Biofuels – 20 July
-Biofuel demand in US driving higher food prices, says report
-EU powers ahead with ‘sustainable’ biofuel certification schemes
-Lufthansa begins flights with biofuels
-US Air Force: We want to use biofuels
Renewable Energy
Energy and peace: the dangers of our slow energy transition
Resource scarcity and climate change should be driving forward our transition to the energy systems of the future. Though this transition has started in important ways in several locations, change is not being undertaken at either the scale or speed required.
ODAC Newsletter – July 15
The world could soon be short of oil again, despite the worsening fiscal crisis, says the IEA. Although the turmoil in Europe threatened to engulf Italy – with the world’s third largest bond market – and the US budget standoff threatened its AAA credit rating, the Agency raised its 2012 oil demand growth forecast by 270,000 barrels/day.
Of Buck Rogers, magic elixirs and fusion power
Physicists and other hopefuls seek energy solutions on far off horizons. But what’s really needed are solutions that are available which will put folks back to work, move the economy and address energy resilience at the same time.
ODAC Newsletter – July 8
Oil prices surged again this week on news of tightening US crude stocks. Prices are remaining bullish despite concerns about the Eurozone, and Chinese manufacturing figures being at their lowest for two years, as the authorities there move to calm inflation…
Tapping our oil
Much has been made of the recent decision to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). Some are for it, and others are against it. But there’s something missing in this discussion – something that affects our economy, the future of alternative energy, and the autonomy of local regions.
Green energy internships in cutting edge ecovillage
Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in northeastern Missouri is one community pushing forward their own micro-scale energy research. Like most small villages, Dancing Rabbit isn’t filled with PhD qualified engineers. They’re ordinary people, some with interests in formal scientific research, some with a focus on organic farming or green building methods, so they decided to launch a renewable energy internship to encourage interested engineers and university-level engineering students into the community for a summer.
ODAC Newsletter – July 1
The fallout from the IEA’s recent decision to release 60 million barrels of oil reserves continued this week. OPEC members criticized the IEA for “breaching its own principles” and interfering with the market. Traders too seemed little impressed with the move as prices recovered last week’s losses, as Greece drew back from the brink. After all, 60 million barrels is less than a day’s global consumption.
Can biomass help phase out coal?
If biomass can help power plant owners ease away from coal faster, that is certainly a good thing. The Dominion announcement is particularly relevant given the number of planned plant retirements in the coal industry – there are currently 190 generators around the U.S. set to be shut down, and there’s a dwindling appetite to replace them with more coal.
ODAC Newsletter – June 24
The oil market was plunged into turmoil as the IEA announced it will tap its strategic reserve for only the third time ever. The agency had hinted in the past months that it might be prepared to release stocks to offset the shortfall in production from the Libyan crisis, to calm prices and avoid a “hard landing” for the global economy.
Brown to green: A new use for blighted industrial sites
Few places in the U.S. are as well suited to developing renewable energy as the contaminated sites known as “brownfields.” But as communities from Philadelphia to California are discovering, government support is critical to enable solar and wind entrepreneurs to make use of these abandoned lands.
Santa isn’t bringing gigawatts
Through the clouds of wishful thinking that too often make up what we are pleased to call a collective conversation on the subject of energy, a ray of common sense occasionally shines through. This week’s ray came by way of a study on the Earth’s thermodynamic balance, soon to be released in no less a scientific publication than the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The study found among other things that there’s a fairly modest upper limit to the amount of energy that wind farms can extract from the atmosphere without changing the climate.
