Wind Energy

Review: The Impending World Energy Mess by Robert Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling

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In The Maltese Falcon a character tells detective Sam Spade, “By Gad, sir, you’re a character, that you are! Yes, sir, there’s never any telling what you’ll do or say next, except that it’s bound to be something astonishing.”* I’m telling Bob Hirsch the same thing. There’s no denying the man’s considerable credentials within the energy industry, nor his contribution to peak oil scholarship as principal author of the first major U.S. government report to take the issue seriously. But neither is there any predicting what outlandish thing he’ll propose next in his efforts to spread the message.

Lessons from the early years of offshore wind in Europe

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The industry is rapidly becoming a major industrial sector of its own. It is rapidly transforming from an experimental sub-sector into one of the largest infrastructure building activities in Europe, with a soon-to-be-macro impact on energy geopolitics. The regulatory process drives everything. First, the economics need to make sense. Second, the permitting process needs to be understandable and stable.

Transition & responses – Oct 12

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– 10/10/10 day of climate action (photo slideshow)
– Review of the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan
– Oxfordshire town sees human waste used to heat homes
– Transition and Social Enterprise: a short film
– Google Invests in $5bn Wind-Power Superhighway
– Hopkins Interview

ODAC Newsletter – Oct 1

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This week saw the release of another influential report on peak oil. Fueling the Future Force, by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS)…recommends that the Department of Defence transitions entirely away from petroleum by 2040. The publication demonstrates once again that there is a freedom to engage with the issue in military circles which as yet does not exist in mainstream politics.

Real-world tests of small wind turbines in Netherlands and the UK

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Two real-world tests performed in the Netherlands and in the UK confirm our earlier analysis that small wind turbines are a fundamentally flawed technology. Their financial payback time is much longer than their life expectancy, and in urban areas, some poorly placed wind turbines will not even deliver as much energy as needed to operate them (let alone energy needed to produce them).

A report from the launch of the Totnes Renewable Energy Society

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Last Friday, in Totnes Civic Hall, saw the historic launch of the Totnes Renewable Energy Society (TRESOC). A key piece in the relocalisation of Totnes and district, TRESOC offers members of the community the chance to buy into their own renewable energy company.

Steady growth of wind industry moves EU closer to green goals

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Europe is in the midst of a wind energy boom, with the continent now installing more wind power capacity than any other form of energy. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, the European Wind Energy Association’s Christian Kjaer describes his vision of how wind can lead the way in making Europe’s electricity generation 100 percent renewable by 2050.

A Pearl River tale, power and pride in China

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For a few days last week, global news agencies pursued the peculiar story of the world’s worst traffic jam, which was reported to have lasted for around nine days and stretched across about 100 kilometres of a major highway leading to Beijing. China’s latest instance of leading the world, now in the scale and size of traffic jams, is a direct consequence of the modern uses and abuses of energy.

Two agricultures, not one

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A great deal of the discussion of post-petroleum food production misses the fact that in societies before oil — and thus arguably in societies after oil — food was produced by two distinct systems. The last century saw the dismantling of one of those; the present century will have to see its reconstruction.