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The financial markets might be in trouble but renewables are seeing boom times!

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renewable energy

Photo Credit pseudorlaya

A couple of interesting announcements were made in Ireland in the last week.

On the 8th of Oct., Eirgrid, the Irish grid operator launched their Grid25 strategy (pdf warning). In the strategy document they announced they are spending €4 billion reinforcing the Irish distribution grid in the expectation of a 60% rise in electricity usage.

The Irish Environment Minister, John Gormley in his Carbon Budget announced that the Irish government is going to target that 40% of electricity consumed in Ireland would be from renewable sources by 2020. This is an increase over the previously stated, already ambitious target, of 33% from renewables.

Ireland had an average electrical demand of 3.2GW in 2007. A 60% increase means an average consumption of 5GW by 2025 and an average of 4.5GW in 2020. This is the date the government has set as its target of 40% from renewables.

40% of 4.5GW means that Ireland will average 1.8GW from renewables in 2020. Assuming that this will come from wind (there is no other viable renewable energy source in Ireland), this will require 5.4GW of installed wind capacity.

Ireland currently has 1GW of installed wind capacity so to hit the target it needs 4.4GW of wind farms to be built.

That’s 366MW per annum or just over 1MW every day until 2020! A 1MW wind turbine would be a significant structure costing in excess of €1m.

So the Irish government has set as a target the sourcing of 1MW extra from wind energy every day for the next 12 years?

I also spotted today that StrategyEye in their new quarterly report are reporting that investment in the Cleantech sector is up 50% this quarter, compared to the first quarter of 2008.

The financial markets might be in trouble but renewables are definitely seeing boom times!

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Mark Monroe, Sun’s Director of Sustainable Computing talks Green!

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Mark Monroe is Sun Microsystems‘ Director of Sustainable Computing. I had a chat with him the other day about Sun’s thinking around Green IT.

We discussed Sun’s new Santa Clara data center, their pod architecture and their Project Black Box among other things!

Mark had some interesting numbers to share, including the fact that in their Santa Clara data center, they reduced the size of the data center from 202,000 square feet to 76,000 square feet and the number of racks was dropped from 550 to 65 while reducing thier power requirement and increasing the compute capacity!

Towards the end Mark referred to two links on the sun site for further information, they were sun.com/blueprints and sun.com/ecoinnovations.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/16/2008

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/15/2008

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/14/2008

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Any questions for the Chevy Volt team?

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I will be talking to Greg Cesiel (pronounced SEE-SIL) this afternoon. Greg is the Program Director for the Chevrolet Volt – GM’s highly anticipated extended range electric car.

If you have any questions you’d like me to put to Greg, please feel free to leave them in the comments of this post or email them to [email protected].

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GreenMonk Interview with Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist

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I talked to Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist, Rob Bernard the other day. We discussed how large organisations can reduce their environmental footprint, using Microsoft’s own example; we discussed how Microsoft software is helping other companies reduce their carbon footprint and we discussed how Microsoft people and products are helping research into Climate Change.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/09/2008

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  • Next Big Future: Power to Overall Weight Ratio of the 2013 Hyperion Power Nuclear Reactor

    The Hyperion Power Generation uranium hydride reactor will weigh fifteen to 20 tons, depending on whether you’re measuring just the reactor itself or the cask—the container that we ship it in—as well. It was specifically designed to fit on the back of a flatbed truck because most of our customers are not going to have rail. It’s about a meter-and-a-half across and about 2 meters tall. It will generate 27-30 Megawatts of electrical power from 70 MW of thermal power. This means 0.5 to 0.75 tons per MWe for the nuclear reactor.

    I’m not a huge fan of non-renewable energy generation systems but I do recognise that nuclear will need to be part of the oil-less energy generation mix and this technology does appear to be one of the better nuclear options.

    tags: nuclear, nuclear power, uranium hydride

  • Dell customers ignore the offer to plant a tree | Technology | The Guardian

    Dell is still finding it an uphill struggle to persuade its customers to take part in its “Plant a Tree for Me” scheme. Under this plan, customers can choose to spend an extra £1 per notebook or £3 per desktop to offset its estimated carbon emissions for the next three years.

    tags: dell, Plant a Tree for Me, tree, offset

  • Halls of shame: biggest CO2 offenders unveiled | Environment | The Guardian

    Around 18,000 buildings in the UK, including town halls, museums, schools and job centres, are being tested to discover their energy efficiency on a sliding scale where A is the best and G is the worst. Parliament and the Bank both scored a G. Together, they consume enough electricity and gas to pump out 21,356 tonnes of CO2 a year, the equivalent of more than 14,000 people flying from London to New York.

    tags: energy efficiency, electricity, co2, buildings

  • IBM Delivers Breakthrough Storage Capability on Blade Computing Solution Designed for the Office

    IBM announced today a storage breakthrough in blade computing that will allow small and medium-sized customers and branch offices to consolidate multiple storage devices onto a single blade computing system. Building on the leadership design of IBM’s office-ready blade solution, customers can now share information across all blade servers in a single system to help improve utilization and reliability while reducing costs.

    tags: ibm, blade, virtualisation, virtualization

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Climate Change: It’s The Economy, Stupid. Half a Bail-out.

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Hafsól
Creative Commons License photo credit: Flying Kites

I read a headline in the FT this morning, and then twittered it, planning to blog it later. The headline in question was Climate groups’ revenue hits $300bn. I think the number was so big I didn’t really take the implications in. I mean – what is $300bn after all, other than just under half what it takes to bail out the entire US financial system?

According to the FT:

“Companies providing goods and services that tackle climate change now form a bigger industry grouping than the global software and biotechnology sectors combined, according to new research.”

That’s the analysis of HSBC’s global banking and markets research team.  We’d love to see the report in more detail, but its good to see the headline numbers. Its very important to build real momentum around energy and climate change markets now, because as the recession kicks in energy costs are sure to drop again, as they did in the early 1970s, killing that green revolution pretty much stone dead.

The story concludes:

“The HSBC index of climate change companies excludes those that derive only a small proportion of their revenues from low-emissions products or services. The company’s index was designed to help investors gain exposure to companies that are expected to profit from dealing with climate change. HSBC said there was now a “clearly identifiable sector”

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/04/2008

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  • Global Warming: Beyond the Tipping Point: Scientific American

    The most recent major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 projects a temperature rise of three degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees—enough to trigger serious impacts on human life from rising sea level, widespread drought, changes in weather patterns, and the like.

    But according to Hansen and his nine co-authors, who have submitted their paper to Open Atmospheric Science Journal, the correct figure is closer to six degrees C. “That’s the equilibrium level,” he says. “We won’t get there for a while. But that’s where we’re aiming.” And although the full impact of this temperature increase will not be felt until the end of this century or even later, Hansen says, the point at which major climate disruption is inevitable is already upon us. “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” the paper states, “CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm.” The situation, he says, “is much more sensitive than we had implicitly been assuming.”

    tags: climate change, co2

  • The Tide Is Turning: Turbine Rides Underwater Currents Like a Kite: Scientific American

    There is no market yet for turbines that turn the tides into a source of energy from deep beneath the sea. But that has not stopped mechanical engineers at the University of Strathclyde’s Energy Systems Research Unit (ESRU) in Scotland from developing one that will ride the tide while latched to the seabed by a cable—like a kite flying on a windy day.

    tags: esru, tidal energy

  • Eco-Cities: Urban Planning for the Future: Scientific American

    Today it is an almost completely paved naval air base built atop earthen material dredged from the San Francisco Bay in the 1930s. By 2020 it is scheduled to become one of the most sustainable communities in the U.S. According to a master plan from the engineering firm Arup, the 400-acre island would be home to 6,000 new apartments and condominiums surrounded by large buildings along the San Francisco coastline. The homes—and the adjacent businesses they supported—would get 50 percent of their power from renewable resources, including solar electricity and solar water heaters.

    tags: eco-cities, solar water heater, solar energy, arup

  • Saudi Arabia’s Crude Oil Reserves Propaganda

    Saudi Aramco is no longer the world’s leading crude oil producer. Saudi Aramco’s statement of 260 billion barrels of remaining recoverable reserves is almost certainly false. Instead, the remaining recoverable crude oil reserves are probably less than 100 Gb, instead of 260 Gb.

    tags: oil reserves, peak oil, saudi aramco, crude oil