It had to be April 1st, didn’t it, but it was no joke. I doubt if anyone noticed, but yesterday morning while updating this site to enhance your viewing experience, some finger trouble on my part caused a WordPress widget to go berserk and bring down the hosting server. It took about a day to restore from a backup and recreate the subsequent posts. And that merry prankster post I spent hours on has passed its sell-by date, and will have to be put on ice for next year. If it’s still topical.

None of this has done anything to improve my mood. I was in a dark place for a while, and seriously considered giving up this blogging lark altogether. However, my mate Nick at Dream Hosting helped me through it and here we are again. In one of my blacker moments I considered moving to a new hosting service, preferably one that has a position on envionmental issues. A quick Google shows there’s a load of options out there. Here’s a random sample.

“Give your carbon footprint the red card!” say www.greenwebhosting.co.uk, who claim to be an affordable earth-friendly service, 100% solar powered and Fairtrade friendly.

NSDesign Web Hosting say they “recently became one of the few web service companies to become carbon neutral, by completely offsetting our carbon footprint”. NSDesign has partnered with Tree Appeal to offer a tree planting carbon offset service. The presence on the Tree Appeal home page of two photos of that ghastly, misguided old duffer ‘Professor’ David Bellamy doesn’t tempt me to pursue this option.

Eco Web Hosting “provide carbon neutral web hosting and green web hosting throughout the UK”. They offer “individuals and companies a carbon neutral web hosting service. We carefully calculate the carbon emissions of our servers, and offset them by planting trees in Ransom Wood Business Park.”

A swift glance suggests that the majority of ‘green’ web hosting services justify their claims by using carbon offsets. Outfits like Greenwebhosting that invest directly in renewables to power their data centres seem to be pretty thin on the ground. Careful research is needed to make sure you get the right service for your own personal ethical stance. Another complicating factor is price; I pay £9.99 a year for my current site, I would have to pay seven times that amount for a basic solar-powered service with Greenwebhosting, offering a fraction of the web space and bandwidth.

Decisions, decisions. Why does everything have to be so difficult?

On 7th January, BBC News carried an item about a large hydro-electric scheme in Scotland. Monday saw the completion of a major phase of the project, with breakthrough at the end of a 5-mile tunnel at Glendoe, near Fort Augustus, Loch Ness. The cameras were there to capture the moment as the 220 meter long boring machine, nicknamed ‘Eliza Jane’ by local schoolchildren, emerged blinking into the daylight after 18 months.

My initial reaction was one of great surprise, a real “Wow! Where was that hiding?” moment, and I know I’m not the only one. Glendoe is the largest ongoing civil engineering project in Scotland, which when completed will have an installed capacity of about 100MW, producing around 180 million units of green electricity in a year of average rainfall. Its flexibility will help to meet major fluctuations in power demand, with the ability to start generating electricity at full capacity in 30 seconds. When operating at maximum capacity, Glendoe will be able to generate enough electricity to power Glasgow, almost 250,000 homes.

OK, pretty small beer in comparison with, say, China’s Three Gorges project, but this is Scotland’s second largest conventional hydro-electric station and the first large-scale station to be built since 1957. The fact that it’s remained largely unpublicised says a lot about the media and about how Scotland is seen by the rest of the United Kingdom.

It’s fair to say that the film crews only turned up because it was a telegenic event. Once the breakthrough was captured on video, there was very little about the wider project, just a quick interview with a suit and a hard hat, then up, up and away. Another factor in deciding newsworthiness was that the project has been remarkably free of controversy. In England, a proposal involving a 75 square kilometer reservoir formed by a dam 1 kilometer long and 35 meters high would have been bogged down in protest and bureaucracy for years. Scotland, being a relatively unpopulated country, has fewer constraints, and Glendoe has been welcomed by local environmental groups. This from the Scottish and Southern Energy website:

SSE is committed to minimising negative effects on the local environment. The land which will form Glendoe’s reservoir is ‘degraded’ peat bog, meaning it is a peat area which has already been changed by man and has limited biodiversity – because of this Scottish Natural Heritage approved the use of the site for the reservoir.

With all the main components of the hydro scheme being underground, the dam and reservoir are the main structures that will be visible (yet they cannot be seen from any home or public road). In addition, the area around the reservoir is used only for sporting purposes and is not particularly popular with hillwalkers.

If Heathrow Airport only had hillwalkers and “sporting purposes” to consider, we’d have had ten runways by now.

It’s clear that Glendoe’s remoteness within Scotland has enabled the project to proceed quickly and smoothly. Scotland’s isolation within the UK has made the whole thing a very well-kept secret, which is a shame because this is a real success story.

Glasgow Herald “The spark coming from our water”

Scottish and Southern Energy project information

Glendoe Hydro Scheme

The Observer reports that Britain is running out of renewable energy, as a surge in demand from businesses has outstripped the supply of electricity generated from ‘green’ sources. Firms’ interest in reducing their carbon footprint has far exceeded new capacity coming on-stream. This leaves companies which have pledged to become ‘carbon neutral’ with a sizeable headache. EDF is ‘prioritising’ existing customers, Npower says the amount it can supply depends on how much customers can pay, and Good Energy, a renewable-only electricity supplier, is turning away very big orders.

What some might consider a surprising popularity of renewables in the business fraternity is being led by large companies, who are obliged to pay the climate change levy on electricity from fossil fuels. The situation isn’t helped by the snail’s pace of the UK planning system, with wind energy projects which could supply one in six British homes mired in bureaucracy.

So much for the power of the market.

‘Business runs out of green energy supply’

Shares in Renewable Energy Holdings (REH.L) were up today on the news that the green technologies firm has agreed a deal to purchase the Kobylany wind farm site in Poland, which will provide 30 MW of generating capacity with an accompanying off-take infrastructure and transformer station. REH will pay €68,000 per MW of generating capacity, making a total of €2.04m. The agreement allows for an initial lease term of 25 years, with an option to extend for a further 25 years.

The annual lease payment will be €25,000 (plus VAT) with an additional annual payment of €7,000 (plus VAT) for each turbine on the site. It is expected that there will be 15 wind turbines altogether. Construction is expected to start in Spring 2008, financed by REH’s credit facility with Standard Chartered Bank. Good to see the credit squeeze doesn’t apply for renewable projects.

REH is active in wind, wave and biomass. The company owns the CETO wave energy technology, which it is developing in co-operation with Carnegie Corporation.

An article in last Sunday’s Observer (‘How Africa’s desert sun can bring Europe power‘) describes a £5bn plan to generate electricity in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, and export it to Europe. More than 100 solar installations, each equipped with an array of thousands of mirrors, would generate enough power to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs.

The Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) is a joint initiative of the Club of Rome, the Hamburg Climate Protection Foundation and the National Energy Research Center of Jordan, campaigning for the transmission of clean power from deserts to Europe. TREC has researched and developed the DESERTEC concept in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center. In Brussels on November 28, former Club of Rome president Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan presented a White Paper “Clean Power from Deserts – The DESERTEC Concept for Energy, Water and Climate Security” to members of the European Parliament.

The project aims to exploit cheap desert land using a technique known as ‘Concentrating Solar thermal Power’ (CSP). A CSP installation consists of an array of adjustable mirrors covering around a square kilometre. The mirrors focus the sun’s rays onto a central pillar filled with water. Temperatures inside the pillar rise to 800C, causing the water to be vapourised into superheated steam which is channelled off and used to drive turbines which in turn generate electricity. The residual heat will then be used to power desalination processes to provide fresh water.

White Paper

I found it quite amusing that the Observer can’t tell the difference between CSP and photovoltaics. Or perhaps they just couldn’t find a picture of a CSP site in their archive and thought their readers would be too dumb to notice.

Afterword: Having published this post I went off to do something else, but found myself thinking some more about the TREC scheme. It has interesting political implications if it goes ahead. It seems the next logical step in the process of incorporating North Africa and the Middle East into some kind of Greater Europe. Where will Europe’s southern boundary be redrawn, and how will it be defended? And how will issues of energy supply security be addressed?

I just don’t know.

The environmental propaganda machine continues to rumble forward on ‘The Archers’, BBC Radio 4′s venerable soap opera and green information channel. Tuesday’s episode featured an earnest discussion of anaerobic digesters on farms, turning animal muck into methane and generating electricity for sale back to the grid. According to jet-setting career agriculturist Debbie Aldridge, calling home from Eastern Europe where she runs her father’s offshore organic farming operation apparently single-handedly, the Germans are streets ahead of the UK with this technology. She wants a piece of the action at Home Farm.

It’s taken a while for art to imitate life. Last year the BBC reported how an agricultural college was using methane from the muck produced by its dairy herd to power its working farm all year round (‘College harnesses cow pat power‘ ), saying “the technology is used at more than 1,000 farms in Germany but only at a handful in the UK”.

Why are we so far behind here? The natural conservatism (small ‘c’) of UK farmers? Problems financing the project? General uncertainties in the farming industry? The idea seems to tick all the right boxes: cheap electricity, lower emissions, reduced water pollution. For me, the only fly in the ointment is the need for artifical fertilisers to replace the muck that used to be spread on the fields.

The reason they’re ahead in Germany is, you guessed it, money. In 2004, Renewable Energy World reported:

In Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, the incentive system for anaerobic digestion consists of both a subsidy for the green electricity generated, and of either investment subsidies or fiscal incentives. Of all the countries reviewed, Germany has the best investment climate for anaerobic digestion at this level, the main reason being its high feed-in tariff for the electricity generated – 10.1 Eurocents/kWh. Moreover, this rate is guaranteed for a period of 20 years.

Sounds tempting. I bet Brian Aldridge would jump at that deal, if it were available in the UK.

Dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum…

A new community-owned hydro power project has launched a share offer today. Torrs Hydro New Mills Ltd plans to install new hydro-electric technology in the 200 year old weir at the Torrs in New Mills, Derbyshire. The company, a joint venture between Water Power Enterprises and High Peak Friends of the Earth, is an ‘Industrial and Provident Society’ which was officially formed in September 2007. It has four founding directors and has now launched a share offer to help raise £126,000 for the project. Each share will cost £1 with a minimum shareholding of £250 and a maximum of £20,000. Shareholders will get a “modest” rate of interest on the shares, but most of the profit from the project will go as grants for regeneration and environmental projects in the New Mills area.

The hydro project, only the second of its kind to be installed in the UK, will generate enough green electricity for 140 homes, as well as cash to fund local regeneration schemes. It uses a modernised version of a 2000 year old Greek invention – the Archimedean screw – to generate energy. The technology is very efficient at generating electricity from weirs, and has huge potential for installation in other old mill sites throughout the region.

Richard Body of High Peak Friends of the Earth said:

“This region’s got an abundance of water power which can deliver pollution-free energy. By investing in the regeneration of these old hydro sites we can do our bit to tackle climate change and regenerate our communities at the same time. However we also need to see the Government do much more to help renewable technologies such this flourish in the UK. They can start by introducing a strong climate change law which commits the UK to cutting its carbon dioxide emissions by at least 3 percent a year.”

Prospectus (available by download from Saturday 24th November 2007)

High Peak FoE Press releases

Water Power Enterprises

A plan to build the world’s largest power station fuelled by biomass – in this case wood chips – has been approved by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The £400m, 350 MW plant was proposed by London-based Prenergy and will be built in Port Talbot in South Wales. It will burn some 3m tons of wood chips annually, which will be shipped in from the USA and Canada. Said Energy Secretary John Hutton:

“This will be the biggest biomass plant in the world, generating enough clean electricity to power half of the homes in Wales. It joins eight major renewables projects already given the green light in the past 12 months alone and is another important step towards the low carbon economy envisaged by the Prime Minister.”

When completed at the turn of the decade, the plant will contribute around 70% of the Welsh Assembly’s 2010 renewable electricity target. It will be able to produce continuous, base-load electricity for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year over its expected 25 year lifespan.

Government News Network press release

Prenergy non-technical summary (2.3 MB PDF)

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has published an ‘Issue Brief’ on biofuels. The document, the first output from WBSCD’s new workstream on clean energy technology, provides an overview of biofuel production and use with a special focus on the transport sector. It describes first and second generation biofuels and explores their potential as a possible substitute for fossil fuels.

The Issue Brief tries to unpack key issues and analyse the many variables involved in biofuels policy so as to open debate by business on the main challenges for this energy source. Although intended primarily for a business audience, the brief provides a general understanding that could serve to inform the general public as well.

Read the press release online

Download the Issue Brief (PDF 751 kb)

It’s a good job someone’s looking at increasing the supply of silicon for the solar industry (“IBM Recycles Silicon”) . In his article “Profit from the End of Cheap Oil“, Ian Cooper describes how the hopes of the solar industry to provide a viable energy alternative to oil depend on a reliable and continuing supply of polysilicon. At $70 per kilogram, the price of polysilicon has doubled since 2004. Very few solar companies world-wide have the resources to meet an insatiable demand for panels, so they have started investing in polysilicon manufacturers to fund the construction of new facilities and increase output.

Without solar panels, there’s no solar power. The industry is dead in the water. All the current activity in the solar sector will grind to a halt.

Face it. Strong global demand for solar isn’t going to slow in the face of $95 oil . . . and there’s plenty to get excited about thanks to China’s insatiable demand ahead of the Summer 2008 Olympics, and the United States’ solar energy plans:

· George W. Bush has announced plans to increase federal government spending on solar energy to $150 million.

· California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has pledged a million solar rooftops by 2017.

· And New York’s Governor George Pataki has inked a bill offering a $5,000 tax credit to homeowners who install solar-power roofing.

· Add to this the Chinese parliament’s plans to convert 10% of the country’s energy consumption to renewable energy sources by 2020, including the use of solar-generated electricity and solar water heating, and you’ve got an emerging industry with only a select few players for all the wealth to flow to.

Small wonder that there’s a “feeding frenzy” going on in the solar industry. Whether this bubble will burst depends on the supply of raw materials and the future development of alternative technologies which might change the industry beyond recognition.