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The clean energy industry is turning Nevada green

by Cass Barret Posted on March 21, 2014

The clean energy industry is turning Nevada green

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Few things could be less sustainable than an entertainment mecca in the middle of a desert. But there’s more to Nevada than the Vegas Strip, and investors in the Silver State are finding better ways of wagering their money than in slot machines.

On Thursday, leaders from both major parties joined forces to tout Nevada’s clean technology sector. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) held a press conference to laud the $5.5 billion that has been invested in the industry in the state since 2010.

The figure was calculated by the Clean Energy Project, a Las Vegas–based advocacy group for the renewables sector. The group credits state tax breaks for growing clean energy investment. From its new report:

Due to Nevada’s vast solar, wind, geothermal and biomass resources, the state has excelled at meeting demand in and out of its borders leading to significant clean energy capital investments. As of 2014, Nevada has 480 MW of clean energy developed or being developed to meet its energy demand and 985 MW of clean energy exported to other states.

The cumulative capital investments for both in-state and out-of-state clean energy projects, including transmission lines to move the clean electrons, total $5.5 billion since 2010. Nevada’s Investment of $500 million in tax abatements has attracted $5.5 billion of capital investment in clean energy projects to the state.

According to the report, $2.3 billion worth of solar projects are operating in Nevada, many of them installed by an 80-company-strong solar industry that employs 2,400 people. Geothermal energy has long been an important part of Nevada’s energy mix, and the report notes about $1 billion of investment in that sector since 2009. Wind energy remains nascent, though 66 turbines are spinning at the Spring Valley Wind project.

All of these projects will help Nevada meet its goal of getting 25 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025. About two-thirds of the electricity sold in Nevada currently comes from natural gas, with a hefty dose of coal in there as well.

“Renewable energy is one of the focuses of our economic development,” Sandoval said Thursday against the backdrop of the solar-powered “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign. “I think that the taxpayers can be confident that they’re getting a good return on their dollar.”


Source
Going Green in the Silver State, KLAS-TV Las Vegas

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The clean energy industry is turning Nevada green

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Wall Street Investors Take Aim at Farmland

by sreg2 Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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In a couple of posts last fall (here and here), I showed that corporations don’t do much actual farming in the US. True, agrichemical companies like Monsanto and Syngenta mint fortunes by selling seeds and chemicals to farmers, and grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill reap billions from buying crops cheap and turning them into pricey stuff like livestock feed, sweetener, cooking oil, and ethanol. But the great bulk of US farms—enterprises that generally have razor-thin profit margins—are run by independent operators.

That may be on the verge of changing. A recent report by the Oakland Institute documents a fledgling, little-studied trend: Corporations are starting to buy up US farmland, especially in areas dominated by industrial-scale agriculture, like Iowa and California’s Central Valley. But the land-grabbing companies aren’t agribusinesses like Monsanto and Cargill. Instead, they’re financial firms: investment arms of insurance companies, banks, pension funds, and the like. In short, Wall Street spies gold in those fields of greens and grains.

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Wall Street Investors Take Aim at Farmland

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What the State of the Union Missed

by Posted on January 29, 2014

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What the State of the Union Missed

Posted 29 January 2014 in

National

Viewers of last night’s State of the Union address got the impression that President Obama supports an “all of the above” approach to America’s energy policy. But despite this rhetoric, the President’s own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to cut back on renewable fuel in 2014 by slashing obligations under the Renewable Fuel Standard. This proposal threatens severe economic and environmental effects: drivers will pay billions in increased fuel costs, oil companies stand to increase their profits by more than $10 billion and, according to a recent analysis, 30 million additional metric tons of carbon dioxide will be released into the air as a result of increased petroleum consumption. That’s the equivalent of 5,600,000 more cars on the road.

By signaling a retreat on renewable fuel, the Administration is also threatening the immense progress the industry has made toward commercialization of advanced fuels like cellulosic ethanol. This map, based on data from the Biotechnology Industry Organization, details 68 facilities and more than $5.9 billion of investment in the fuels of tomorrow:

We hope the Administration and the EPA listen to the thousands of comments sent by farm families, small business owners, labor groups and environmental advocates in defense of renewable fuel and revise their proposal for the sake of a clean energy future.

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Midwestern farmers harvesting solar power

by BDRWilliam Posted on January 28, 2014

Midwestern farmers harvesting solar power

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USDA

It’s not just milk, cereal, and soy that’s being produced on Midwestern farms. Increasingly, farmers in the region are also harvesting their own solar power. That’s according to a report in Midwest Energy News:

Solar installations have been taking off in many areas of the Midwest, but perhaps nowhere more so than in farm country.

“It’s a huge buzz now throughout the agriculture industry,” said Todd Miller, sales director for CB Solar in Ankeny, Iowa.

The Midwest is a conservative place, and today’s conservatives tend to reject renewable energy. So what is it about farms that has the region’s growers so eager to reap power from the sun?

For one, farms tend to use a lot of power, with monthly electric bills sometimes running into the thousands of dollars. They need electricity to run fans, to heat and cool barns for dairy cows, to cool milk and produce, to dry grain and move it around.

Many farms also have barns with roofs that lend themselves to holding up solar panels. And if there’s not a suitable roof, there’s usually plenty of space for a freestanding array.

In addition, farmers are accustomed to thinking long-term and investing in their business. Many of them have maintained the farm in their family for generations, and expect it to continue as a family-owned enterprise that will reap the benefits of investment in solar energy for decades to come.

And they tend to be an independent lot who like the prospect of producing their own power.

It might be time for Midwestern politicians to start listening to their farmers.


Source
In the Midwest, farmers leading the way on solar power, Midwest Energy News

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Pesticide in frozen food sickens hundreds in Japan

by DelilahRichards Posted on January 9, 2014

Pesticide in frozen food sickens hundreds in Japan

By

Rebecca Siegel

Some of the food that’s been sold out of freezers in Japan recently has had a strange smell to it — a fishy odor that has nothing to do with seafood.

It’s the smell of malathion, an insecticide.

More than 1,000 people have been sickened so far by eating frozen foods laced with the pesticide, according to some media reports. From the BBC:

[Food company Maruha Nichiro Holdings] is recalling at least 6.4 million food packages manufactured at a factory in Gunma prefecture, north of Tokyo.

It started the food recall last week, recovering more than one million packages so far.

“The products will have a strong smell and eating them may cause vomiting and stomach pain,” Maruha said in a notice to consumers.

How did the insecticide end up in pizza, chicken nuggets, and the like? That’s something the nation’s law enforcers are desperately trying to figure out. Bloomberg reports that police are interviewing hundreds of factory workers:

The matter was referred to police after prefectural health officials found no evidence of contamination during production at the facility where the food was made. …

“The company is partly to blame because they weren’t testing,” said Edwin Merner, president of Atlantis Investment Research Corp. in Tokyo, which manages about $3 billion in assets. “You’ll see a big drop in sales of the food.”

Calls to mind this classic moment from the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Maybe there was malathion on his sushi?


Source
Hundreds report symptoms amid Japan food pesticide scare, BBC
Over 1,000 ill as Japan tainted food scandal widens: report, Agence France-Presse
Japan Police Query Workers in Tainted Food Investigation, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Fracking boom is fueling a plastics boom

by oe8o7kdg Posted on November 22, 2013

Fracking boom is fueling a plastics boom

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Plastic crap that Americans are accustomed to importing from Asia is increasingly being manufactured right here in the U.S. — all thanks to the country’s crappy fracking boom.

Chemical and plastics companies use natural gas as a raw material, and now they can get it cheaply in the U.S. As Living on Earth reports, “The fracking boom has led to renaissance for the chemical industry, particularly for plastics makers in Louisiana, where the plants are major employers.”

Other states are seeing growth in the plastics business too. Asia’s largest chemical producer, Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics Group, has announced that it’s planning to spend $2 billion expanding its manufacturing operations in Texas. Bloomberg reports:

“Because of shale gas, the cost of making petrochemical and plastic-related products is becoming very competitive here in the United States,” [Formosa Vice Chair Susan] Wang said. “It’s probably as cost effective as in the Middle East.” …

Wang said the Taipei-based company expects to receive the environmental permits for an expansion at its Point Comfort facility, about 125 miles southwest of Houston, sometime within the next year. Construction can begin immediately thereafter, she said. …

U.S. shale gas and oil will replace naphtha in the production of basic chemicals as their costs are lower, [said] Simon Liu, vice president at Yuanta Securities Investment Trust Co., which oversees [$10 billion] of assets and holds shares of Formosa Plastic Group companies.

“Investing in U.S. petrochemical plants is the right move,” Liu said.

This isn’t the first questionable manufacturing boom to be fueled by fracking. Ammonia factories are also being built and expanded to take advantage of cheap natural gas.


Source
Fracking Boosts Plastic Production, Living on Earth
Chemicals Maker’s $2 Billion U.S. Bet Driven by Fracked Gas, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Fracking boom is fueling a plastics boom

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Larry Summers, Secular Stagnation, and the Great Investment Drought

by Lubomyr21t Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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This weekend Paul Krugman lavished immense praise on a presentation that Larry Summers gave to the IMF a few days ago, and I’ll confess that I’m a little puzzled by this. Not because it wasn’t a good presentation. It was. But it’s quite short and basically just tosses out an idea without really elaborating on it much. Here’s the idea: we might be in a permanent condition of slow economic growth—i.e., secular stagnation.

The evidence Summers presents is pretty straightforward: during the aughts, we had a huge housing bubble, and yet the economy still performed only listlessly:

Too easy money, too much borrowing, too much perceived wealth. Was there a great boom? Capacity utilization wasn’t under any great pressure. Unemployment wasn’t under any remarkably low level. Inflation was entirely quiescent. So somehow even a great bubble wasn’t enough to produce any excess in aggregate demand.

That’s true enough, and you can argue that this is a new thing. As recently as the late 90s, the dotcom bubble did produce a boom and did push employment to very high levels. That in turn put pressure on employers to offer higher wages, and sure enough, wages went up.

But the housing bubble, despite being even bigger than the dotcom bubble, did no such thing. As Summers says, it didn’t produce high employment; it didn’t push wages up; and it didn’t get the economy running at full capacity. And today, six years after the bubble burst and four years into recovery, with the world’s financial plumbing once again functioning just fine, the economy still isn’t running at high capacity. What’s up?

When I’ve talked about this before, I haven’t framed it as a problem of the natural interest rate going below zero, as Summers does. Instead, I’ve usually framed it as a problem of an investment drought. There simply aren’t enough promising real-world investments available, which means that lots of money is either sitting on the sidelines or else getting diverted into financial rocket science.

Now, in one sense, this is just two ways of saying the same thing: there aren’t enough promising real-world investments at current interest rates. It doesn’t matter that real interest rates are already negative. Reduce them even further, and more investments will look like winners. And yet, if Summers is right and this is a permanent condition,1 we’re still left with a question: what happened to produce a world in which, for an extended period of time, even negative interest rates aren’t low enough to make real-world investments attractive in sufficient quantities to get the economy humming?

The answer matters, because it determines our response. Krugman mentions demographics as one possible answer: slowing population growth means slower economic growth. Another possibility is increased automation: as machines take over more and more work, there are fewer jobs available and less income to spend. There’s also Tyler Cowen’s great stagnation thesis. Or the possibility that increasing income inequality means that the future will have fewer and fewer middle-class buyers to power a consumer economy, and investors know it. Or perhaps, as Jared Bernstein suggests, the culprit is the financialization of America (and the world):

I wonder if the key is “secular,” as in sector, as in sectoral misallocation. Many observers of the US economy have worried about the impact of financialization—the relative growth of the finance sector—on growth. Part of the concern is the bubble machine, and part is the devotion of considerable resources to non-productive activities.

And the misallocation is profound. Who out there thinks financial markets are playing their necessary role of allocating excess savings to their most productive uses? Anyone?

Not me. And yet, I wonder if this is really something that can be blamed on Wall Street? I’m all for reining in the size of the financial sector, but I confess to thinking that there must be something deeper than this that underlies our problem. Wall Street would happily allocate more money to real-world investment opportunities if the demand were there. But it’s not, even with essentially free money. For some reason, the investment community doesn’t believe that expanding production of real-world goods and services to maximum levels will pay off. If Summers is right, this is not a temporary condition that can be solved with monetary policy, it’s a permanent change in the economy. But why? One way or another, the answer has to get back to the real world. That’s where everything starts.

1Something that’s still up in the air. Usually, when bad economic times last long enough, people start to thing they’ll last forever. Ditto for good economic times. It may be that we’re just in an usually bad recession and need more time to pull out. However, the evidence of the aughts really does suggest that something happened to the economy starting around 2000, which means it’s been going on for an awfully long time.

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Larry Summers, Secular Stagnation, and the Great Investment Drought

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Discover Ways To Select, Store And Prepare Coffee

by Jim Bow Posted on November 2, 2013

Did you click on this short article never having drank a cup of coffee prior to? Oh, you’re in for it. Perhaps you have actually attempted many different kinds of coffee, but you want to see exactly what else is out there. Keep reading to discover more details on the various ranges of coffee that you can attempt.

You will get a better coffee the more costly it is. Although this may not sound attractive, coffee really needs making some financial investments in outstanding beans and various other tools so that you can take pleasure in the very best coffee. If you attempt to be economical, you’ll never ever get the coffee you desire.

Coffee is respectable for you if you lay off the extras. The real coffee is not unhealthy; it; s the sugar and cream lots of people put in it. Make coffee healthy by including stevis or milk latte with honey instead.

Coffee should not be kept in the freezer for more than 3 months. Exceeding that time frame indicates the coffee will likely start to spoil.

If you liked your coffee on ice, attempt cold-brewing your very own coffee focused. There are numerous dishes offered online; Most involve mixing a few cups of water into several ounces of ground coffee, enabling the mixture to sit overnight. When the grounds are strained out, you are left with a smooth, rich concentrate that can be watered down with milk or water and ice.

If you wish to assist the Earth out a little in your coffee habit, then purchase filters that are reusable. These will spare you from losing a bunch of paper filters in the future. This is green for the earth, and saves the green in your wallet. Many recyclable filter lovers likewise think their coffee tastes much better this way.

If you grind your very own coffee, be sure to just grind the amount you will be using that day. If you grind too much and just leave your coffee around, the elements will take the freshness and taste of it. Contrary to exactly what lots of think, storing coffee in the fridge does not leave it fresh.

Use your utilized coffee grounds in your compost heap! Coffee grounds offer lots of advantageous components to a compost heap including pest control. Coffee grounds contain caffeine which assists restrict the development of fungus that can quickly destroy your veggie garden. The next time you brew a fresh pot of joe do not get rid of those grounds; include them to your compost pile! Make the most of any repeat customer program that your neighborhood coffee home runs. Even a single-unit independent location could have a punchcard system where you get a free cup of coffee for every five that you buy. Never ever throw these away, even for locations you do not frequent much. They can still amount to complimentary cups of joe in time.

Do not make use of hot water to make your coffee. Lots of people think this is the best way to make their coffee hot; the reality is that the only thing this does is decrease its flavor. You should be making use of water that is not only cold, however charcoal filtered if possible. Do you know more about coffee now than before you read this post. Ideally, you are now more prepared to go and purchase that next cup of joe. Whether you make it yourself or purchase that special cup from a business, you make sure to delight in that fresh tasting blend.

Some of the best organic coffee you can get is organo gold coffee . Visit my website for more information on how you can sell organic coffee to create financial freedom in your life.

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More of America’s wind turbines are actually being built in America

by s1cx54s Posted on August 13, 2013

More of America’s wind turbines are actually being built in America

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Homegrown.

The equipment that’s powering America’s wind energy boom is increasingly being made right at home.

In 2007, just 25 percent of turbine components used in new wind farms in the U.S. were produced domestically. By last year, that figure had risen to 72 percent, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy. And exports of such equipment rose to $388 million last year, up from $16 million in 2007.

This happened even as the U.S. was installing a whole lot of turbines. More than 13.1 gigawatts of new wind power capacity was added to the U.S. grid in 2012, representing $25 billion of investment. That made wind the nation’s fastest-growing electricity source last year, faster even than natural gas–fueled power.

Unfortunately, there were job losses in the sector last year, with the number of wind industry manufacturing jobs falling to 25,500 from 30,000 the year before. That’s because there was a lull and some factory closures after a mad scramble to fulfill orders placed before a federal tax credit expired. (It was renewed for this year, but its future is still up in the air.)

The better news is that the number of workers both indirectly and directly employed by the sector grew to 80,700 in 2012, up from 75,000 the year before.

And as the wind energy sector has grown, so too has the diversity of companies that comprise it, as shown in this chart from the DOE report:

Energy DepartmentClick to embiggen.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Our Response to API’s E15 Report

by Posted on January 29, 2013

Our Response to API’s E15 Report

Posted 29 January 2013 in

National

Big Oil unveiled a new report today, filled with misleading claims and half-truths about one of our favorite renewable fuels: E15. Our response:

Today’s report from oil-lobby backed research group Coordinating Research Council displays clear bias and ignores millions of miles and years of testing that went into EPA’s approval of E15.

CRC’s bias is clear – API is a “sustaining member” of the group – and so it’s no surprise that the CRC is negative about E15. They’re playing right in to API’s misguided ploy to overturn the Renewable Fuel Standard.

Over 6.5 million miles of testing, equivalent to 12 round trips to the moon, makes E15 the most tested fuel, ever.

The CRC study by contrast doesn’t reflect a single mile driven, but rather, car components tested in isolation. By researchers’ own admission, testing also included an “aggressive” E15 blend that includes more water and acid than what consumers would use in their cars. Meanwhile, auto makers like Ford and GM have approved E15 for use in their new vehicles and some of the world’s most demanding cars and drivers at NASCAR use ethanol exclusively. This is a fuel that works and is already in use.

The oil industry is intent on maintaining its control over America’s fuel supply, and this kind of biased research is exactly why we must continue to protect the Renewable Fuel Standard and the investment it has supported. Luckily Congress had the foresight to create the Renewable Fuel Standard to ensure that drivers have access choices with renewable fuel at the pump.

 

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