Our Global Future in the 21st Century is based on "The Third Industrial Revolution" which finally connects our new ICT infrastructure with distributed energy sources that are both renewable and sustainable
£600 million of public support for the UK’s ‘Green Deal’ energy efficiency program was recently approved by the European Union.
The Green Deal is a program designed to make investing in energy efficiency improvements, such as insulation, lighting, draught-proofing, hot water efficiency, modern boilers, etc, more affordable for homeowners. The loans are then repaid through energy bills, and transfer with the property, rather than the person who took out the loan.
“The UK Green Deal allows consumers and businesses to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings without making huge upfront investments,” EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a statement.
On January 15, 2013, I presented a webcast on Energy Central titled, “Geomagnetic Disturbances and their Impacts on Power Transformers”. You can view the presentation here.
The presentation generated many questions from the audience that I did not have time to address. This blog post addresses a few of those questions. Stay tuned for more posts with more questions and answers.
Several years ago I got my first taste of open source software and it has been one heck of a ride and learning all the way. When I started I knew no programming at all, and the best I could do was Frontpage and other “html” programs, but through delving inside open source software I started to learn a lot of things bit by bit and to expand my knowledge. I have benefited from using and studying open source software tremendously. I became a WordPress fan because I was able to easily change a lot of things in WordPress with no coding experience at all.
What impressed me about the “WordPress” project was how it was organized and how it was able to survive for so long offering a world-class product for free.
I found it fascinating that Automattic, the company behind WordPress is completely virtual, has employees scattered throughout the world, and makes millions of dollars. I loved the model of Automattic’s organization.
If you were ever a victim of Operation Murambatsvina you will understand why I loved the model, and why I consciously avoid brick-and-mortar business.
Although the Zimbabwean economy is now stable, several companies continue to close and the unemployment rate as we know it is still over 80%. While open source mostly refers to software, I believe it can also apply to economic development programmes and that such programmes can play a huge role.
In my case, I am in favour of a technology-based and export-led economic development programme (Programme) simply for reasons of higher value addition and the promise of higher paying jobs, unlike in agriculture and mining.
Biology is a messy science. Nature doesn't lend itself to nice, orderly categories for people to understand. The tree of life is really tangled, and it's probably a bad analogy to start with.
As we learn more about genetic analysis and find samples of ancient DNA, scientists are starting to reconsider some evolutionary processes. Here are just a few fascinating studies.
GIVEN the government's "responsible attitude" and how the country's resources are managed professionally, the outlook for Malaysia's economy looks good, says American billionaire money manager Howard Marks.
He also lauded Malaysia for being a "high savings" nation which allowed it to promote a high level of consumption with less dependence on external forces for its economic development.
"I like a nation with a high savings rate and Malaysia's outlook looks good.
"The attitude of the government is very responsible, too," he said in an interview here recently.
"Economic growth does not just happen.
"Its vigour depends on the combination of population gains, a conducive infrastructure, positive aspirations and a profit motive, advances in technology and productivity, and benign exogenous developments."
Marks, the founder of Los Angeles-based publicly traded alternative asset management firm, Oaktree Capital Management, was here on a one-day trip.
Oaktree manages assets under management worth US$8 billion (RM24.788 billion), primarily on behalf of pension funds, foundations, endowments and sovereign wealth funds, mostly in the United States and Western Europe.
He said while Oaktree had yet to become an Asian expert as its exposure to the region was still modest, it was scouting around for the right investment opportunities to increase its exposure.
Google wants to see the world deliver so-called moon shots, or breakthrough technology that can solve the planet’s most pressing and difficult problems. Naturally, at the top of the list are technologies that can fight climate change, and solve global resource constraints, from energy to food to water.
For Google’s new “Solve for X” initiative, the search engine giant is celebrating these risk-taking entrepreneurs and researchers, and is highlighting these environmental technologies. Here’s 15 moonshots from the Solve for X site that are looking to solve resource constraints and fight climate change:
Click headline to read more and view the video clips of the presentations--
Today we sit at a critical juncture in technology and telecommunications history -- a time when utopian and dystopian trajectories are both possible, and when our thoughts and actions will shape the very future of participatory democracy.
In Europe, privacy battles focus on how to protect the rights of citizens in a digital era. The network neutrality debates in Brazil and South Korea last year underscored the importance of the continuing effort to uphold principles of the Internet’s founding tenets. In the United States, cyber-security is raising questions about the balance between freedom and security in the 21st century. In India, NGOs pushed the government to reverse its position and oppose intergovernmental control over the Internet. The release of new products such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android epitomize the ongoing tension between open and closed technologies. And authoritarian regimes around the globe are struggling to find new ways to surveille and censor, while living in fear of the liberatory potential of new communications technologies.
The outcomes from these battles are fundamentally important – the path dependencies created will reverberate for generations to come. The global liberalization of traditionally state-owned telecommunication companies in the 1980s and 1990s helped pave the way for the Internet’s rise a decade later. But the laissez faire attitudes of many governments towards telecommunications have lead to ever-increasing abuses, malfeasance, anti-competitive practices, price-gouging, redlining, and a host of other dysfunctional business practices. In the U.S., Congress’s decision to promote the use of the Internet for commercial purposes unleashed powerful new forces that drove the Internet’s rapid expansion and lead to the creation and wide-spread adoption of incredible innovations (e.g., social media blogging platforms, e-mail, VoIP systems like Skype, instant messaging). To this day, resources like Wikipedia remain outstanding examples of how a relatively small community of volunteers can create remarkable treasures for humankind at large -- all thanks to the Internet.
But it would be a mistake to equate the Internet today to what existed ten (or even five) years ago. Unlike other domains of human interaction, we are facing fundamental choices about what we want this new communications sphere to look like. And because computer-mediated communication is evolving so quickly, it is imperative that we focus on normative principles that will withstand the test of time and do not favor particular “solutions” or technologies.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that people from countries with experience holding back the sea see the potential of building an artificial island to store wind energy.
Belgian cabinet member, Johan Vande Lanotte, has introduced a planning proposal for a man-made atoll placed in the North Sea to store energy.
The idea is to place the island a few kilometers off shore near a wind farm, according to Vande Lanotte’s office. When the wind farm produces excess energy for the local electricity grid, such as off-peak times in the overnight hours, the island will store the energy and release it later during peak times.
It would use the oldest and most cost-effective bulk energy storage there is: pumped hydro. During off-peak times, power from the turbines would pump water up 15 meters to a reservoir. To generate electricity during peak times, the water is released to turn a generator, according to a representative.
The Belgian government doesn’t propose building the facility itself and would rely on private industry instead. But there is sufficient interest in energy storage that it should be part of planning exercises and weighed against other activities in the North Sea, the representative said. It would be placed three kilometers offshore and be 2.4 kilometers wide, according to a drawing provided by Vande Lanotte’s office.
The plan underscores some of the challenges associated with energy storage for the electricity grid. Pumped hydro, which contributes a significant portion of energy supply in certain countries, is by far the cheapest form of multi-hour energy storage. It costs about $100 per kilowatt-hour, a fraction of batteries, flywheels, and other methods, according to the Electricity Storage Association. (See a cost comparison chart here.) And grid storage is a considered critical to using intermittent solar and wind power more widely.
The Minister of Science and Technology, Prof. Ita Ewa, has tasked stakeholders in the science and technology sector on its development, stressing that paying lip service alone to the sector cannot develop it.
Ewa made this dropped the task during a National Stakeholders Workshop Exhibition on National System of Innovation (NSI).
This programme organized by the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology initiative, with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), was held in Kaduna, Aba and Lagos respectively to sensitize stakeholders on the imperativeness to boost the sector.
The minister said that it is time Nigeria channels the technology sector to be a major contributor to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) before year 20:2020.
He said, “Nigeria cannot depend solely on oil as the backbone of her economy.
That was why the initiative and drive towards ensuring that Nigeria takes its rightful place amongst the technologically advanced nations of the world by the year 20:2020, is presently being accorded the utmost urgency by the Ministry.
“As a people, we need to make science and technology a way of life, build a culture of innovation, strong political will, commitment and leadership, engendering strong and sustainable private sector participation in Research and Development, and evolving reliable funding mechanism.
Municipalities and county and local agencies all over the U.S. are beginning to discover solar can generate revenues. The City of Lancaster is putting teachers in classrooms and cops on the streets with money generated by its investment in solar. For cities facing the strains of these tough economic times, the news is even better: No investment capital is necessary.
“The asset municipalities and agencies have purchasing power,” Borrego Solar’s CFO recently told GTM. “They can monetize that purchasing power. Through entering an agreement with us, they get cheaper power and it is a way for them to make money on the first day.”
Budget and finance officers in those agencies who do the calculations on infrastructure investments, explained The Solar Foundation (TSF) Executive Director Andrea Luecke, “don’t know what goes into pricing solar and they don’t know there are incentives and benefits they can factor in to reduce costs.”
TSF, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) SunShot program, is leading an outreach effort to the people “who crunch the numbers,” Luecke said. “The big mistake they make,” she explained, “is doing simple payback calculations.” Solar, she said, “never looks good in terms of simple payback calculations. No local government wants to see those big numbers. They want quick, easy cost-reduction infrastructure projects that have fast and simple payback.”
TSF wants the number crunchers to substitute a net present value (NPV) method to calculate the valuation of solar, as well as to consider third-party ownership (TPO) opportunities. TSF’s NPV cost-benefit analysis brings greater dimension to solar’s costs, benefits and opportunities for public agency budget and finance officers.
Telstra’s rivals have united in a fresh protest against billions of dollars in taxpayer and industry-funded payments the company is scheduled to receive to supply essential fixed-line services for the next two decades.
Vodafone Hutchison Australia’s chief executive, Bill Morrow, questioned universal service obligation (USO) payments Telstra locked in nearly two years ago as part of its $11 billion deal to surrender its fixed-line monopoly to the government’s national broadband network, claiming they are obsolete as mobiles replace landline phones as the dominant form of telecommunication.
“Over the last 10 years telecommunications companies have paid more than $660 million to a universal service scheme that subsidises the fixed-line phone network because the fixed phone was viewed as an essential service,” he wrote in a thinly veiled reference to Telstra. “As mobile becomes the more versatile and preferred service, we should revisit this fixed line-focused policy.”
The claims, made in an opinion piece for The Australian Financial Review on Thursday, were supported by SingTel Optus, which said USO costs should be monitored carefully.
“Optus has consistently advocated appropriate regulatory and policy initiatives designed to encourage competition and network diversity within regional Australia,” a spokesman said.
The government’s Telecommunications Universal Service Management Agency (TUSMA) last year formally awarded Telstra a $6.38 billion tender to June 2032 to, among other things, supply thousands of payphones, transfer calls to emergency services and maintain its copper network for telephone access in remote areas that will not get the fibre-optic NBN.
In his recent New Republic interview, President Obama said we "need some big technological breakthrough" to tackle climate change. Mr. President -- our nation already has the technologies to protect the climate while advancing prosperity. Here's how.
Your National Renewable Energy Laboratory showed just last June how to produce 80 to 90 percent of America's electricity from proven, reliable and increasingly competitive renewable sources like the sun and wind.
That confirmed the findings of Rocky Mountain Institute's peer-reviewed study Reinventing Fire, introduced by the heads of Shell Oil and Exelon and endorsed by President Clinton. RMI showed how to run a 2.6-fold-bigger U.S. economy by 2050 with no oil, coal, or nuclear energy, one-third less natural gas, a $5 trillion dollar net savings, 82-86 percent lower carbon emissions, and no new inventions, with the transition led by business for growth and profit.
The U.S. is already started towards a clean energy system based on technologies cost-competitive today in many markets and, unlike traditional generation, with steadily declining costs. These new winners include energy efficiency, solar, wind, and flexible demand through a smart grid, integrated with geothermal, biomass, hydro, and others. Soon most renewables will compete almost anywhere without subsidies -- especially if fossil-fuel subsidies are phased out too, as the G8 nations have agreed to do.
Let's examine the biggest three -- efficiency, solar and wind.
Nearly a decade ago then-CEO of BP, Lord John Browne, gave a landmark presentation on climate change mitigation in the City of London. He introduced to the broader interest group (the work had already circulated in the academic sector) the idea of stabilization wedges, which had been developed by Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow at Princeton within a research program supported by BP. Each wedge represented one of a number of quantifiable actions that together were necessary to move from a business as usual (BAU) global emissions trajectory to a given atmospheric stabilization of CO2. In the initial study that stabilization was 500 ppm.
Wedges were on a very large scale (up to 1 GtC/annum) and consisted of actions such as:
Increase fuel economy for 2 billion cars from 30 to 60 mpgReplace 1400 GW 50%-efficient coal plants with gas plants (four times the current production of gas-based power)Introduce CCS at 800 GW coal or 1600 GW natural gas (compared with 1060 GW coal in 1999) power plants.Add 700 GW (twice the current capacity) of nuclear fission capacity
Tax reform will provide Congress with many opportunities to promote energy efficiency and remove barriers through the tax code, according to Tax Reforms to Advance Energy Efficiency, a new report issued today by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). The report looks at several major changes to the tax code.
“Tax reform will be a major topic of discussion in Congress in upcoming months, and energy efficiency should be part of the conversation,” said Steven Nadel, ACEEE’s executive director and the report’s lead author. “Since energy efficiency leads to job growth, increased productivity, and a cleaner environment, it’s only common sense that Congress should consider these changes as they rewrite the tax code.”
The report looks at tax reforms that could be made in six major areas including promoting capital investment in manufacturing, encouraging advanced energy-saving technologies, and rationalizing depreciation schedules. The authors find that changes in these three areas would pay for themselves as the increased energy savings increase profits and tax receipts. They also find that the provisions to encourage advanced energy-saving technologies would increase employment by an average of 164,000 jobs over the 2014-2030 period.
Canada’s vast quantities of oil sands have been described variously as the world's third largest proven crude oil reserve, Canada’s path to energy superpowerdom, ‘game over for the climate’, and ‘the most destructive project on earth’. Unsurprisingly, they have become an object of acrimonious public debate and significant political maneuvering.
But what exactly are Canada’s oil sands, and how does oil sand extraction work? What's at stake with the extraction and use of Canada’s vast oil sands deposits?
This post, the first in a series of two, will explore the oil sands resource, the technology involved in extracting it, and the consequences of doing so. A subsequent post will tackle larger questions surrounding the economics of oil sands and the political debates raging around their extraction, transport, and use.
Turkey will spend $5 billion on smart power grids by 2015 to boost network efficiency, allowing North American companies to expand, the U.S. government said.
The U.S. sees “substantial opportunities for closer cooperation between the Turkish government and energy companies and U.S. companies that provide smart-grid technologies,” according to a statement from the consulate in Istanbul, which will hold a conference in the city tomorrow on grid investments.
Turkey, forecasting annual power-demand growth of 6.3 percent in the next two decades, has already lured investors including General Electric Co. as its energy industry expands. The country is bucking the trend of most emerging European nations, where retail electricity use trails growth in incomes.
The jump in demand increases the need for smart grids, which allow power generators and users to monitor consumption and reduce costs by saving energy in transmission. Turkey is seeking to boost efficiency of supply after demand grew 5.1 percent last year, while generation expanded only 4.2 percent, according to data from Turkish Electricity Transmission Co.
“If the utilities want to take advantage of this, the accurate metering and billing that smart grids can provide will be vital,” said Chris Rogers, a utilities analyst for Bloomberg Industries in London. “As Turkey becomes richer, more air- conditioning, solar power and electric vehicles will be bought, which also need smart grids to function properly.”
Living with FTTH: A Dutch family tells their story of how FTTH-enabled applications and services have brought multiple benefits to their work, personal and family life.
When I was in São Paulo recently, I saw a city that has a huge traffic problem, given that back when other cities were developing subway, light rail, and other rail systems, the local government was receiving bribes from the auto industry to keep those alternatives out of their city. Now they are paying a huge price for that corruption.
A few years ago, a French infrastructure engineering company came in to inspect the city for possible work-arounds, but finally concluded that there are none. While their economy is booming (unlike most other places in the world), their transportation infrastructure is stuck.
As motorcycles zoom perilously between nearly parked cars driving down the roads, with a couple of fatalities a day, I commented to my hosts, the Keppe Motor group, that the solution to their gridlock would be flying cars.
Now, it looks like we area getting closer to that becoming not just a wish but a reality.
Using a new scheme called Microsoft 4Africa Initiative, the technology giant hopes to spur entrepreneurship and Small, Medium Enterprises growth in Nigeria. Crusoe Osagie reviews the initiative and notes that people must be ready to compete in order to benefit.
The biggest economic challenge facing Nigeria today is the fact that nearly 60 per cent of the nation’s citizens are either under-employed or totally unemployed.
With the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) statistics declaring that over 50 per cent of Nigeria’s huge 160 million people fall between the ages of 0 and 24 years, simple deduction therefore reveals that Nigeria apparently has young people within the age range of 0 and 40 years, numbering more than the entire population of Germany; one of the biggest countries in the European Union.
Such an army of young people, most of whom are either unemployed or underemployed, are ticking time bombs and unless they are put to productive economic use, a humanitarian crisis is inevitable in the next few years, analysts believe.
Instead of perceiving this scenario entirely as a monumental risk, Microsoft Corporation, through its ‘Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative’, sees it as a enormous opportunity to put millions of young and talented people into gainful employment, most of which will be created by the young people themselves.
According to the General Manager, Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative, Fernando de Sousa, “The world has recognised the promise of Nigeria and Africa, and Microsoft wants to invest in that promise. We want to empower African youth, entrepreneurs, developers as well as business and civic leaders, to turn great ideas into a reality that can help their community, their country, the continent, and beyond.”
Countries that have signed on to international cybersecurity agreements tend to have fewer malware infections among their citizens, according to new research released by Microsoft and George Washington University.
Countries that have signed the 2001 Council of Europe Cybercrime treaty or the 2004 London Action Plan on spam tend to outperform other countries in a key cybersecurity measure, said the report, released Wednesday by Microsoft and George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute.
While simply signing on to an international cybersecurity agreement may not have an impact on the metric, computers cleaned per mile, or CCM, the agreements often come with requirements for countries before they can sign on, said Paul Nicholas, senior director of global security strategy and diplomacy at Microsoft.
The requirements from the agreements include methods for international cooperation on cybercrime that "can evolve with the changing threat landscape," he said.
To sign on to the agreements, countries "had to go and build capabilities, they had to change laws," Nicholas added.
Following Nigeria's announcement that calculations of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) may have been underestimated over the last two decades, the country's economy has been portrayed much more optimistically by mainstream media.
The Financial Times headline 'Nigeria: No 1 in Africa by 2014?' in its special edition on emerging markets, Beyond Brics, is a case in point. Similarly, headlines such as 'Nigerians optimistic about economic prospects' or 'Nigeria wins ratings upgrade for tight fiscal policy' from The Guardian and Reuters, respectively, capture the media's changing attitude towards Africa's most populous nation.
And Nigeria's economic performance has not only caught the attention of the media. The traditionally cautious business community, major global players such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and influential private institutions such as Goldman Sachs, have warmly embraced this favourable analysis, setting the scene for more positive depictions of Nigeria's economy.
It appears academia, too, has joined the chorus in praising Nigeria's apparatchiks for supposedly bringing in reforms that have resulted in "unprecedented" growth.
Several commentators are now asserting that Nigeria's economy will be more important to Africa than South Africa's by 2020. These analyses in particular require a closer look.
The 31 members of the CEO Coalition, put together by the Commission to make the internet a better place for children, agreed in December 2011 to a Statement of Purpose with a 12-month plan of actions. The meeting to review the results and recommendations arising from these actions took place on 22 January 2013 in Brussels, and brought together representatives of the Coalition's companies as well as over 40 representatives from third parties (child welfare NGOs, researchers, freedom of speech advocates etc.).
The CEO Coalition was tasked to work on the following 5 areas:
simple and robust reporting tools;age-appropriate privacy settings;wider use of content classification;wider availability and use of parental controls;effective takedown of child abuse material.
This was taken forward in a working group for each area. Each group produced a summary report of the work carried out, the main results and recommendations for best practices or implementations.
EU leaders are arguing over the money needed for long-term projects. Everyone wants stable energy delivery, reliable transportation and high-speed Internet, but who should pay?
There are bound to be a lot of people with something to say when it comes to taking in and handing out about 1 trillion euros ($1.35 trillion).
The initial draft of the Multiannual Financial Framework for 2014 to 2020 - the document that regulates the EU's budget - is proposed by the European Commission. The draft lists expenditures including agriculture, regional support and employment.
The Commission's current proposal, however, also contains some projects like the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). The project is a 40 billion euro fund to finance energy and transportation networks as well as broadband Internet in rural areas of the EU. The program will help competitiveness and create jobs and growth for Europe, according to Ryan Heath, spokesperson for Neelie Kroes, the EU commissioner responsible for the digital agenda.
"In China, 36 million households got a connection to fast broadband last year," Heath said. "That's more than all the new connections that we developed in all of Europe."
The CEF permits national governments to connect EU citizens to the Internet on inexpensive financial terms.
"We are talking about loans that are backed by the European Investment Bank, so any money the governments put up to this facility they will get back with interest in the long term," Heath added. "It's not a gift or a blank check, it's actually something that will come back to taxpayers as well as delivering an essential service to people who don't have it now."
Newly appointed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with his Canadian counterpart, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. In any such bilateral meeting, it is paramount that each participant trust the words of their counterpart. After all, when it comes to the world of diplomacy, where wars are settled and treaties are signed, there's little more than words and trust.
As a former employee in Canada's Foreign Affairs I have attended many bilateral meetings with foreign dignitaries. If I were advising Kerry, I would suggest one question he would hopefully ask of John Baird to see if he is an honest broker.
The question is: "Is Canada committed to confronting climate change?"
John Kerry is, and has been for a long time, a vocal leader on the issue of climate change. Sources inside his former Senate office have told me Kerry regularly expresses his commitment to act on climate change and understands the imperative of curbing water and air pollution to safeguard the economy.
Canadian Minister John Baird has a very different stance towards the climate change challenge, preferring to express contempt for proposals to implement market-based solutions to Canada's soaring greenhouse gas emissions. For example, just last year Baird told Parliament that the Harper government disbanded the National Roundtable on Energy and Environment because they did not like the Roundtable's recommendation that Canada adopt a tax on carbon.
According to a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) between El Paso Electric Company and First Solar, electricity will be sold from First Solar’s thin-film solar panels to El Paso Electric Company for 5.8 cents per kWh (a good 4-8 cents cheaper than new coal, which is in the 10-14 cents per kWh range).
The name of the power plant is Macho Springs Solar Park. It is located in New Mexico, and it has an electricity generation capacity of 50 MW.
An interesting thing about this is that the average residential retail cost of electricity in the United States is 11.4 cents per kWh, which is twice as much as the price at which this power plant will be producing electricity. Also, the typical price of thin-film solar power is 16.3 cents per kWh, which is 2.8 times more.
Clearly, even compared to the wholesale price of electricity from the cheapest energy options, this is quite competitive.
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More information on the green deal, what ever you do read the small print and make sure the overall package suits your requirements.