• A starting price of $23 per tonne of ‘carbon pollution’ (measured as CO₂ equivalent) to be paid by the 500 heaviest emitters and increasing by 2.5% over and above normal inflation, followed by a move to an emissions trading scheme in 2015,
• AU$9.2 billion of this money will go to assist many of the businesses and workers impacted by the plan,
• There will be tax cuts and pension increases to protect people from the inevitable price gouging by the major polluters, with a leap in the tax-free income threshold from $6k to $18k,
• AU$1.2 billion Clean Technology Program intended to drive energy efficiency in manufacturing and to support research and development,
• The closure of Australia’s most polluting electricity generators, to be replaced with gas-fired units by 2020,
• A $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation with a mission to to finance new clean energy technology,
• An Australian Renewable Energy Agency (AREnA) to manage $3.2 billion in clean energy investment,
• A target of 20 per cent renewable energy by 2020,
• and agriculture to be excluded from paying the carbon price in the immediate term.

All in all this is a massive leap forward for Australia with an emissions reduction trajectory being locked in at 5% reductions on 2000 figures by 2020, building up to n 80% reduction on 2000 figures by 2050. While personally I would have liked to see a more aggressive trajectory, with 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 and complete decarbonisation of the economy by 2050, the political realities in Australia simply ruled this out.

The full details are available on cleanenergyfuture.gov.au. — DS

Technorati Tags: Australia, carbon emissions, carbon price, carbon tax, CO2

The Ted Talk above by Shai Agassi is all the more remarkable given it was given in 2009 and, since then, his vision is starting to be rolled out. The Better Place network is being rolled out in Canberra, where I live, and the Renault Fluence electric car that uses Better Place’s charging system will be sold here for around AU$45,000 they believe. I got to take one for a test drive last year in Copenhagen and they are awesome. – DS

Technorati Tags: Better Place, carbon, clean energy, clean tech, climate, Climate Change, CO2, Shai Agassi

“Philips is confident that the product submitted meets or exceeds all of the criteria for the L Prize,” Rudy Provoost, chief of Philips Lighting, said in a statement.

The $10 million is almost beside the point. More important, the contest winner will receive consideration for potentially lucrative federal purchasing agreements, not to mention a head start at cracking a vast consumer marketplace.

The L Prize has garnered significant attention in the lighting industry because 60-watt incandescent lamps represent 50 percent of all the lighting in the United States, with 425 million sold each year. The Energy Department says that if all those lamps were LED equivalents, enough power would be saved to light 17.4 million American households and cut carbon emissions by 5.6 million metric tons annually.

I’ve blogged about Philips and the amazing stuff they’ve been doing in the flighting department before. It’s great to see they are keeping their innovation stream flowing. Honestly I am counting on corporations like them to make sure our futures are cleaner, safer and more prosperous for more people.

Clearly US$10 million, while hardly chump change to a smaller business or solo inventor, is not the motivator for a company like Philips. Indeed by all accounts their LED bulbs were well into design and development before the l Prize was ever announced. Perhaps the competition itself is not ambitious enough. Still competitions like this raise awareness, set a very public finishing line for entrants, and it’s not always the big companies who win these things. They motivate entrepreneurism and that’s a great thing. — DSgeneric viagra levitra and cialis pills? Viagra Purchase can i take viagra
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Technorati Tags: CFB, climate, energy, energy efficiency, LED, light, lighting, lights, Philips

Photo of Glenelg, Scotland, by Dave Sag and used with permission.

IEEE Spectrum is reporting, in a story “£10 Million Sea Power Challenge“, on a new initiative by the Scottish Government to boost research into technologies that generate power from the sea.

Scotland is finalizing the terms of a contest in wave and tidal energy that takes inspiration from the prize that prompted Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in 1927 and successors like the X Prizes and the Virgin Earth Challenge. The aim of the contest is to make ocean energy more than just a technical curiosity and, not so incidentally, give the country’s inventors and entrepreneurs a boost in an area where they have some obvious advantages–suitable geography, friendly government policies, and a head start in engineering.

Dubbed the Saltire Prize, after the cross that is the central element in Scotland’s flag, the prize of £10 million (about US $16 million) will be awarded in five years. Contestants will need the time to devise and demonstrate their technology because, by all accounts, Saltire is a very challenging challenge, so much so that only a Scottish company may be able to win it.

“To win the prize,” the rules say, “entrants must demonstrate, in Scottish waters, a commercially viable wave or tidal energy technology with a minimum output of 100 gigawatt-hours over a two-year period–using only the power of the sea. The winner will be judged to be the best overall technology after consideration of cost, environmental sustainability, and safety.”

The transition from powering our lives by burning fossil fuels to lives powered by renewable resources is going to require considerable investment and innovation. Prizes like this go a long way to stimulating the kind of entrepreneurial initiatives that will speed that transition. Just as the stone age did not end for lack of stones, so the age of dirty oil, coal and gas burning will surely come to an end, well before those resources are truly depleted. Whaling didn’t end because the world ran out of whales, or because the world suddenly started to care about our seep sea cousins. Whaling ended because lamp-oil became redundant due to a technology shift. So too with fossil fuels. When clean power hits price parity with fossil fuels, and that’s not far away now, and when energy density of batteries, fuel cells and other means of storing and transporting power improves just a little bit more, we’ll see a wholesale shift from centralised, ‘broadcast’ power, to decentralised ‘peer-to-peer’ power supplies. And won’t that just be great! — DS

Technorati Tags: Alternative Energy, British Sea Power, energy, Scotland, sea power, tidal power, wave power

Southern Italy, with it abundant sunshine and high electricity tariffs from coal-generated power plants, could by 2010 produce solar power that is economically competitive with conventional power. That’s the assessment of Winfried Hoffmann, president of the European Photovoltaic Industry Association, who also predicted that solar power could meet 12 percent of Europe’s electricity demand by 2020. Hoffman said that the cost of producing power from photovoltaic cells is steadily declining, so much so that by next year solar power in southern Italy could be produced as cheaply as the 25 euro cents ($.35) per kilowatt hour that residents there now pay for coal-generated electricity. Hoffmann asserted that 12 percent of the continent’s electricity could come from solar power by 2020 if the European Union enforces rules on renewable power quotas and continues state-subsidized programs that pay generators of renewable power a premium for channeling their electricity into centralized power grids.

Rock on Italy! If they can do this in Europe where the sunshine is, to be frank, rather weak, imagine what we could do down-under! — DS

Technorati Tags: economics, energy, Italy, power, solar

I love this sort of thing. I am always charging something, my iPhone, my laptop, my Wife’s 9 year old mobile that only holds charge for a few days (but she loves and won’t upgrade until it really truly dies). So being able to charge these devices without drawing off the grid is a wonderful thing. It’s low-carbon, includes vital incidental exercise and it’s cheap! Love it. — DS

ps: Sorry for the lack of posts for the last couple of weeks, I have been on Holiday.

Technorati Tags: Alternative Energy, battery, crank, emissions reduction, freecharge, gadgets, green power, iPhone, mobile phone, power

Oil refinery workers, even in these modern, enlightened, times, are exposed to some of the most hazardous chemicals on Earth including asbestos and benzene carcinogens. Indeed several studies have shown that oil refinery workers have a higher proportion of lung cancers and mesothelioma than people working in other industries. Forward-thinking emissions reduction policies that reduce dependence on fossil fuels will not only slow the destruction to our planet’s climate, but also save lives of industrial workers who toil in this terribly dangerous industry. — DS

[UPDATE] You might want to check out www.asbestos.net which has a load of details about Asbestos and Mesothelioma.

Technorati Tags: asbestos, cancer, Climate Change, mesothelioma, oil, oil industry, oil refinery

I just watched the most amazing TED talk from 2003, by Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLab and CEO of Energy Innovations. If you watch the whole video above Bill explains the development of his Solar Sunflower and it’s brilliant. In the video he’s using genetic algorithms to optimise old-school tech like Stirling Engines to make super-efficient combined solar energy and hot water systems. The version he’s now selling seems even more simple and advanced. How very cool. — DS

Technorati Tags: Bill Gross, cleantech, Energy Innovations, evolutionary computing, genetic algorithms, genetic programming, green power, IdeaLab, solar power, Stirling Engine, Sunflower, TED

Nobel Prize winner, former US Vice-President and long-term climate activist Al Gore addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the strong links between the climate crisis, the economic crisis and the war on terror.

Political Journal Swamp Politics has complete text and video of Gore’s presentation with their own commentary. They also cover the question and answer sessions at the end in their transcript.

In order to repower our economy, restore American economic and moral leadership in the world and regain control of our own destiny, we must take bold action now. The first step is already before us. I urge this Congress to quickly pass the entirety of President Obama’s recovery package. The planned unprecedented and critical investments in four key areas — energy efficiency, renewables, a unified national energy smart grid, and the move to clean cars — represent an important down payment and are long overdue. These crucial investments will create millions of new jobs and hasten our economic recovery, while strengthening our national security and beginning to solve the climate crisis.

Quickly building our capacity to generate clean electricity will lay the groundwork for the next major step needed — placing a price on carbon. If Congress acts right away to pass President Obama’s recovery package and then takes decisive action this year to institute a cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions — as many of our states and many other countries have already done, and as many of the leading Fortune 500 corporations in America are pleading with the Congress to do so they’ll have predictability and the basis to become more competitive in world commerce — then the United States will regain its credibility and enter the Copenhagen treaty talks with a renewed authority to lead the world in shaping a fair and effective treaty.

Al Gore makes the point well saying, in reference to the USA but the ideas apply broadly:

We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf and burning it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.

Al Gore calls for four major requirements for success at the forthcoming Copenhagen meeting where the climate regime post-2012 will be hammered out into The Copenhagen Protocol or something along those lines. Gore says:

The elements that I believe are key to a successful agreement in Copenhagen include, first, strong targets and timetables from industrialized countries and differentiated but binding commitments from developing countries that put the entire world under a system with one commitment: to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants that are the cause of the climate crisis.

Two, the inclusion of deforestation, which alone accounts for more than 20 percent of the emissions that cause global warming.

Three, the addition of so-called carbon sinks, including those from soils, principally from farm lands and grazing lands, with appropriate methodologies and accounting. Farmers such as Senator Lugar and ranchers in the U.S. and around the world need to know that they can be a part of the solution.

Fourth, the assurance that developing countries will have access to mechanisms and resources that will help them adapt, to the worst impacts of the climate crisis, and technologies to solve the problem. And finally a strong compliance and verification regime.

Finally the world’s remaining superpower is in the hands of adults, and brainy ones at that. But is nerd-power going to be enough to save us all? Probably not. But it’s a massive start and, with luck, the mallet of common sense will swing for those still preferring to believe that everything is really a-okay, and who simply tune out of the evidence that abounds. — DS

Technorati Tags: Al Gore, clean power, Climate Change, economy, energy, global warming, green power, terrorism, USA

What is GreenPower™?

GreenPower™ is a trademark owned by the NSW Department of Water and Energy, who manage the national GreenPower™ Program on behalf of the various states and territories. Certified GreenPower™ consists of Australian Renewable Energy Certificates™ (RECs)

Carbon Planet’s GreenPower™ product is accredited under the National GreenPower™ accreditation program.

Carbon Planet has always prided itself on its transparency. When you buy GreenPower™ from Carbon Planet we transfer legal title to the associated RECs to your business, so you have proof that the RECs are not being sold more than once. See our GreenPower™ site for more information. — DS

Technorati Tags: Carbon Planet, clean power, Climate Change, global warming, green power, GreenPower™, REC, RECs, renewable energy, solar power, wind power