Origin CEO (Grant King) told the committee for economic development of Australia that electricity prices across Australia are likely to triple over the next 10 years; he suggested that a combination of the federal government’s mandatory renewable-energy targets, energy policy uncertainty, higher electricity transmission and distribution costs, and higher fuel costs would drive the increase.

The fact is, the end-user should pay, but when you see corporate remuneration sky-rocket and the size of these boards increase (usually with ex-politicians and senior bureaucrats), it no wonder the cost are going up.

King said the boom sales of energy-inefficient flat-screen televisions’ are also pushing up household energy use, despite the development of more energy-efficient household appliances such as fridges and dishwashers. How he joins increased consumption with the need for the price of electricity to go up substantially is the $64,000 question. Perhaps if companies like brink and concrete roof tile manufacturers paid the same price as the average house-holder, then there may be justification for rasing the cost, but these organisations receive subsidized energy.

Mr King said ‘the cost of electricity transmission and distribution has historically been about 50% of the cost of energy to consumers; but this would now go up to between 60 and 70 % of the total cost’, but why?

He went on to say,  ‘we think that by 2020, the cost of electricity will be threefold what it is today, given the current policy of large amounts of renewables being forced into the system, uncosted charges for those renewables given the current policy settings and a substantial increase in transmission and distribution costs; fuel prices in Australia will also be repriced much more to international pricing levels’.

The reality is that electricity generation via coal gas and oil has been subsidized by goverment in the billions of $’s and his comment inferring we pay less than elsewhere for fuel is fanciful. To claim renewables places fossil fuel energy generation at a disadvantage; the honeymoon is over, they have dipped in the public coffers to excess and the game is up.

The only thing I agree with is when King said the federal government would fall “well short” of its goal of cutting carbon emissions by 5% by 2020. With our population growing the way it is, the higher numbers will nullify any savings if there were any.

King was right on one thing, he said he was concerned politicians and policy-makers were fatigued by the challenge of introducing measures to cut back carbon emissions in Australia and would defer the issue into the next electoral cycle.

One of the main reasons is that most bureucrats have no idea and don’t know where to ask about relevant policy being written and secondly, no corporate sponsors will pay money into a re-election campaign if they don’t make money …

It would be interesting to find the ‘press release as a news story’ that helped seperate Queenslanders from their cash when Peter Beattie pushed the shale oil barrow or when suckers err investors parted with their hard (and some not so hard) earned money to invest in ‘free geothermal energy’.

The reality is that all electricity authorities as well as federal and state governments are all wondering where there next energy grid will go and how it will be paid for, let alone coping with thousands of electric cars running around the countryside requiring special plugs to charge from.

The story / interview by Alan Kohler (ABC) of – excuse the snigger – a Better Place Australia at the end of this.

San Francisco has adopted building codes that require all new homes and offices to be wired for electric car chargers, in an attempt to position itself as America’s environmental car capital. The move comes before the release this year of the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, which promise to deliver driving distances of 65 kilometres or more on a single battery charge and are being marketed to middle-class families.

Local authorities are starting a lending scheme next month to encourage homeowners to install their own charging stations through a green financing program. [hope its more successful than our Green Loans program]. The move confirms California’s reputation as America’s greenest state, as it led the country in putting limits on vehicle emissions and imposing higher efficiency standards for homes and appliances such as flat-screen TVs.

Terry Tamminen (who advises California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, on energy and environment) said ‘people can’t be trusted to charge only at night and discharge in the day’. And San Francisco’s main supplier (Pacific Gas & Electric), is sketching out ”heat maps” of neighbourhoods at risk of overloads and blackouts when suburban motorists begin plugging in their cars. It can take eight hours, drawing only on the domestic power supply, to charge an electric car, though dedicated charging stations take a fraction of that time.

There is scepticism that Mr Obama will be able to deliver on his promise to put a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015, with a population of 306 million people (0.33%); with a population of 26 million people in Australian, thats 85,000 electric cars, but with a sparser population spread.

Dave Kimble crunched a few numbers and came up with the following;
If you need to charge your car during the day, say 8 hours at 4 KW at 18.8 cents/KW.h = $6.02 so you would be paying maybe $4 more than a night charge so you would go ahead anyway. But the trouble is the grid doesn’t have the capacity during the day, so more generating capacity is needed.

Smart meters would be the way to go, but ultimately you would have to say no to some demand, which is alien to our current culture, pardon the pun. Ah, now I remember why I was asking after the power consumed of desalination – the point is we need some electricity-intensive but non-urgent task that can be used as a grid-stabilising demand.
A Government run operation that can be forced to work with the power generators to smooth out the load when people just flick a switch and expect things to happen.

End

Apparently, it isn’t so much about the energy as the financing model and having convenient swap-out spots to enable long-distance driving. Can anyone see any way that this can happen without requiring either new coal-fired power stations or nuclear energy? i.e. considering the already growing demand for electricity in Australia, and how the output
from any new wind farms are just soaked up by the new houses and their new air conditioning..

So do electric cars offer an attractive proposition for Australia ?
[Broadcast: 21/03/2010 http://www.abc.net.au/insidebusiness/content/2010/s2851753.htm

ALAN KOHLER, PRESENTER: Later today the Victorian motoring association, RACV, will commit $2 million to electric cars through an investment in Better Place Australia, the company leading the push to set up a national re-charging network.

So I spoke to its CEO, Evan (sic – gold tooth) Thornley about the future of electric cars.

Evan Thornley how does the deal with RACV work, are they just buying a piece of Better Place ?

EVAN THORNLEY, BETTER PLACE AUSTRALIA:

Yeah, well it’s a strategic partnership, the RACV obviously represents 2 million motorists in
Victoria and they’re very excited about the transition to electric vehicles so we’ll be working with them in roadside assistance, we’ll be working with them on a range of strategic projects but they are also putting their money where their mouth is and making an investment in the company.

ALAN KOHLER: How much do they get for $2 million?

EVAN THORNLEY: Oh, well we don’t talk about valuation Alan but I think it’s part of the wider trend that we are seeing. Obviously we’ve raised our first round in Australia, led by Lend Lease. ACTEW AGL, our utility partner in Canberra, is also an investor. And that’s part of what we are seeing globally. Better place globally has raised about $US700 million in the last two years through the middle of a global financial crisis.

ALAN KOHLER: So why don’t we talk about valuation, I mean as you say Better Place in the US has raised $700 million and you’ve raised some money here, what’s the ballpark? That people are paying?

EVAN THORNLEY: I think the only thing I can talk about, you know, we’re a private company and that’s part of the joy of being a private company. But it’s on the record that Better Place globally did its last $350 million round on a valuation of $US1.25 billion, so that’s obviously very significant for a two-year-old company. But I think it’s about, that’s the scale of the opportunity, there’s a $24 billion petrol market in this country, we think it will be a $40 billion market by 2020, we think that you could make an infrastructure investment of about $600 million dollars that puts you in a position to launch an incredibly aggressive substitute product into that market.

ALAN KOHLER: What do you think the market in total is going to be in supplying electricity both batteries and so on to cars?

EVAN THORNLEY: We think it’s somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of the Australian car fleet by 2020 will be running on electric. So that means probably a larger proportion of the petrol market because the cars that are most likely to be most attracted to going electric are the large ones, the people who drive around the outer suburbs of Australia in our large cities, they’ve got three, four, sometimes five, six thousand dollar petrol bills.

If you can replace that with a $1000 worth of renewable electricity and cover the capital cost of the battery then that’s a pretty attractive financial proposition.

ALAN KOHLER: I suppose as a sidelight that’s not great news for Australian manufacturing since most of the large cars are made here and it doesn’t look like the electric cars will be made here?

EVAN THORNLEY: Well I hope that they will Alan, I think it’s an enormous opportunity for the Australian car industry and the Auto Innovation Council which is a representative body of the whole industry recently put out a vision statement saying that they thought that Australia should be one of the world’s leading producers of large, powerful, zero emissions vehicles. I think they’re right, it’s what customers want in this country, it’s what we know how to build, it’s where the money is, there’s much more margin in large cars than small cars and there’s certainly much more money in the energy for large cars than small cars and I think there’s still a global leadership position open in the large car market so we think that’s – and obviously others think – that’s a tremendous opportunity for the Australian car industry and I hope they take it up.

ALAN KOHLER: So how much more will an electric car cost, which I guess is the cost of the battery?

EVAN THORNLEY: Well we don’t think they’ll cost any more but let me explain why, and this is part of the way Better Place works. When you produce at similar volumes the electric, pure electric vehicles will be as cheap or cheaper to build than their petrol equivalents. You know, an electric motor has got one moving part, it’s a very simple but
very efficient device. The expensive part is the battery but the even more expensive part of the petrol car is the petrol and so…

ALAN KOHLER: But I’m talking about the capital costs not the running costs, what’s the actual cost of the car?

EVAN THORNLEY: Well, so the capital cost of the car would be the same or less than a petrol car…

ALAN KOHLER: …including the battery?

EVAN THORNLEY: Not including the battery, but if somebody like Better Place or indeed the car companies pays for the cost of the battery and then gets a payment from the customer that is equivalent or less than their petrol costs for the running costs then you end up with a car that is as cheap or cheaper to buy and as cheap or cheaper to run.

This is not about a green premium thing, this is not about a small group of people who are willing to pay a lot more money…

ALAN KOHLER: …sounds like a mobile phone plan, is that what it’s like? You give the batteries away and then you charge, the cost of the batteries is embedded in the cost of the plan, is that what happens?

EVAN THORNLEY: Well I guess there’s an analogy there yes, people buy a handset and then they connect to a network. You see, you do that with cars at the moment, you just don’t realise you do. You know, the last page of the contract you didn’t realise you signed
when you bought a car, said ‘and I promise to bring it back to the global oil cartel for the rest of its natural life and pay whatever’s on the bowser’.

ALAN KOHLER: So how will your business work, are you going to charge the cars at home as well as on the road?

EVAN THORNLEY: Absolutely, look the way electric cars work will be different to the way petrol cars work. When you park the car you plug it in, when you get home with your mobile phone you plug it in, you keep the battery being topped up all the time, you can’t really top up a petrol car, there’s no guy running around with a little tanker in every car park topping up all the things or coming to your house and topping it up but you can do that with an electric car.

So the most important thing is when you park the car you plug it in, our job is to put those plug-in points wherever people have their cars parked for a long period of time, that’s mainly in their garage at home, in their car park at work and then in some public places, shopping
centres, airports etc where they’re parked for a long time. So that is what you would do most of the time so instead of going to the global oil cartel once a week and paying whatever price is on the bowser, when you park the car you plug it in and you drive whenever you want.  Every once in a while you do a long drive that will take more energy
than you can store in your battery and to deal with that we have battery swapping stations, they’re completely robotic you can go in and out in less than three minutes and get a brand new fully charged battery in your car so, with a combination of a large number of plug in points and a small number of battery swapping stations, mainly on the outer rims of our major cities and the big connecting highways, you’ll be able to drive wherever you want, whenever you want.

ALAN KOHLER: And when are you going to start rolling these things out, when are you going to start doing it?

EVAN THORNLEY: So we will be building the infrastructure (obviously there are car makers across the world making electric cars, we don’t make cars we provide the infrastructure for the energy) we’ll start in Canberra in late 2011, Canberra and southern New South Wales to do our first roll out and then we’ll be rolling out throughout the country
starting late 2012.

ALAN KOHLER: And will there be cars on the market here, electric cars?

EVAN THORNLEY: Absolutely. I think there’s 51 models currently that are scheduled to be in production in terms of plug-in vehicles around the world by 2012.

ALAN KOHLER: Do you know how many of those are going to be on offer in Australia next year?

EVAN THORNLEY: Oh look, I’m sure all 51 won’t be but the Australian car market historically in the way it’s been opened up in the last few years, you know we have a very diverse car market, most of the things you can buy anywhere in the world you can buy in Australia. We’ll be the third country in the world with a large scale charge network, Better Place is rolling out first in Israel in late 2011, secondly in Denmark but then third in Australia, so we’re going very early with the charge network, it’s a great opportunity for Australia and so we would expect that the car market will follow where the charge networks are.

ALAN KOHLER: If the cars cost the same and the monthly price of running the thing is going to be much the same or about the same, so why is it only going to be 10 or 20 per cent of the fleet, the Australian fleet in 2020?

EVAN THORNLEY: Well I think there’s going to be a tipping point, now exactly when that tipping point is relative to 2020 I can’t tell you. I think it will tip a few years before 2020 and it will be on a very steep growth path.

ALAN KOHLER: So do you think they’ll be a time when every car is electric?

EVAN THORNLEY: Yes I do. Look we know how the movie ends, battery prices are going down, petrol prices are going up, that tells you what’s going to happen it’s just a question of how long that takes. We think it will take between 20 and 25 years for the entire Australian
fleet to transition from petrol to electric because it takes a while for things to transition but we think you’ll kick in to the sort of sharp end of that s-curve around the middle to the early second half of this decade.

ALAN KOHLER: Thanks for joining us Evan Thornley.

EVAN THORNLEY: Thanks very much Alan.

Market demand for the scheme from new large-scale projects, such as wind farms and solar energy plants, has stalled partly because the government used it to reward households installing rooftop solar panels with an $8000 rebate; however, the government intends, from January 2011 to split the scheme into two parts: one for large-scale projects and a second for small-scale technologies such as solar panels and solar hot water systems.

‘We anticipate under these changes we will exceed our 20 % target by 2020′ Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told reporters in Canberra today. But she was reluctant to nominate by how much the target would be exceeded, saying that depended on (1) the take-up by households.

Large-scale projects will deliver about 41,000 kilowatt hours, the “vast majority” of the 2020 target [45,850 kilowatt hours]; ‘what that will deliver is certainty to the large-scale market,” Senator Wong said, adding the change aimed to drive investment. Small-scale projects will be covered by an uncapped fixed price – $40 per megawatt hour of electricity produced – scheme.

The changes mean the average household will pay $3 to -$4 more a year in electricity charges, Senator Wong said, but Parliament will need to approve the changes. And while the Australian Greens have welcomed the decision, questions remain unanswered about how it will operate. The Greens – Senator Christine Milne – said the changes meant thousands of Australians employed in building and running renewable energy power stations could breathe a sigh of relief that their jobs were secure, but with the details still to be clarified, important questions remained about how the scheme would now operate.

‘While the fixed price removes some uncertainty for solar investors, we need to know what long-term certainty the government will offer the industry, given that the solar multiplier will phase out over the coming few years’ she said. The Greens are calling for a gross national feed-in for all forms of renewable energy and a parallel energy efficiency scheme.

Australia’s largest electricity retailer AGL Energy managing director Michael Fraser said today the changes could see construction begin on new wind farm projects “sooner rather than later”. AGL had put a hold on any investment in its proposed Macarthur wind farm, about 300 kilometres west of Melbourne. [The Macarthur project is a joint venture with New Zealand's Meridian Energy] But Mr Fraser said the changes to the scheme could spark investment in new renewable energy projects. ‘We’d like to congratulate them on being decisive in trying to address that issue’ he told analysts at the company’s half-year results presentation. ‘We obviously need to work through the detail of what is being proposed … we’ll work through the detail, get that legislation worked out; I’d like to think that once we understand the detail and see that legislation in place we’ll see projects like Macarthur begin construction much sooner rather than later’.

But really is it still just smoke and mirrors ? The Green Loan program – that could have seen thousands of Australians led by the hand in making changes in energy consumption reductions as well as energy production via solar power – has been neutered.

But the last word comes from someone far smarter and with simple logic, Albert Bartlett.
The now world famous professor of Physics, Al Bartlett, took Australia’s Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s figures apart on climate change emissions and population numbers, showing that Ms Wong is wrong.

He said ‘to accommodate the projected population growth AND to reduce overall annual emissions by 60% would require an annual rate of decrease of per capita emissions of polluting greenhouse gases of 3.543 % per year over the next forty years; the per capita annual emissions would have to be cut in half every 19.6 years !’

Bartlett went on to say that at its present rate of growth, Australia’s population will double by 2050, so thats not 35 million as touted by the federal government, thats almost 45 million people … and we have to import much of our food now; and despite the heavy rainfall and some billions spent of water infrastructure, we’ve had probelms getting water to half the projected national population in 2050.

In Australia we use the Rule of 72 to calculate the effects of growth and reduction; so we can apply this Rule to anything … numbers of patients per doctor; average waiting time patients per doctor then injecting (pun intended) additional patients, you can calculate the new wait time … road / traffic density, add additional users and we could see what I saw in Argentina in Buenos Aires; imagine Queen street 20 lanes wide.

Why local, state and federal governments don’t seem to want to acknowledge this simple calculation is anyone guess … but one thing is for sure, if you educate the population in ways to reduce GHG emissions, not only will they have more disposable income (to pay fat bankers) but it will reduce massive infrastructure costs associated with the soon to be required power stations to supply electricity to 40+ million Aussies and have cut our emissions in half … yer right …

Global Green Plan Ltd, using the name GreenSwitch, was deregistered from the national GreenPower program in September 2008 for failing to buy enough renewable energy certificates, but it continued to trade through its website until November.

The company will now have to buy 4000 renewable energy certificates to make up the shortfall.

‘The ACCC investigated GreenSwitch activities and found the numbers didn’t stack up and that they took money from customers and did not use it for what it was intended. The GreenSwitch company’s website read: ”GreenSwitch is no longer accredited to sell GreenPower renewable energy. We apologise for any inconvenience. GreenSwitch is examining other options in the field of carbon credits.”

The GreenPower program has over a million customers in Australia. It encourages households and businesses to pay extra on their energy bills to support investment in solar, wind and other forms of renewable power. It creates renewable energy certificates equivalent to one megawatt hour of renewable energy. But the program itself has previously been questioned by the ACCC, which wrote to the NSW Department of Water and Energy in August asking that it no longer say the scheme would ”make a real difference” to the environment.

As a result of discussions with the consumer watchdog, the department changed the wording on its website and wrote to energy companies asking that the phrase ”significant results for our environment” be replaced with ”renewable energy for our future”.

The doubts arose because the Federal Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme effectively sets both a ceiling and a floor on greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that voluntary actions to reduce carbon emissions could be seen as simply creating more space under the emissions cap for companies to pollute.

The Government maintains this interpretation of the system is wrong, and voluntary efforts, such as buying GreenPower, would be included in any targets for emissions cuts from the start of this year. The Government’s target range for carbon cuts by 2020 took voluntary cuts into account, the Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, has said.

The ACCC’s GreenSwitch announcement came a day after it said it would take court action against a carbon trading company, Prime Carbon, saying it allegedly made misleading representations about the National Environment Registry and the stock exchange.

One wonders when the ACCC investitages ENERGEX for having customers pay a premium for alternative energy which they were never able to supply and just boosted their bottom line.

However, they went into voluntary administration a week before Christmas after failing to pay a $500,000 bill to the NSW government-owned Integral Energy and other creditors include Origin Energy, AGL Energy, Country Energy and Queensland supplier Energex [Energex have long sold alternative energy at a premium but have never had the number of suppliers to provide promised alternative energy, but hey ... thats the business of profit].

Jackgreen had a staff of nearly 100, who have been sacked and Jackgreen shares that traded at 3.8c before the collapse, are now worthless.

Since Jackgreen’s retail licence was revoked on December 18 and receivers were appointed by the group’s major secured creditor (owed about $11 million), Jackgreen’s accounts showed it’s owed about $25 million in unpaid bills by customers.

Is this just another get rich scheme by people manipulating the federal and state governments going through the motions by splashing cash (stimuli) to companies trading on people’s good faith and paying for alternative energy that never really existed; how will these energy suppliers maintain their ‘green credentials’ if they now have to prove the source rather than buy it from a third party?

Jackgreen did not generate power, it just specialised in selling renewable electricity from cheap methods such as hydro generation, rather than more expensive options such as solar or wind.

So while the public interest in green power generation grows, or may one suggest that like the Victorian ‘green energy’ (buring old growth counts under some morally corrupt interpretations), Jackgreen and other companies of its ilk (like the thermal power) last only long enough to take investor’s money and then going belly up.

It will be interesting if someone could research the names behind these various ‘unlucky’ companies.

He claims ‘electricity demand in the Gladstone area is being driven by strong long-term growth in the industrial, coal mining and minerals processing sectors, and is expected to increase by around 12 per cent in the next five years’.

What he doesn’t say is that the energy is for highly polluting industry in Gladstone.

The new Larcom Creek Substation, as well as the seven kilometres of new 132kV transmission line, which has the capacity to be upgraded to 275kV will help provide additional transmission capacity within the Gladstone State Development Area for industry … not for the benefit of the people of Gladstone.

His bullshit claim that ‘this initiative will help lower electricity demand at peak periods and will ultimately help reduce upward pressure on electricity prices; and the proposal is expected to save the average pool owner $180 a year on what their pool would have otherwise cost to run; and that an estimated 10,000 residential swimming pools are constructed throughout Queensland every year; that the vast majority are not connected to an off-peak tariff and contribute an estimated 6.3 megawatts to peak load, which equates up to $18 million in additional electricity infrastructure costs annually; that the proposal will in no way effect a new pool owners ability to filter their pool and new pool owners will have the option to install a device to allow them to run their filter in peak periods when they are using the pool’.

Mr Robertson also said ‘this enables electricity distributors Ergon Energy and Energex to manage electricity supply at these peak times; and will save millions of dollars in expenditure on our electricity network which is ultimately passed onto all householders in the long-term; for every 1500 pool owners that connect their pool to an off-peak tariff, one megawatt of peak demand can be deferred, which saves $3 million on capital infrastructure spending; the Bligh Government is planning for the future and developing innovative ways to support Queenslanders with their electricity bills by reducing demand on the network; rather than spend millions building infrastructure to meet rising peak electricity demand, we will all benefit if we make off-peak use of swimming pool filtrations systems a requirement for all newly constructed residential pools; by 2020 we estimate that infrastructure costs of $188 million will be avoided through if this measure goes ahead’.

About 11 per cent of the networks capacity of electricity distributors is built to meet the peak level of demand which occurs less than 1% of the time (0.824%) / 3 days per year. If Queensland’s peak demand on Friday was 6,700 MW, the impact of moving 1,500 swimming pools onto off-peak would be 0.015% of demand; or to put that another way, you would need to move 100,000 swimming pools to off-peak to reduce peak demand by 1%, and that’s assuming their pumps were all on at the same time.

So this is yet another trick by the Queensland Government to make people think they are ‘doing something for the environment’, the same way they claimed changing light-bulbs (to poisonous mercury CFL’s) or pumping up your car tyres and running the fridge a degree warmer. If the government really wanted to reduce demand, they could close an aluminium smelter, but no, they want more aluminium smelters.

And that is why I pose the question in another article ‘Is The End Nigh’ ?

But the worm is turning and newspapers seem to be coming out of their hiatus (probably because there was no longer investigative journalism, just namby pamby kowtowing to the high spending politicians.

I’ve long lamented that Victoria has been selling ‘green power’ derived from burning off of old growth forests and how Energex sold GreenSmart at a premium to well meaning consumers when there was no way that much alternative energy (solar and or wind power) was available.

The Federal Government’s GreenPower scheme is crap, a major exercise in spin-doctoring and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has asked a state government agency and energy suppliers to stop telling customers that using GreenPower will ‘‘make a real difference’’ to the environment.

The report suggests (as I have complained about for many years now) that almost a million households buy GreenPower, paying extra on their power bills to support renewable energy and shrink their carbon footprint.

But the problem isn’t so much that the energy companies now have to support and seek out alternative energy, they just not allowed to tell us suckers that using their energy leads to ‘‘significant results for our environment’’.

Federal Minister for Climate No Change, Penny Wong, is said to be facing a growing revolt over changes to the GreenPower scheme, amid claims from the consumer organisation Choice and environmental groups that voluntary efforts to cut emissions will simply allow large polluters to pollute more, but she doesn’t care.

From her perspective, we don’t pay her wages, her salary is chump-change, she is in it for her real employers (which includes post politics) and the big money; the fact that her quality of life like the rest of her family and future generations will be far worse off is of little concern.

While GreenPower customers have made a great contribution to the financial coffers over the years, the fact remains that even with the best efforts of Australian households and businesses in buying Green Power, Australia’s emissions have still grown every year since 1998.  Instead of marketing words ‘You can make a real difference’, they will replace it with ‘You have the power to choose’, but no doubt will be allowed to use green colour themes and rainforests shots (taken overseas as our rain forests are progressively cut down).

The next spin-doctoring phrase is changed from ‘significant results for our environment’ to an equally misleading fabrication ‘renewable energy for our future’, what a crock of shit; this just proves that the energy corporations have succeeded in making believe energy can be renewed … there is no such thing as renewable energy.

The only thing limiting their success may well be the need for this high concentration in alternative energy … Peak Oil … where the world’s oil supplies are fast being depleted.  General Electric is an industrial conglomerate and world leader in manufacturing, and looks to deploying more focus on solar, wind and geothermal energies. While Google is the world’s leading search engine, software and Internet company.

General Electric’s engineers calculated that if only seven per cent of the land area of Arizona was covered with GE PV 165 photovoltaic modules, on a sunny day they would generate daily electricity equal to that of the average daily electricity demand for the entire United States.

In 2007, Google became carbon neutral, in part by covering its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., with 6,000 photovoltaic cells and by planting 3,000 pole-mounted solar panels throughout their campus Google is also a major investor in at least two solar ventures: eSolar, an enhanced thermal solar player and Bright Solar Energy, a nanosolar company.

Currently, billions of dollars are invested in the largest solar play in North America located in western Nevada. There are over 104 claims held by major companies that are backed by Goldman Sachs, Pacific Gas & Electric, Edison International, Israeli and German solar firms, Google, Silicon Valley start-ups and Chevron covering about 405,000 hectares. They will generate about twice what the state of California consumes in electricity in a year (33 gigawatts).

A conservative estimate from this western Mojave solar project predicts that by 2020 it will be generating $50 billion annually. And that’s important because hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created over the next decade – in alternative energy – in a bold plan to solarize the following American cities: Seattle; Portland; Berkeley; San Francisco; Santa Rosa; Sacramento; San Jose; San Diego; Tucson; Salt Lake City; Denver; San Antonio; Austin; Houston; New Orleans; Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.; Madison, Wisc.; Milwaukee; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Orlando.

Oilman T. Boone Pickens has clearly shown that about $700 billion a year is flowing out of the U.S. to purchase imported oil. Pickens’ Plan proposes to create comparable energy in the U.S. from one of his subsidiaries by installing thousands of windmills throughout America. He is asking the U.S. government to bear the cost of $15 billion to install new utility transmission lines. In fact, an entire new electrical grid is needed to accommodate the western Mojave solar project.

This is where General Electric and Google come in. Both companies believe it is crucial to build a 21st century U.S. electrical system. They believe that a “smart” electricity grid will empower utilities and end users to manage electricity more efficiently and with significantly lower emissions while America begins changing-over its petroleum-based energy to clean, renewable green energies.

General Electric and Google will develop and deploy renewable energy and plug-in vehicle related technologies. In addition, they will create utility-scale renewable energy with an initial focus on advanced geothermal technology. State-of-the-art software, controls and services will enable utilities to integrate plug-in vehicles into the conventional grid.

Israel has launched an electric car venture that will spear-head into an oil-free economy. Hundreds of thousands of recharging points are being erected throughout the country. The plan calls for motorists to swap their batteries within a matter of minutes at dedicated stations or recharge them at home or at work. “Oil is the greatest problem of all time — the greatest polluter and promoter of terror. We should get rid of it,” said Israeli President Shimon Peres.

With a host of exciting and affordable new electric cars coming on the market, it’s clear that at least 25 cities in the U.S. are gearing up to power vehicles that do not rely on fossil fuels. Despite the current economic downturn, there are millions of jobs waiting to be created throughout the Western Hemisphere from clean energy partnerships just like the one between General Electric and Google.

Next, we have to solve the problem of how to dispose / recycle all the ‘old’ cars …

“In the last 15 years, more than three million jobs have been directly and indirectly lost in Kano with the closure of more than two-thirds of our industries — due mainly to power shortages,” said Ahmed Rabiu, vice-president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce.”There were 500 industries in Kano in the mid-1990s, but more than 400 have since closed down and the workers left without a means of earning a living,” he told AFP on Monday.

Nigeria has been grappling with a power crisis for almost two decades with its generating plants described as a shambles amid corruption and mismanagement within its sole national power generating company PHCN.

A review of the sector issued last week by a special presidential committee said 85 billion dollars (54 billion euros) would be needed for the country of 140 million people to enjoy a “stable power” supply. Nigeria poured 16 billion dollars into its epileptic power sector under former President Olusegun Obasanjo over the past eight years, but manufacturers say power has become even less reliable.

Twice in recent days, the country was thrown into total darkness with the collapse of the power generation system at its only source of electricity at Shiroro hydro station in central Niger state.

Despite nine new thermal stations being slated for completion, Nigeria remains drastically under-supplied — with the head of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), Ransom Owan, telling AFP last May that demand stood at 20,000 megawatts but that generation capacity was only 3,000 megawatts.

In Kano alone, the daily power requirement stands at 250 megawatts but PHCN’s supply does not exceed 80 megawatts, according to PHCN officials. There are now less than 100 factories operating, under strain, because none of them is producing at half of capacity due to high production costs as a result of lack of power,” said Ali Madugu, head of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) in Kano.

Increased production costs are attributed to the price of diesel, needed to power machinery. Kano once had flourishing textile, plastic, food and beverage industries, as well as foundries and tanneries. But a visit to the city’s three industrial estates of Sharada, Challawa and Bompai shows them desolate with the bulk of the factories now closed.

President Umaru Yar’Adua promised to declare a state of emergency in the power sector by the end of June, but has yet to do so as he fights corruption and unrest in his stated bid to use the country’s vast oil wealth potential to propel its economy into the world’s top 20.

Saidu Dattijo Adhama, a garment manufacturer who closed down his factory and laid-off 314 workers, cited the lack of power as his major reason.  “High interest on bank loans and stiff competition from cheaply produced Asian goods kill local industries, but these pale in significance compared to the lethal blow lack of power inflicts on industries,” Adhama said.

Kano state government has for the past five years been promising to set up an independent power plant, but negotiations with Canadian and Indonesian firms have yet to result in concrete proposals.

And China

A worsening coal shortage means that China faces the prospect this summer of the most extensive power cuts it has seen in four years. Despite encouragement to keep the current flowing, with new approval to raise electricity prices, power generators are struggling to find enough fuel, in part due to China’s clampdown on illegal coal mines.

This, coupled with robust demand for electricity, explains why the National Development and Reform Commission recently said the power shortfall this summer could be as high as 10 gigawatts, with 60% of the disparity in Guangdong province, a manufacturing hub.  But analysts say the shortfall may well be larger than the government economic-planning agency’s forecast.

Cuts are already causing major problems, and the situation may well get worse, not least due to inadequate connections, which hinder regions with surpluses from filling gaps elsewhere. Electricity rationing has been imposed in several provinces, and many power plants are struggling with shrinking coal stocks.

On July 6, inventories at 541 coal-fired power plants connected to the state grid averaged 34.64 million metric tons — the equivalent of 11 to 12 days of stock, below the normal level of 15 days — according to domestic media reports. Stocks at 64 plants were below three days’ supply, while an additional 181 had stocks of less than seven days.

On Tuesday, shares in Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd., China’s largest alumina producer by output, slumped in Hong Kong after the company said two of its smelters in Shanxi province were forced to cut production because of a power shortage.

The Chinese government has been stepping up efforts to close down illegal mines since 2005. Output from small coal mines, which account for nearly one-third of China’s total production, is now stagnant at best, and large state-owned mines haven’t bridged the gap, said Wang Shuai, an analyst with Shanghai-based Orient Securities. At the same time, demand has been growing robustly in the past year, with a slew of new coal-fired electricity capacity coming online.

Yang Tao, an analyst with KGI Securities, estimates that the coal shortage is likely to reach 10 million to 20 million tons this year. Though that volume is a fraction of China’s total coal output — around 2.5 billion tons in 2007 — it is still significant, because more than 80% of China’s electricity is produced by coal-fired power plants.