World is Green

Atanu looks at the global energy needs in the future and analyses the option of using solar or nuclear energy for India and concludes:

As far as I am concerned, the answer to the question–solar or nuclear–is a no-brainer. It has to be solar. Otherwise India is up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

” When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? “

- John Maynard Keynes

Quote of the day (Gil Friend)

BBC NEWS | Special Reports | The cost of food: Facts and figures

The cost of food: Facts and figures
Explore the facts and figures behind the rising price of food across the globe.

Line graphs showing rising food prices 2005-07 and price rises by food type, 2007

Graphic illustrating price rises in corn, rice, soya and wheat

As biofuels get the blame, the BBC provides a FAQ which provides some analyses into the real causes.

What are the main causes?

The first reason why prices are rising is growth in the world’s population, which is expected to top nine billion by the middle of the century.

That is an incredible number of mouths to feed and will put pressure on a range of resources, including land, water and oil, as well as food supply.

But lurking behind the headline figures for population is an even more significant factor pushing up prices, and that’s the economic miracle driving emerging economies such China and India.

To put it bluntly, rich people eat more than poor people, and all this economic growth is generating a whole new tier of middle-class consumers who buy more meat and processed food.

The FAO estimates that processed food now accounts for 80% of food and beverage sales.

What other factors are involved?

There is also the added environmental pressure all these extra people are loading onto the planet, as well as the impact of climate change.

Desertification is accelerating in China and sub-Saharan Africa, while more frequent flooding and changing patterns of rainfall are already beginning to have a significant impact on agricultural production.

And global warming has played a significant role in another driver of rising prices: the shift in agricultural production from food to biofuels.

Ethanol production is on course to account for some 30% of the US corn crop by 2010, dramatically curtailing the amount of land available for food crops and pushing up the price of corn flour on international commodity markets.

So what is happening in India? The report argues that the real issue is the purchasing power of the poor and farm productivity.

There has never been an acute shortage of food in India, not even during the infamous famine in Bengal in 1943 in which more than 1.5 million people are estimated to have died of starvation.

The problem then - and now - is entitlement or access to food at affordable prices.

Given the low purchasing power of India’s poor, even a small increase in food prices contributes to a sharp fall in real incomes.

The current crisis in Indian agriculture is a consequence of many factors - low rise in farm productivity, unremunerative prices for cultivators, poor food storage facilities resulting in high levels of wastage.

Kleiner Perkins going greener | Cleantech.com

Kleiner Perkins said the $500 million Green Growth Fund is intended to help speed mass market adoption of solutions to the world’s climate crisis.

John Denniston, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, will co-manage the new fund along with Ben Kortlang, plucked from Goldman Sachs where he previously co-directed alternative energy investments.
[...]

The VC firm also announced the formation of KPCB XIII, a $700
million fund that will invest in cleantech, information technology and
life sciences ventures.

Kleiner Perkins said within the cleantech sector, KPCB XIII would
mainly back early-stage entrepreneurs, while the Green Growth Fund
would support companies that have already entered their growth phase.

DD’s Eco Notes

# There are no effect-free solutions. We need to guesstimate the effects of all potential solutions, measure their real effects if we put them into practice, and compare alternatives to the best of our collective ability.
# We cannot afford to paint things black or white. We need to be able to differentiate a wide range of shades of green, and be willing to give new technologies some extra slack.

X Prize: $100 Million for Clean Fuels

In its richest and largest competition yet, the foundation will divvy up some $100 million for transformations in biofuels, clean aviation fuel, energy storage, the provision of basic utilities for developing nations, and other categories.
[...]
The X Prize Foundation has previously launched competitions for breakthroughs in private space travel, genome mapping, and high-mileage cars. In 2004 aerospace entrepreneur Burt Rutan won the Ansari X Prize by sending his rocket-powered SpaceShipOne to an altitude of more than 367,000 feet with a pilot and the weight equivalents of two passengers. More recently, Google ( GOOG) has backed an X Prize of $30 million for the first team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit video, images, and data back to Earth.

Google Lunar X Prize Team Announcement
[...]
He says one prize will be for innovation in providing water, broadband, and clean electricity to villages in the developing world. Other energy categories will be for innovation in energy transmission and the construction of energy-efficient houses and commercial facilities.

More details on their website (PDF). The incentives of X Prize has proved before to be powerful enough to solve issues never before solved like non-government space flights.

V.C.’s Clean Energy Investments - National Business News - Portfolio.com

“You start to see this rise in enormous appetite for energy, and someone’s got to feed that mouth,” says Erik Straser, general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, a V.C. firm that has invested more than $400 million in clean energy ventures.
[...]
“The primary difference between what is happening now and what has
happened in prior market cycles is it’s now economically feasible and
desirable to pursue these types of solutions,” says John Balbach,
managing partner at Cleantech Group, a network of clean technology
investors and companies. “If the outcome is less pollution or reduced
carbon or some impact on climate change, that can benefit in a positive
way, but the primary [concern] is return on investment.”

MIT Class Calculates Carbon Footprint of “The Man” | Wired Science from Wired.com

The MIT class, in a paper (pdf) to be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment, estimated that no American, even the homeless and itinerant Buddhist monks, could get their total “share” of energy usage below 130 gigajoules, which is more than twice the global average, and directly correlated with carbon footprint.

That’s because the basic infrastructure of the United States including police, roads, libraries, courts and the military were allocated equally to all citizens of the country. Thus, even if one’s personal consumption in terms of purchased products and lifestyle were minimal, he or she would still bear their share of the systemic carbon load, according to the methodology of this study. In common terms, each and every U.S. resident is carbon-heavier other countries’ citizens.

This is the real issue that needs to be addressed.

Slashdot points to an article by Joe Romm, who is considered “one of the world’s leading experts on clean energy, advanced vehicles, energy security, and greenhouse gas mitigation” discussing the merits of solar thermal energy.

Frankly, I have never seen a better article on this and is an eye opener to me.

Mr. Romm understands the issue very clearly because the title of the article is “The technology that will save humanity” and not the other way round of saving the Earth. As Atanu Dey pointed out to me sometime back, it is us; humans; who need saving and not the Earth.

Romm after the excellent start, goes on to explain the constraints of a good carbon free source of energy.

He then goes on to provide a good history of the technology and its use in the last century and the developments in this century.

Solar has the biggest potential of all and looks like thermal electricity is better than PV.

The Tata Mundra power project has been provided the necessary loans and subsidy by the IFC to start the project. As I argued yesterday in Coal power or no power, the power plants need to be built.

Dot Earth considers the dilemma and provides more stark numbers.

India faces power shortages that leave more than 400 million people without access to electricity, mainly in poor rural areas. The country needs to expand generation capacity by 160,000 megawatts over the next decade, and this new project helps address this gap.

As Michael Wines reported last year, the 700 million people of sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa have access to the same amount of electricity used by the 38 million people of Poland.

Dot Earth concludes, “Is all of this bad? If you’re one of many climate scientists foreseeing calamity, yes. If you’re a village kid in rural India looking for a light to read by, no.”