on why anyone carrying on about job losses as a result of being more sustainable is a right twat. Wind in the US now employs more people than coal.
Scale wind up, and solar, and what do you have? Sustainable jobs.

In some promising “green jobs” news, the wind industry in the U.S. has now officially surpassed the coal mining industry in the number of people it employs. Wind industry jobs increased to 85,000 in 2008 while the coal industry remained the same at about 81,000 jobs.

The country made huge gains in wind energy in the past couple of years and that increase obviously created huge gains in employment as well. Last year, there was a 50 percent increase in installed wind capacity and a 70 percent increase in wind industry jobs over the year before. Off those jobs, 13,000 were in regions of the country that had seen a loss of manufacturing jobs in recent years.

• Sustainable job opportunies abound
• Learn about (CC solutions): Solar Energy
• Is climate change adaptation expensive?
• Obama: “The science is beyond dispute. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response”
• Global Warming, here, now

I’m concentrating on these two because they offer us solutions – now – to reducing our reliance on fossil fuel energy sources. Our future relies on not just piecemeal solutions to the challenges of climate change (i.e. “we’ll just buy more snow guns to make more snow!”) but a whole system (or suite) of solutions; such as:

• government investment (or tax credits for investment) in renewable energy, both R&D and implementation (the focus of this post)
• as above but for energy efficiency measures in homes and business
• as above but for micro power generation (e.g. solar panels on homes)
• government or utility incentive for consumers to feed electricity into the grid (and get paid for it)
• removal of subsidies for polluting industries
• implementation of a CO2e market pricing signal (carbon tax or trading scheme, or elements of both)
• legislation mandating compulsory sourcing of renewable energy
• strong legislation regulating CO2e emissions (US EPA is onto this)

That’s just a start. This sort of systemic and holistic approach is really important particularly given the growth in China and India, and eventually in Africa. These countries absolutely must leapfrog the Western world’s past framework of coal and oil – if they don’t, we’re seriously in big trouble (even more so than we are now).
The Europeans have been onto this for years. In Denmark, the government has been very successful in encouraging corporate and retail (consumers) investment into renewable energy, specifically wind. And in Spain (read further below) and Germany, government incentive has created very strong solar industries through a mix of R&D and investment incentive both directly and through consumer incentives to encourage take up of the systems (like a feed-in tariff: a FIT is when the utility pays you a rate to put electricity back into the grid, and they’ll usually – not always – have to pay you more than it costs for you to take out, meaning it’s a strong incentive to generate electricity yourself through say wind or solar means).

Since 1979, the Danish government, through intelligent, sustained investment, has mobilized the nation in the development of next-generation wind energy, and the results have been impressive. Today, Danish firms account for one third of the global wind power market and have driven the creation of a booming multi-billion dollar industry. In Denmark alone, 6,300 wind turbines pump energy into the regional grid today, providing roughly twenty percent of the nation’s electricity. Wind power accounts for some 25,000 Danish jobs, and in 2007, the industry exported 4.7 billion euros worth of energy technology. Without a doubt, government involvement in the wind sector enabled this Danish success story.

Denmark unlocked the energy and capital of its private citizens through strong, consistent market incentives. From 1979 to 1989, the Danish government covered 30 percent of wind investment costs, and later implemented loan guarantees for large turbine export projects. It also guaranteed the domestic wind market by mandating that utilities purchase all generated wind energy at a consistent, above-market price. These market guarantees and subsidies, along with significant tax breaks for wind-generated electricity, promoted rapid deployment and technological innovation, as firms competed to capture the profits to be made from wind energy with the most efficient and cost-effective technologies. Financial incentives also drew ordinary citizens into the wind energy economy, including the members of Middelgrunden and other wind cooperatives, who were attracted by income from shares in wind cooperatives, made tax-free by the Danish government.

The USA is now finally starting to shift on this too.

This month Gainesville, Fla., became the first city in the United States to introduce higher payments for solar power, which is otherwise too expensive for many families or businesses to install. City leaders, who control their electric utility, unanimously approved the policy after studying Germany’s solar-power expansion.

With the increasing momentum behind some type of price signal for CO2e emissions, China, whilst being a voracious user of coal, at least is investing in solar and hydro (implementation, R&D) and shifting their energy mix to rely more on renewables to ensure their future sustainability.

Most people know about solar, and have a rough idea what it involves. Basically, we have two “flavours” of solar;

• Photo-Voltaics (PV) which is what most people use in their homes (when they have solar), and
• Concentrated Solar Power or solar thermal electric

PV uses silicon or another semiconductor to derive electricity. CSP uses concentrated heat (from the sun’s rays) to heat a fluid and drive an electric generator.
Joe Romm had a great article on Salon.com about this (as well as on his page). I like the technology and it’s well suited to places like Australia, Spain, Africa and the USA (Nevada, Calif, AZ etc). But instead of this being something that’s a “few years away”, it’s here, now. Spain is about to build a CSP plant – Technology Review has an EXCELLENT article on it here.

What strikes me most in this article is that it neatly captures the dichotomy in the solar technologies, but how this dichotomy can cover the 2 different markets; core baseload generation (CSP) and modular, micro deployments of PV for homes and businesses. Both technologies have a place.

From the road to the Solúcar solar plant outside Seville, drivers can see what appear to be glowing white rays emanating from a tower, piercing the dry air, and alighting upon the upturned faces of the tilted mirror panels below. Appearances, though, are deceiving: those upturned mirrors are actually tracking the sun and radiating its power onto a blindingly white square at the top of the tower, creating the equivalent of the power of 600 suns, which is used to vaporize water into steam to power a turbine.

This tower plant uses concentrated solar technology – otherwise known as solar thermal power – with a central receiver. It’s the first commercial central receiver system in the world.

Spanish companies and research centers are taking the lead in the recent revival of concentrated solar power, as expanses of mirrors are being assembled around the country for concentrated solar plants. At the same time, Spanish companies are also investing in huge photovoltaic fields, as companies dramatically increase production of PV panels and investigate the next generation of PV. Spain is already fourth in the world in its use of solar power, and second in Europe behind Germany, with more than 120 MW in about 8300 installations of PV. Within only the past ten years, the number of companies working in solar energy has leapt from a couple dozen to a few hundred.

What’s also obvious from this, is that, as we previously blogged about here, is that there are going to be loads and loads of jobs in this space. LOTS. Which makes the bleating from coal/fossil industry leaders about how a carbon tax will cost jobs, seem rather glib.

I’m SUPER excited about solar growth. It’s (for now, until the sun burns out, but by then, we’ll have worse things to worry about) an endless source of clean energy, and the technology to harness it is here, now. As soon as I buy a house, I’ll be putting solar on my roof and feeding electricity into the grid (and getting a quarterly electricity credit as a result – that’s right, I’ll be getting paid for the electricity utility every quarter).

• How to save the economy and fight climate change (greentech jobs)
• Global Warming, here, now
• Sustainable job opportunies abound
• The action imperative: a new hope
• Obama: “The science is beyond dispute. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response”

From a speech Obama made in a gathering between Obama administration officals and energy entrepreneurs.

But you’re also helping us to overcome this crisis. Paul’s company, Serious Materials, just reopened, as he mentioned, a manufacturing plant outside of Pittsburgh. Last year, that factory was shuttered and more than one hundred jobs were lost. The town was devastated.

Today, that factory is whirring back to life, and Serious Materials is rehiring the folks who lost their jobs. And these workers will now have a new mission: producing some of the most energy-efficient windows in the world.

And:

We can remain the world’s leading importer of foreign oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of renewable energy. We can allow climate change to wreck unnatural havoc, or we can create jobs preventing its worst effects. We can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors, or we can create those jobs right here in America.

We know the right choice. We have known the right choice for a generation. The time has come to make that choice, to act on what we know. And that’s why my budget makes a historic investment: $150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and energy efficiency, building on what we’ve achieved through the Recovery Plan.

This man is just the leader we need to win over the hearts and minds of people who most need winning over, which is what it looks like we really need right now.

On top of his incredible determination, Obama is enabling US agencies to regulate CO2 emissions. As the Washington Post reports:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s new leadership, in a step toward confronting global warming, submitted a finding that will force the White House to decide whether to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the nearly 40-year-old Clean Air Act.

Under that law, EPA’s conclusion — that such emissions are pollutants that endanger the public’s health and welfare — could trigger a broad regulatory process affecting much of the U.S. economy as well as the nation’s future environmental trajectory. The agency’s finding, which was sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget without fanfare on Friday, also reversed one of the Bush administration’s landmark decisions on climate change, and it indicated anew that President Obama’s appointees will push to address the issue of warming despite the potential political costs.

Dear Deniers: Welcome to the new paradigm. Start running.

• Obama: “The science is beyond dispute. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response”
• Sustainable job opportunies abound
• How to save the economy and fight climate change (greentech jobs)
• Obama: saving the snow and the planet
• Despair + Hope.

Demo is below, link using Google Earth plugin is at the Perdue Vulcan site. Nature.com has a report on it here and here.

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