India can show the USA how to roll out cost effective solar power that is just a few sunrises away from competing with the price of coal fired power!

India, the world’s third-largest energy consumer, is cutting solar-power costs to a record by forcing project developers into auctions, helping avoid the spiraling renewable-energy subsidies that have hurt Europe.



The lowest bid in India’s latest national auction on Dec. 2 came from Solairedirect SA, France’s second-largest producer, which offered to sell photovoltaic electricity at 7,490 rupees ($147) a megawatt-hour. That’s 38 percent below the average price set in a December 2010 auction and about 30 percent cheaper than the global average for solar projects.



Governments in Europe including Germany and Spain, the world’s largest solar-panel markets, this year cut above-market rates paid to all plant operators that led to ballooning costs amid an escalating debt crisis. India is staying ahead in driving down costs by forcing companies to compete on price.


“Astonishingly competitive pricing in the latest auction,” Anand Mahindra, managing director of Mahindra Group, whose solar unit won two of the 28 contracts awarded for the solar plants, said in a Twitter feed that was confirmed by his spokeswoman Roma Balwani. “The sun appears to be shining on India’s solar power program.”


Globally, power project developers on average demand to be paid $208 per megawatt-hour to build a solar plant, $78 for a wind farm and $76 for a coal plant, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance levelized cost of energy analysis.




The auction’s results for $700 million of projects shows the price of solar power in India is closing in on the cost of coal-fired generation faster than expected as photovoltaic equipment costs plunge, said Mohit Anand, senior consultant at Bridge to India Pvt., a New Delhi-based advisory firm.

Canada says to the WORLD: Damn the environment; let's get on with polluting in a really big way!!!!

Canada on Monday became the first country to announce it would withdraw from the Kyoto protocol on climate change.


Environment Minister Peter Kent broke the news on his return from talks in Durban, where countries agreed to extend Kyoto for five years and hammer out a new deal forcing all big polluters for the first time to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Canada, a major energy producer which critics complain is becoming a climate renegade.

The right-of-center Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which has close ties to the energy sector.

"It's a national disgrace. Prime Minister Harper just spat in the faces of people around the world for whom climate change is increasingly a life and death issue," said Graham Saul of Climate Action Network Canada.

"Our government is abdicating its international responsibilities. It's like where the kid in school who knows he's going to fail the class, so he drops it before that happens," said Megan Leslie of the opposition New Democrats.

Canada's former Liberal government signed up to Kyoto, which dictated a cut in emissions to 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. By 2009 emissions were 17 percent above the 1990 levels, because of the expanding tar sands development.

1 step forward; 1 degree warmer; and several billion tonnes of mercury later...

Developing nations led by China and India pledged they’d work toward an agreement that would limit their fossil fuel emissions for the first time, the biggest advance in the fight against global warming in 14 years.



Envoys from more than 190 nations also extended the Kyoto Protocol, the only ratified treaty limiting greenhouse gases. They will develop document with “legal force” by 2015 that would curb pollution for all nations, according to a text adopted today in Durban, South Africa.


The move breaks a division enshrined in the United Nations- led discussions since 1992 that allowed the poorest nations to escape commitments on burning coal and oil while requiring industrial nations to clean up the atmosphere. That rift prevented the U.S. from ratifying Kyoto, which is the heart of the international effort to protect the environment.

“Historic is the word,” Grenadian ambassador Dessima Williams, lead negotiator for a coalition of 42 island nations, said in an interview. “The idea that we got everybody to agree to take some form of legal commitment is a major outcome.”

Canada is the only country in the world saying it won’t honor Kyoto!!!

Canada, the country furthest from meeting its commitment to cut carbon emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.


The country’s greenhouse-gas emissions are almost a third higher than 1990 levels, and it has a 6 percent CO2 reduction target for the end of 2012. If it couldn’t meet its goal, Canada would have to buy carbon credits, under the rules of the legally binding treaty.


Canada, which has the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves, would be the first of 191 signatories to the Kyoto Protocol to annul its emission-reduction obligations. While Environment Minister Peter Kent declined to confirm Nov. 28 that Canada is preparing to pull out of Kyoto, which may ease the burden for oil-sands producers and coal-burning utilities, he said the government wouldn’t make further commitments to it.

“Canada is the only country in the world saying it won’t honor Kyoto,” said Keith Stewart, an energy and climate policy analyst for Greenpeace in Toronto. Under a previous Liberal government, Canada was one of the first countries to sign Kyoto in 1998. The current Conservative government made a non-binding commitment at 2009 United Nations talks in Copenhagen to reduce emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, in line with a pledge by the U.S., its biggest trading partner.

As with the Clean Air Act; we all win under Cap & Trade

One of the main complaints about the first cap-and-trade regime for greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S. was well answered in a study released this week.
Critics had argued that the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative -- which links New York, Connecticut and eight other Northeastern states -- would increase energy costs for consumers. Based on its first three years, RGGI (pronounced Reggie) will actually do the opposite, producing $1.3 billion in consumer savings over the next decade, according to the study by the Analysis Group, an economic consulting firm. That’s because most participating states are investing a significant portion of their proceeds from carbon-allowance sales in energy-efficiency programs that reduce consumer bills.

Much like Mercury Poisoning from Coal Fired Power; Climate Change is REAL!

A new climate study shows that since the mid-1950s, global average temperatures over land have risen by 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit), confirming previous studies that have found a climate that has been warming – in fits and starts – since around 1900.

Most climate scientists attribute warming since the mid-1950, at least to some degree, to carbon dioxide emissions from human activities – burning coal, oil, and to a lesser extent gas, and from land-use changes.

The latest results mirror those from earlier, independent studies by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

EU: Calls Canadian Tar Sands the Filth they are!!!

Oil derived from tar sands will be penalised by the European Union after its executive arm resisted pressure from Canada to exclude the fuel from new pollution standards.


The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, decided to target tar sands on Tuesday after more than a year of review, which saw intense lobbying from Ottawa and the oil industry. It will classify oil derived from tar sands as being nearly a quarter more polluting than conventional crude in new legislation that requires suppliers to reduce transport fuels’ carbon emissions.


In order to import such oil, suppliers will also have to invest in biofuels and other green products to offset the pollution – which could be cost prohibitive.

Although tar sands oil is almost non-existent in Europe, the new restrictions could scupper plans for future exports from Canada and Venezuela.

They could also influence other markets, including the US, as they debate the merits of an abundant new source of energy that critics contend is highly polluting.

The US will decide this year whether to allow the proposed $7bn Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry heavy crude extracted from the oil sands of Alberta to refineries on the US Gulf of Mexico. “That’s why the Canadians are so worried about this. They know it will set a precedent and have financial implications for them,” said Nusa Urbancic, a policy adviser at Transport & Environment, a campaign group.

EPA doing its job again....NOT!!!

NEW TOWN, N.D. — Across western North Dakota, hundreds of fires rise above fields of wheat and sunflowers and bales of hay. At night, they illuminate the prairie skies like giant fireflies.


They are not wildfires caused by lightning strikes or other acts of nature, but the deliberate burning of natural gas by oil companies rushing to extract oil from the Bakken shale field and take advantage of the high price of crude. The gas bubbles up alongside the far more valuable oil, and with less economic incentive to capture it, the drillers treat the gas as waste and simply burn it.


Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day.


The flared gas also spews at least two million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars or a medium-size coal-fired power plant would emit, alarming some environmentalists.


All told, 30 percent of the natural gas produced in North Dakota is burned as waste. No other major domestic oil field currently flares close to that much, though the practice is still common in countries like Russia, Nigeria and Iran.


With few government regulations that limit the flaring, more burning is also taking place in the Eagle Ford shale field in Texas, and some environmentalists and industry executives say that it could happen in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Ohio, too, as drilling expands in new fields there unlocked by techniques like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.


“North Dakota is not as bad as Kazakhstan, but this is not what you would expect a civilized, efficient society to do: to flare off a perfectly good product just because it’s expensive to bring to market,” said Michael E. Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.


The widespread flaring is a step backward for a domestic energy industry. Most oil and gas fields in the United States have well-developed facilities to gather and process gas.

But the recent rise of shale drilling has changed the economic calculus. Natural gas prices have plunged since 2008 as vast shale fields laden with gas are tapped through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Meanwhile, those same techniques have opened up other shale fields rich with oil.


Regulations on flaring are loose in North Dakota, as they are in most states, and there are no current federal regulations on flaring at oil and gas wells. That is largely because flaring has not been a significant concern since the 1970s, when the federal government insisted that oil companies re-inject gas into Alaska’s North Slope rather than flare it.


The federal Environmental Protection Agency has recently proposed new air emissions standards for fracked wells, and it has also begun to ask oil companies to compile data on greenhouse gas emissions from drilling and other operations.

Environmentalists are also beginning to express alarm. “It’s time for the regulators to take a hard look at the impacts of flaring and make sure that available solutions to the flaring problem are required before there is any further widespread expansion of the practice,” said Amy Mall, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Some of the companies working in North Dakota, including Whiting, are investing $3 billion over the next three years in pipelines and several large processing plants to deliver gas to Midwest markets rather than burn it.


Wayde Schafer, the Sierra Club’s North Dakota conservation organizer, said that the industry needed to slow down development if it could not protect the air. “You can do it fast or you can do it right,” he said.

The rules will also save consumers more than $8,000 a vehicle, on average, in fuel costs, the EPA said.

Automakers agreed to double the fuel economy of the vehicles they sell in the U.S. to a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, President Barack Obama said.
A separate rule issued in 2009 takes effect next year, and requires automakers to increase average fuel economy to 35.5 mpg by 2016.

The White House negotiated the proposal, which will take effect in 2017, with automakers including General Motors Co. (GM), Ford Motor Co. (F) and Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) The administration proposed a 56.2 mpg requirement last month, up from a fleetwide average of 27 mpg today for cars and light trucks.

“This agreement on fuel standards represents the single most important step we’ve ever taken to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said today at an event in Washington with auto executives.

Obama is seeking to limit the amount of fuel used by U.S. vehicles as part of a pledge to reduce oil imports by a third by 2025. The agreement with automakers, which also curbs greenhouse-gas emissions, comes as his administration negotiates with Congress on raising the U.S. debt ceiling to avoid default.

Obama used the event to promote his energy priorities and to highlight some of the issues being weighed in the standoff over raising the federal debt ceiling.

The agreement on higher standards “is only possible because we made investments in technology,” Obama said. A “sensible and balanced approach” is needed to make sure the U.S. is able to sustain economic growth in the future, he said.

Be Careful what you wish for, you just might get it!

The case is American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, 10-174.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on a federal lawsuit Monday by states and conservation groups trying to force cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Eight states initiated this novel approach. They argued that under traditional common law, power plants were creating a public nuisance, and that state governments had the power to intervene. Eight states were originally involved: California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. When Republican governors took over in New Jersey and Wisconsin, those states withdrew from the case.

The court said that the authority to seek reductions in emissions rests with the Environmental Protection Agency, not the courts.

EPA said that it will issue new regulations by May 2012 to reduce power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas. The Obama administration has already started controlling heat-trapping pollution from automobiles and from some of the largest, and most polluting, industrial plants.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, said the Clean Air Act gives the EPA authority to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants.

The landmark environmental law leaves no room for what Ginsburg described as a parallel track, "control of greenhouse gas emissions by federal judges."

On the other hand, Ginsburg said, that the states and conservation groups can go to federal court under the Clean Air Act if they object to EPA's eventual decision.

The private defendants in the suit are American Electric Power Co. of Ohio, Cinergy Co., now part of Duke Energy Corp. of North Carolina; Southern Co. Inc. of Georgia, and Xcel Energy Inc. of Minnesota. Five of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in America. Four of them are part of the Edison Electric Institute, a major industry group.

If the EPA puts forward a national cap & trade regime – much like say Europe; then you have some good shorts on your investment list above. If they don’t, you are still likely to see stiffer state regulations on emissions and that can go to point of origin – simple meaning -- a dirty coal plant in Utah cannot sell power in California without being penalized.

In any event we can all wheeze, cough, and tear while sucking in some more dirty air.