As Price of Oil Soars, Users Shiver and Cross Their Fingers

http://is.gd/HQT2lh

When David Harris built his 2,000-square-foot hilltop home nine years ago, he wanted to put in natural gas, but the utility wouldn’t run a line to his house. Like many people here, he was stuck using heating oil.

Mr. Harris added a wood stove to help cut costs and now uses only about one-third of the oil the house would otherwise need. But that did not stop a deliveryman for Crowley Fuel from handing him a $471.21 bill earlier this month for a refill that should get him to April.
...
While natural gas prices have plummeted to 10-year lows, heating oil prices have been steadily rising for years and are expected to reach record levels this winter, precipitated by higher costs for crude oil and the shutdown of several crucial refineries in the Northeast and in Europe. The Energy Department projects a price of $3.79 a gallon over the next few months, more than a dollar above the winter average for the last five years. Analysts do not expect much relief in the longer term, either, because global oil prices are expected to stay high amid political instability in the Middle East and rising demand from developing countries.

With electricity prices also down, utilities are trumpeting that bills will drop this season for customers using gas and electric heat. Con Edison announced this week that residential gas heating bills in New York were expected to drop 11.5 percent this winter, and in New Jersey, PSE&G said that it would cut February bills for residential gas customers by an average of $30.

“The people who have been unable to switch off of heating oil will be increasingly penalized in the coming years,” said Jay Hakes, a former administrator of the Energy Information Administration and now the director of the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum....

Nationwide, the average household using oil spent $2,298 on heat last year, compared with $724 spent by gas users and $957 spent by electricity users, according to the Energy Department.

This year, heating oil users are expected to spend 3.7 percent more than last year, while natural gas customers are expected to spend 7.3 percent less and electricity users will spend 2.4 percent less, according to the department.

Cheap natural gas was part of the appeal for Gus Kontoudakis, who spent about $3,000 to switch from oil at the home he rents out in Plainfield, Conn. The boiler was due for replacement anyway, he said.

...
But many oil users — living in places like Alaska, Maine and even affluent parts of Manhattan — do not have that option. Some are simply too far from a pipeline. For others, converting to natural gas is unaffordable, with costs that can run to tens of thousands of dollars for each home. As a result, they are trapped in a cycle of spending more and more for heat while those who use natural gas and electricity are generally spending less and less.

That dynamic is at work in households across the economic spectrum, but the cost gap looms as a crisis for the poor, experts warn, since the federal government has cut financing for energy assistance programs.
...

The use of heating oil, which rose after World War II as a replacement for coal, has been on a long decline. As the use of virtually every other fuel has increased, the number of households that use heating oil has dropped from about 20 percent in 1975 to roughly 7 percent today, spurred by new home construction and population shifts to the West and South, closer to natural gas fields and pipelines. Government incentives for installing insulation also cut consumption of heating oil.

For decades, the prices of oil and gas moved virtually in tandem, but in recent years, vast increases in American gas supplies have made gas decisively cheaper.

Meanwhile, heating oil could grow more scarce in the Northeast this winter, the Energy Department warned last month. Companies have been closing refineries that produce heating oil because of declining profit margins. Sunoco and ConocoPhillips recently announced the idling of two major refineries in Pennsylvania, and a third refinery owned by Sunoco may close next summer.

Encouraged by the low prices for natural gas and government and utility incentives, more oil customers have been looking to make the switch.

Thomas Dziki of Richmond Hill, Queens, said it was a $750 bill to fill up his 150-gallon oil tank last winter that prompted him to call National Grid to convert. He spent about $8,500 to switch his three-story home to gas. Now, his monthly bills are in the $30 to $50 range ...

For larger buildings in New York City, there is increased pressure to switch because of a new pollution regulation that will phase out the use of the heavier heating oils.

But conversion costs can be prohibitive, in part because Con Edison, the local utility, has to rip up the street to run pipes larger than those used for cooking gas.

Nancy T. Schmitt, an energy-sector investment adviser whose Upper East Side co-op burns the densest form of oil.... But by one estimate, she said, it would cost $2 million to connect her complex to the existing lines. Con Ed has been working to help organize buildings into clusters for conversion, to lower costs and diminish the inconvenience.
...

By Diane Cardwell and Clifford Krauss
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://is.gd/HQT2lh
The New York Times
January 21, 2012

An Energy Supergrid for Europe Faces Big Obstacles

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/business/global/17iht-rbog-grid17.html
Advocates of renewable energy say an electricity supergrid could enhance the clean-power industry by connecting power sources like wind farms in Scotland and solar arrays in Spain or North Africa to the population centers of Europe.

The technical arguments for a significantly expanded and upgraded power network in Europe are clear, they say. Yet the political, regulatory and economic obstacles are formidable.

... Doug Parr, chief scientist at the British arm of Greenpeace [noted]... “it’s not garnering political weight and support”...

With its windy weather, Britain could be a big beneficiary of better international power connections....

Britain is working ... to negotiate the North Sea Countries Offshore Grid Initiative, a planned network of underwater cables that would connect offshore wind farms and other power sources to nearby countries.

The project, likely to take decades, is seen as a potential building block for a broader European grid....

Some cross-border power connections exist, but many European countries still produce and supply most of their own electricity.... Experts say a richer cross-border network will reduce power prices for consumers and make supplies more secure by promoting competition and distributing surplus production more efficiently.

Renewable power advocates say improved connections are essential for making sources like wind and solar practical on a large scale. Potential energy-producing areas, like the windy coasts of Scotland and Ireland and the deserts of North Africa, are often far from larger cities with their power-hungry consumers.

Broad networks could also help ease one of renewable energy’s biggest problems: intermittency. When the wind drops in Britain, it may still be strong in Germany, or the sun may be shining in Tunisia....

The Energy and Climate Change Committee of Britain’s main parliamentary chamber, the House of Commons, said in a report in September that a drastically improved grid would be crucial for the viability of the country’s plans for significant investment in offshore wind power.
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But the report listed several caveats about the development of a Europe-wide grid, saying the cost would probably be high and the challenge of coordinating national energy regulations would be daunting.
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The decades-long time frame for investing in energy infrastructure inevitably contrasted with the shorter-term focus of politicians.

Because energy is a heavily regulated sector, one of the biggest obstacles to building a supergrid is the long negotiations required to bridge differences among individual countries’ rules.

Budget woes, too, may limit the availability of investment from Brussels and national capitals.

Still, some advocates said poor economic conditions could actually make it easier to raise private financing.

“There are pension funds and many investors looking for safe returns,” Julian Scola, spokesman for the European Wind Energy Association in Brussels, said by phone. “Electricity infrastructure, which is a regulated business with regulated returns, ought to and does provide very safe and very attractive investment.”
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The estimated price tag varies widely; James Cox of Poyry, a Finnish engineering and management consulting firm, said a wide-reaching grid could cost 100 billion euros, or about $127 billion.  A study by Poyry in March said that better regional interconnections would only partially solve the intermittency problem because weather patterns could extend over large areas.... Over all, he said, more links made economic sense. But winning permission for transmission projects can be difficult....

The European Union wants to create a unified electricity market, and Brussels is debating a bill that would streamline permit-granting for power transmission and provide more than 9.1 billion euros.
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New linkups are therefore likely to happen piecemeal.... Mr. Parr of Greenpeace U.K. said. “It could get very expensive if it’s not done right.”

By Beth Gardiner
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/business/global/17iht-rbog-grid17.html
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
January 16, 2012

In Bat Deaths, a Catastrophe in the Making?

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/in-bat-deaths-a-catastrophe-in-the-making

A “biodiversity crisis”: that’s how some conservationists describe new numbers released this week by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service on so-called white-nose syndrome. According to the agency, 5.7 million to 6.7 million bats have died from the fungal ailment in eastern North America since an epidemic first broke out in upstate New York in 2006.

The new numbers are striking, and far higher than the previous bat mortality estimate of one million released in 2009, yet it is hard to put the number into perspective because researchers lack baseline data for many bat species populations from before the disease started demolishing colonies.
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What is known is that when the fungus gets into a cave or mine where bats are hibernating, 70 to 90 percent of the bats die. In some cases, the mortality rate is 100 percent.

Over the past three years, the disease has spread from 88 sites in nine states in 2009 to at least 200 sites in 16 states today....  There are 45 species of bats in North America, 26 of which are hibernating species potentially susceptible to the fungus. While the disease has infected only six species so far, some researchers worry that it could wipe out as many as 20 bat species in the next few years.

Researchers have estimated that bats save farmers at least $3.7 billion a year by keeping down crop pests (see http://www.envirovaluation.org/2011/05/bats-worth-billions-to-agriculture-pest.html).

Ann Froschauer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service emphasized that each bat species fulfills a specific ecological purpose.... “Different species eat different things, hunt in different locations and fit into the ecological puzzle in a unique way,” she said. “Losing one bat species would be huge — losing 20 would be catastrophic.”

...
by Joanna M. Foster
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/in-bat-deaths-a-catastrophe-in-the-making
The New York Times Green Blog http://green.blogs.nytimes.com
January 19, 2012

On the Horizon, Planes Powered by Plant Fuel

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/on-the-horizon-planes-powered-by-plant-fuel
The use of jet fuel from renewable sources is now well demonstrated, but it costs more than double what fuel made from petroleum does, according to airlines, aircraft companies and suppliers. One way to cut the cost may be to tinker with the plants that biofuel is made from.

Take jatropha, for example. Lufthansa said last week that it had completed a series of more than 800 flights by an Airbus A321 that shuttled between Hamburg and Frankfurt while burning a 50 percent biofuel mix in one of its two engines. The biofuel was derived partly from jatropha, a tropical shrub with an oil-rich nut, and it cost about two and a half times what ordinary petroleum-based fuel does.

On Monday, the United States secretary of agriculture, Thomas Vilsack, speaking at Boeing’s headquarters in Chicago, identified a major impediment to the biofuels endeavor: the cost of harvesting and delivering the feedstock for biorefineries, the factories that make fuel from plant material.

Biologists and financiers are focusing on the problem. On Tuesday, a San Diego company, SG Biofuels, plans to announce $17 million in new financing from venture capital sources to continue its work on raising the yields from jatropha.

The company is trying to do for jatropha, whose fruit is inedible, what agronomists have done for food crops like wheat and corn, swapping genes among strains to produce varieties that are hardy and higher-yielding. The company said it had already raised yields of jatropha oil to 250 to 350 gallons per acre, double the normal output.
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It was spread around the tropics by Portuguese sailors who believed it had medicinal properties.
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Lufthansa used a mixture of jatropha and camelina, which is widely grown in the United States, and animal fats. After six months on the 50-50 blend, the engine appeared to be functioning normally, the airline said.
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Carbon dioxide emissions declined about 60 percent, gallon for gallon, with the biofuel, Lufthansa said....

Some airlines have reported an even higher differential.

Of the cost, 80 to 85 percent involves the feedstock....

Lufthansa said it spent $8.4 million on the six-month test, with the European Union paying about one-third of the expense.

... Billy Glover, Boeing’s vice president for environment in its commercial airplane sector, said the company hoped to stabilize its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 by using more efficient planes and more biofuels, while still allowing air travel to grow. By 2050, he said, the industry’s goal is to reduce emissions by 50 percent.

(In theory, the Obama administration’s goal is to cut American greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by that date, although the economy is not on track to accomplish that.)

Mr. Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, has been traveling the country preaching the virtues of fueling airplanes from farms. He said that his department would help establish eight to 10 biorefineries producing both vehicle fuel and aviation fuel.

The feedstocks will be specific to the region where the refineries were built — in some places, the nonfood parts of the corn plant, and in others, algae or switchgrass, he said. The department will subsidize the price of feedstocks to help bring the cost closer to competitive levels for the airlines, he said. The Navy has been lined up as a customer.
...
by Matthew Wald
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/on-the-horizon-planes-powered-by-plant-fuel
The New York Times Green Blog http://green.blogs.nytimes.com
January 17, 2012

Environmental concerns prove to be only tiny piece of puzzle

http://www.smh.com.au/national/environmental-concerns-prove-to-be-only-tiny-piece-of-puzzle-20111208-1olg9.html
MEASURES of economic wellbeing are great at assessing the value of the land and minerals we own and mine, but poor at reflecting the other side of the coin: the cost of resource depletion and land degradation due to agriculture, mining and development.

They are worse still at capturing the cost of pollution - where it causes illness, it can actually push up the gross domestic product of the health sector - and the value people placed on loss of species and ecosystems.

On resource depletion, the Herald/Lateral Economics wellbeing index borrows a model from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which estimates the cost of land degradation based on impact on land values and yield rates.

In 2009-10, this was equivalent to $406 million. But this alone does not tell the story. The index must also reflect the value of new mineral discoveries and the cost of the exploration. Once these are factored in, it reaches $1.05 billion. While this may sound large, it is small in relative terms - just 0.1 per cent of net national income.

''If you are looking at resource depletion it has a small impact on wellbeing, and if you are looking at it quarter-to-quarter you would hardly notice the change,'' the chief executive of Lateral Economics, Nicholas Gruen, says.

This is not a universally held view. Left-leaning think tank the Australia Institute placed much greater weight on the impact of environmental damage in a report released earlier this year.

Gruen says he expects some people will be surprised by the low cost of resource depletion. ''But when you think these things through, technology keeps improving and we keep finding new resources,'' he says.

''Even if you were starting to end up with fewer reserves, the other thing that happens is we get much better at mining and processing.''

He gives the example of the central Victorian goldfields - an asset that was written off after the 19th century but where resources companies have recently returned with some success.

On climate change, the index weighs the cost and likelihood of three scenarios - that the world does nothing to cut emissions and temperatures rise by more than 5 degrees, that the increase is between 2 degrees and 3 degrees, and that the Copenhagen Accord goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees is achieved.

Estimates of the cost of each scenario are taken from the Garnaut Review; the probability of each happening from a climate models review by the United Nations Environment Programand emissions data from the International Energy Agency.

On current evidence, Lateral Economics concludes there is a 5 per cent chance of the worst-case scenario, a 70 per cent chance of 2-3 degrees warming and 25 per cent chance of less than 2 degrees. The net present value last year of the future economic damage caused by climate change was estimated at $400 million.


On environmental and ecosystem health, the wellbeing index database includes the Yale Environmental Performance Index, which assesses agriculture, forestry, biodiversity and air pollution. But, in what is likely to be a controversial assessment, the results are given no dollar weighting. .

Gruen calls it ''the Spice Girls question'': when people are asked what they ''really, really want'' in financial terms, ecosystems do not rate well.

''People say they want a clean environment and they care about air pollution. They will rally around the Franklin Dam, but if you tell them something is endangered it is hard to see any evidence of the extent to which they are prepared to pay for that,'' he says.

Related:
Nation richer, older and a little bit wiser
WELLBEING has risen even more quickly than gross domestic product, thanks to the boom in Australia's commodity export prices and big improvements in the combined knowledge of its people, according to five years of historical data from the Herald/Lateral Economics Index of Australia's Wellbeing released today. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/environmental-concerns-prove-to-be-only-tiny-piece-of-puzzle-20111208-1olg9.html#ixzz1gHtcytAj

Putting a figure on inequality adds to strength of statistical spotlight
New numbers are to the press as shiny bottle caps are to magpies. Statistics have the power to shape a debate or provide oxygen to an issue. From a major bank's survey of consumer confidence to a political party's targeted release of ''internal polling'', numbers are often used to bring publicity to a company or a cause. When even condom manufacturers use surveys to get publicity, you know what the new maxim must be: statistics sell.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/environmental-concerns-prove-to-be-only-tiny-piece-of-puzzle-20111208-1olg9.html#ixzz1gHu1ZfIH

When the Best Start in Life Turns Out to be an Early Start
HUMAN capital - the skills and know-how of our people - is the biggest positive contributor to wellbeing after net national income. The index measures it through a combination of indicators that track learning and innovation.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/environmental-concerns-prove-to-be-only-tiny-piece-of-puzzle-20111208-1olg9.html#ixzz1gHuTMK5R

Distribution of Money Makes a Big Difference
MONEY isn't everything - but it is a major driver of national and individual wellbeing.

Happy to live longer but mental illness and obesity still need to be dealt with 
IF LIFE expectancy at birth is any measure, Australians are some of the healthiest people on Earth.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/environmental-concerns-prove-to-be-only-tiny-piece-of-puzzle-20111208-1olg9.html#ixzz1gHvmPs7W

by Adam Morton
The Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au
December 9, 2011

Subsidizing Wall Street to Buy Chinese Solar Panels

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204903804577082631863392956.html
...
Consider the current 30% federal solar energy subsidy. A home solar system with 60 solar panels produces about 15,000 watts of power, enough to completely offset the $6,000 annual electricity bill of a typical upscale California home. The system costs about $90,000 prior to the 30% federal income-tax credit, which reduces its cost to $63,000. After a simple payback period of about 10 years, the homeowner literally enjoys free electricity for the remainder of the guaranteed 20-year system life, a very profitable 10 years.

But what if that $27,000 tax credit, the accelerated-depreciation tax savings, and most of the hefty post-payback profits went to Wall Street firms with a "tax appetite," not the homeowner? That's just what happens with the majority of new home solar-system installations today.

... Today's most successful pitch for home solar financing goes like this: "Why pay a lot of money when you can get your solar system installed free and immediately reduce your utility bill?" Most homeowners find that proposition compelling. They ignore the fine print: "You must give your tax credit and depreciation to us and sign a long-term contract to buy power from us at prices just below market."

Today, most new home solar systems are purchased by special Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs) that are specifically created by Wall Street firms to purchase home solar systems and to sell power to the homeowner on a cell-phone-like contract. The homeowner does not mind giving up the tax benefits as long as the "free" system reduces utility bills.

However, when the system is paid off and the monthly LLC profit jumps to 100% of the electricity bill, the LLC solar electricity price to the homeowner is maintained just below market—and the profit really begins to roll into the LLC. Since the risks to the LLC grow as the solar systems age, many banks offload their risk by selling the LLCs before their 20-year lifetime is up, locking in much of the long-term profit. There is now a growing market for what might be called "solar-backed securities." Wall Street understands the time-value of money; the federal government and consumers do not.

One of the largest solar-system installers in the U.S., SolarCity Corp., uses the LLC strategy and currently buys a majority of its solar panels from the low-cost Chinese supplier, Yingli. Thus when President Obama said that we must subsidize our solar industry to remain competitive with the Chinese, it would have been more accurate to say that we subsidize Wall Street to create employee-less corporations that buy and install Chinese solar panels in the U.S. Wall Street and consumers understand that free markets are borderless; Washington does not.

Just last week, the U.S. International Trade Commission found the Chinese solar industry guilty of "dumping" solar panels in the U.S. Tariffs are likely to be levied against Yingli and others....

by T.J. Rodgers, Founder, President and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor
The Wall Street Journal www.WSJ.com
December 8, 2011
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204903804577082631863392956.html

The Junking of the Postal Service

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/sunday-review/the-junking-of-the-postal-service.html
...
As junk mail multiplies and the United States Postal Service struggles for financial survival, experts are increasingly asking the question, do Americans need Saturday mail delivery ... or daily mail delivery ... or a state-run postal service at all?...

The primary beneficiary of the United States Postal Service today is arguably the advertisers whose leaflets and catalogs flood our mailboxes. First-class mail — items like bills and letters that require a 44-cent stamp — fell 6.6 percent in 2010 alone, continuing a five-year-long plunge. Last year was the first time that fewer than 50 percent of bills in the United States were paid by mail. There were 9.3 billion pounds of “standard mail” — the low-cost postage category available to mass advertisers — but only 3.7 billion of first-class mail.

In fact, to compensate for projected declines in “real” mail, the Postal Service has been aggressively promoting the use of new services for advertisers like Every Door Direct, which allows local retailers to place unaddressed promotional material in every mailbox in an area for pennies a piece, with a few clicks of a mouse.

.... Chuck Teller [is] founder of Catalog Choice, an online service in Berkeley, Calif., that helps people get their names off catalog mailing lists; this requires submitting the customer numbers on unwanted catalogs that arrive in the mailbox, one by one.... Direct-mail advertising generates an estimated 10 billion pounds of waste each year, costing cities an estimated $1 billion to dispose of it, according to Catalog Choice.

... Dozens of United States localities have hired Catalog Choice to create Internet platforms to allow residents to opt out of mailings. Even at $22,000 for the first year of service, King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, has calculated that it will be a good investment for all the garbage collection it will obviate, said Tom Watson, a project manager in the solid waste division of the county....

... In Canada this summer ... a monthlong hiatus in much of Canada’s mail delivery over a labor dispute provoked few complaints. When Canadian postal workers struck in 1990 there was great pressure on government to make concessions. This year, opinion columns ran under headlines like “Who Cares?”...

... Canada’s post office long ago ended Saturday delivery and house-by-house delivery in some newer neighborhoods. (Mail is left in banks of boxes at subdivision entrances.)
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THE post office is a large employer, especially of minority workers, and laying off hundreds of thousands of employees in this economy would be extremely difficult. Even postal skeptics note that it still delivers essential communication to small subgroups that are not (yet) well connected online: the elderly and rural residents. And how else would we get subscription magazines? Ralph Nader has argued that the service should be maintained because it is a crucial delivery network for items like medicine in the case of national emergencies. For now, the overwhelming majority of Americans who pay bills online still prefer to receive paper statements.

But to cover its costs, the post office needs to keep mail volume high. And even some high-end direct mailers worry that the contents of American mailboxes are coming to resemble a paper infomercial....

Some experts favor a general “do not mail” option for people who do not want to receive any direct mail — although advertisers vehemently oppose that approach, maintaining that glossy unsolicited catalogs remain beloved by shoppers, and the postal system would most likely collapse if there were a sudden drop in its business. The Postal Service claims that 81 percent of American households surveyed in 2010 reported that they either read or scanned advertising mail.

... Perhaps catalogs should be delivered by private companies, ending the centuries-old law that the only a government employee can place things in your mailbox....

It is striking that even though many European countries have privatized postal services — shedding thousands of buildings and millions of jobs — the actual delivery of mail looks much as it does here. Deutsche Post, the German postal carrier, which converted from a state company to a private one over a decade ago, is still required to provide coverage six days a week. (And it still delivers and encourages direct mail.)
...
by Elisabeth Rosenthal
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/sunday-review/the-junking-of-the-postal-service.html
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
December 3, 2011

Learning Too Late of the Perils in Gas Well Leases

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/drilling-down-fighting-over-oil-and-gas-well-leases.html
After Scott Ely and his father talked with salesmen from an energy company about signing the lease allowing gas drilling on their land in northeastern Pennsylvania, he said he felt certain it required the company to leave the property as good as new. So Mr. Ely said he was surprised several years later when the drilling company, Cabot Oil and Gas, informed them that rather than draining and hauling away the toxic drilling sludge stored in large waste ponds on the property, it would leave the waste, cover it with dirt and seed the area with grass. He knew that waste pond liners can leak, seeping contaminated waste.

Americans have signed millions of leases allowing companies to drill for oil and natural gas on their land in recent years. But some of these landowners — often in rural areas, and eager for quick payouts — are finding out too late what is, and what is not, in the fine print.

Energy company officials say that standard leases include language that protects landowners. But a review of more than 111,000 leases, addenda and related documents by The New York Times suggests otherwise:
¶ Fewer than half the leases require companies to compensate landowners for water contamination after drilling begins. And only about half the documents have language that lawyers suggest should be included to require payment for damages to livestock or crops.
¶ Most leases grant gas companies broad rights to decide where they can cut down trees, store chemicals, build roads and drill. Companies are also permitted to operate generators and spotlights through the night near homes during drilling.
¶ In the leases, drilling companies rarely describe to landowners the potential environmental and other risks that federal laws require them to disclose in filings to investors.
¶ Most leases are for three or five years, but at least two-thirds of those reviewed by The Times allow extensions without additional approval from landowners. If landowners have second thoughts about drilling on their land or want to negotiate for more money, they may be out of luck.

The leases — obtained through open records requests — are mostly from gas-rich areas in Texas, but also in Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

In Pennsylvania, Colorado and West Virginia, some landowners have had to spend hundreds of dollars a month to buy bottled water or maintain large tanks, known as water buffaloes, for drinking water in their front yards....
Thousands of landowners in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Texas have joined class action lawsuits claiming that they were paid less than they expected because gas companies deducted costs like hauling chemicals to the well site or transporting the gas to market.
...
To be sure, many landowners have earned small fortunes from drilling leases. Last year, natural gas companies paid more than $1.6 billion in lease and bonus payments to Pennsylvania landowners, according to a report commissioned by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry trade group. Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest natural gas companies, has paid more than $183.8 million in royalties in Texas this year, according to its Web site. Much of the money has gone to residents in rural areas where jobs are scarce and farmers and ranchers have struggled to stay afloat....
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At least eight states specifically require companies to compensate landowners for damage to their properties or to negotiate with them about where wells will be drilled, even if the lease does not provide those protections.
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Some landmen show up in poorer areas shortly before the holidays, offering cash on the spot for signing a lease. They might offer thousands of dollars per acre as a bonus to be paid shortly after the lease is signed. Royalties, which usually run between 12.5 percent and 20 percent of what the companies make for selling the gas, can mean tens of thousands of dollars per year for landowners.
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In 2005, [Dave] Beinlich and his wife, Karen, signed a lease for $2 an acre per year for five years on 117 acres in Sullivan County in north-central Pennsylvania. They soon realized they had gotten far less money than their neighbors, so they planned on negotiating a new lease when theirs expired in 2010. A day before their lease term ended, no well had been drilled on their land, but the gas company parked a bulldozer nearby and started to survey an access road. A company official informed them that by moving equipment to the site, Chief Oil and Gas was preparing to drill and was therefore allowed to extend the lease indefinitely.

Lawyers say that drilling leases are not like other contracts. “You’re not buying a refrigerator or signing a car note,” said David McMahon, a lease lawyer in Charleston, W.Va., and co-founder of the West Virginia Surface Owners’ Rights Organization, adding that once a well is drilled, it can produce gas for decades, locking landowners into the lease terms. “With a gas lease, you’re permitting industrial activity in your backyard, and you’re starting a relationship that will affect the quality of living for you and your grandchildren for decades,” he said. Mr. McMahon and other lease lawyers say that unlike many contracts, oil and gas leases are covered by few consumer protection laws, in part because drilling has been most common in states with less regulation.
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“When it comes to negotiation skills and understanding of lease terms, there is a gaping inequality between the average landman and the average citizen sitting across the table,” said Chris Csikszentmihalyi, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who created a Web site last year called the Landman Report Card that allows landowners to review landmen’s professionalism and tactics.

Some lawyers also say that there are major differences between what drilling companies tell landowners and what they must disclose to investors.
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“It’s been one expense after another since our water went bad, and the company only has to cover part of it,” said Ronald Carter, 72, of Montrose, Pa. Mr. Carter and his wife, Jean, said they signed a lease in 2006 for a one-time fee of $25 per acre on their 75 acres and annual royalty payments of 12.5 percent. The Carters live on $3,500 a month, including the $1,500 per month they average in gas royalties. But they had to spend $7,000 to install a water purifier when their drinking supply became contaminated in 2009 after drilling near their property. The Carters joined a lawsuit with about a dozen neighbors ...
...
by Ian Urbina and Jo Craven McGinty
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/drilling-down-fighting-over-oil-and-gas-well-leases.html
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
December 1, 2011

A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/business/energy-environment/a-cornucopia-of-help-for-renewable-energy.html
... NRG Energy is building ... a compound of nearly a million solar panels that will produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes.

... Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project. Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009.

The government support — which includes loan guarantees, cash grants and contracts that require electric customers to pay higher rates — largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come. The beneficiaries include financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, conglomerates like General Electric, utilities like Exelon and NRG — even Google.

A great deal of attention has been focused on Solyndra, a start-up that received $528 million in federal loans to develop cutting-edge solar technology before it went bankrupt, but nearly 90 percent of the $16 billion in clean-energy loans guaranteed by the federal government since 2009 went to subsidize these lower-risk power plants, which in many cases were backed by big companies with vast resources.

When the Obama administration and Congress expanded the clean-energy incentives in 2009, a gold-rush mentality took over.

As NRG’s chief executive, David W. Crane, put it ... early this year, the government’s largess was a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and “we intend to do as much of this business as we can get our hands on.” NRG, along with partners, ultimately secured $5.2 billion in federal loan guarantees plus hundreds of millions in other subsidies for four large solar projects.

“I have never seen anything that I have had to do in my 20 years in the power industry that involved less risk than these projects,” he said in a recent interview....

From 2007 to 2010, federal subsidies jumped to $14.7 billion from $5.1 billion, according to a recent study [by the Energy Information Administration available at http://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/.]

Most of the surge came from the economic stimulus bill, which was passed in 2009 and financed an Energy Department loan guarantee program and a separate Treasury Department grant program that were promoted as important in creating green jobs.

States like California sweetened the pot by offering their own tax breaks and by approving long-term power-purchase contracts that ... will also require ratepayers to pay billions of dollars more for electricity for as long as two decades. The federal loan guarantee program expired on Sept. 30. The Treasury grant program is scheduled to expire at the end of December, although the energy industry is lobbying Congress to extend it. But other subsidies will remain.

The windfall for the industry over the last three years raises questions of whether the Obama administration and state governments went too far in their support of solar and wind power projects, some of which would have been built anyway, according to the companies involved.

Obama administration officials argue that the incentives, which began on a large scale late in the Bush administration but were expanded by the stimulus legislation, make economic and environmental sense....

The first subsidy [for NRG’s California Valley Solar Ranch project] is for construction. The plant is expected to cost $1.6 billion to build, with key components made by SunPower at factories in California and Asia. In late September, the Energy Department agreed to guarantee a $1.2 billion construction loan, with the Treasury Department lending the money at an ... interest rate of about 3.5 percent, compared with the 7 percent that executives said they would otherwise have had to pay.

That support alone is worth about $205 million to NRG over the life of the loan, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times by Booz & Company....

When construction is complete, NRG is eligible to receive a $430 million check from the Treasury Department — part of a change made in 2009 that allows clean-energy projects to receive 30 percent of their cost as a cash grant upfront instead of taking other tax breaks gradually over several years.

... Under a [California] law ... NRG will not have to pay property taxes to San Luis Obispo County on its solar panels, saving it an estimated $14 million a year. ... [Due to] mandates that California utilities buy 33 percent of their power from clean-energy sources by 2020, the project’s developers struck lucrative contracts with the local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, to buy the plant’s power for 25 years.... Ultimately its electric customers, will pay NRG $150 to $180 a megawatt-hour, according to a person familiar with the project, who asked not to be identified because the price information was confidential. At the time the contract was awarded, that was about 50 percent more than the expected market cost of electricity in California from a newly built gas-powered plant, state officials said. While neither state regulators nor the companies will divulge all the details, the extra cost to ratepayers amounts to a $462 million subsidy, according to Booz, which calculated the present value of the higher rates over the life of the contracts.

Additional depreciation tax breaks for renewable energy plants could save the company an additional $110 million, according to Christopher Dann, the Booz analyst who examined the project.

The total value of all those subsidies in today’s dollars is about $1.4 billion, leading to an expected rate of return of 25 percent for the project’s equity investors, according to Booz.

Mr. Crane of NRG disputed the Booz estimate, saying that the company’s return on equity was “in the midteens.”

NRG, which initially is investing about $400 million of its own money in the project, expects to get all of its equity back in two to five years, according to a statement it made in August to Wall Street analysts.

By 2015, NRG expects earnings of at least $300 million a year before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization from all of its solar projects combined, making these investments some of the more lucrative pieces in its sprawling portfolio, which includes dozens of power plants fueled by coal, natural gas and oil.
... At least 10 of the 16 solar or wind electricity generation projects that secured Energy Department loan guarantees intend to also take the Treasury Department grant, and all but two of the projects have long-term agreements to sell almost all of their power....

...Legislation that has been passed in about 30 states ... pushes local utility companies to buy a significant share of their power from renewable sources, like solar or wind power. These mandates often have resulted in contracts with above-market rates for the project developers, and a guarantee of a steady revenue stream.

“It is like building a hotel, where you know in advance you are going to have 100 percent room occupancy for 25 years,” said Kevin Smith, chief executive of SolarReserve. His Nevada solar project has secured a 25-year power-purchase agreement with the state’s largest utility and a $737 million Energy Department loan guarantee and is on track to receive a $200 million Treasury grant.

Because the purchase mandates can drive up electricity rates significantly, some states, including New Jersey and Colorado, are considering softening the requirements on utilities.

Brookfield Asset Management, ... will receive so many subsidies for a New Hampshire wind farm that they are worth 46 percent to 80 percent of the $229 million price of the project, when measured in today’s dollars, according to analyses for The Times performed by Booz and two other two industry financial experts....

...The chief executive of Brookfield Renewable Power, the division that oversees the Granite Reliable project in New Hampshire, declined to discuss his profit expectations in detail, but said the project might not have happened without government assistance.

...
Google has invested in several renewable energy projects ... in part to get federal tax breaks that it can use to offset its profits from Web advertising.

... In the 2010 fiscal year, the oil and gas producers got federal tax breaks of $2.7 billion, according to an analysis by the Energy Information Administration.
...
In an October 2010 memo prepared for the president, Lawrence H. Summers, then his top economic adviser; Carol M. Browner, then his adviser on energy matters; and Ronald A. Klain, then the vice president’s chief of staff, expressed discomfort with the “double dipping” that was starting to take place. They said investors had little “skin in the game.”
...
Energy Department officials said they had carefully evaluated every project to try to calculate how much money the developers and investors stood to make. “They were rejected, if they looked too rich or too risky,” Mr. LaVera, the Energy Department spokesman said.

In at least one instance — NRG’s Agua Caliente solar project in Yuma County, Ariz. — the Energy Department demanded that the company agree not to apply for a Treasury grant it was legally entitled to receive. The government was concerned the extra subsidy would result in excessive profit, NRG executives confirmed.

In other cases, the agency required that companies use most of the Treasury grants that they would get when construction was complete to pay down part of the government-guaranteed construction loans instead of cashing out the equity investors.

G.E. ... lobbied Congress in 2009 to help expand the subsidy programs, and it now profits from every aspect of the boom in renewable-power plant construction. It is also an investor in one solar and one wind project that have secured about $2 billion in federal loan guarantees and expects to collect nearly $1 billion in Treasury grants. The company has also won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to sell its turbines to wind plants built with public subsidies.
...
Satya Kumar, an analyst at Credit Suisse ... said ... “But the industry could have done a lot more solar for a lot less price, in terms of subsidy,” he said.

by Eric Lipton and Clifford Krauss
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/business/energy-environment/a-cornucopia-of-help-for-renewable-energy.html
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
November 11, 2011

Study Clarifies the Energy Savings in Retrofitted Buildings

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/realestate/commercial/study-clarifies-the-energy-savings-in-retrofitted-buildings.html
While the practice of retrofitting buildings with energy-conserving technology like efficient boilers, high-quality windows and compact fluorescent light bulbs has been around for years, data on whether these changes result in any real savings has been virtually nonexistent. Now, a new study shows that these relatively straightforward fixes can significantly reduce spending on fuel and electricity. Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, a philanthropic arm of the German bank, and Living Cities, a nonprofit partnership of 22 foundations and financial institutions, commissioned the report, which will be released later this month. It examined nearly 19,000 affordable housing units in New York City that had undergone energy efficiency retrofits and found that these changes resulted in a 19 percent savings on fuel bills and a 10 percent savings on electricity across the portfolio. This translates into $240 in fuel savings and $70 in electrical savings per apartment every year.
...
At Terrific Tenements, for example, an 88-unit, two-building affordable housing complex on West 48th Street in Manhattan, the installation of new boilers and heating controls reduced fuel costs by 50 percent. At one of the buildings, at 425 West 48th Street, there was a fuel saving of $551 a year per apartment, while at the sister building at 527 West 47th Street, the saving was $355 annually for each unit.
...
The retrofits at the Terrific Tenements “was not achieved with any particularly exotic technologies” like solar panels or a green roof, [Marc Zuluaga of Steven Winter Associates] said. Rather, this is the simple story “of how an owner took the worst-performing building type in the city and turned it into one of the best-performing buildings in the entire city.”
...
Another project examined in the study is Riverview II in Yonkers, also owned by the Related Companies. The 343 apartments at Riverview, at 47 Riverdale Avenue, were heated with electricity, and the landlord was responsible for paying all of the tenants’ electrical bills. The Related Companies started an electrical savings program, including better windows, lighting upgrades and Energy Star refrigerators, that helped reduce overall electricity usage by more than 25 percent.

In addition, each apartment was responsible for paying its own electric bills, giving tenants an incentive to conserve electricity. As a result, the changes translated into $808 in annual savings for each apartment.

The study’s authors hope the results will go beyond persuading landlords to institute environmentally beneficial retrofits. They hope that lenders will use this data and consider underwriting larger loans to landlords based on the projected savings that come from retrofitting buildings.

Currently, lenders do not consider future savings from retrofits when they are underwriting a loan because there is little data indicating what those savings would be, experts said.

In addition to a lack of data, there is also some doubt whether energy audits, like those conducted by the Related Companies, are accurate. This is in part because some auditors are motivated to overstate the potential savings since favorable results help to justify the audits, and also because there is not sufficient follow-up to determine whether the energy audits were accurate.

To help resolve this, the study also created a tool for lenders to confirm the accuracy of energy audits. Using the data gathered, they divided New York City multifamily housing stock into categories based on a building’s age, heating system, electrical infrastructure and other factors.

Lenders can then apply the data gathered in the study to the building types to determine the potential savings and check the veracity of the energy audits. It also allows lenders to identify those buildings that would have the greatest increase in efficiency, and therefore the largest drop in costs, from an energy efficient retrofit.
...
To make them more comfortable using projected savings from retrofits, a public-private partnership started this year, the New York City Energy Efficiency Corporation, is planning to dedicate a portion of $37.5 million in federal stimulus money to provide collateral guarantee these deals. If a lender agrees to underwrite a loan and incorporate potential energy savings from a retrofit, the partnership will repay that loan should the projected savings fall short.

These efforts come at a time when New York City has been pushing environmental initiatives. The City Council has instituted laws requiring that buildings of more than the 50,000-square-feet benchmark compile and share information regarding their energy efficiency, and that every 10 years these buildings perform an energy audit. ...

by Julie Satow
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/realestate/commercial/study-clarifies-the-energy-savings-in-retrofitted-buildings.html
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
November 8, 2011

New Tactics and Billions to Manage City Sewage

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/nyregion/new-york-city-set-to-commit-2-4-billion-on-storm-water-control-tactics.html
The Bloomberg administration is set to commit $2.4 billion in public and private investment to applying new environmental technology to an old problem: the flow of untreated sewage and storm water into New York City’s waterways.

City officials announced ... that the State Department of Environmental Conservation had tentatively assented to a proposal by the city to introduce infrastructure to retain storm water before it reaches the sewer system and overloads it.  The approach reflects a shift from traditional sewage-control methods like underground storage tanks and tunnel systems to techniques like green roofs with plantings, porous pavement for parking lots and depressions for collecting water in parks.
...
The federal Environmental Protection Agency promotes these newer forms of infrastructure as a cost-effective and environmentally preferable alternative to conventional overflow management.

Sewer overflows are the biggest water-quality problem in the metropolitan region, preventing many waterways from meeting federal standards for fishing, swimming and healthy habitats for wildlife. Each year, up to 30 billion gallons of overflow enters New York Harbor, Jamaica Bay, Newtown Creek and other waterways.

The city plans to spend $1.5 billion of its own money in the next 20 years on the infrastructure project. An additional $900 million in private investment is to be secured by imposing requirements for residential and commercial development, like limits on the amount of runoff allowed from a new project. (The city will still spend $1.6 billion more over the same period on traditional sewage-control projects.)
...
City officials said features like plantings would help reduce the sewage overflows by 40 percent by 2030 and cut the city’s sewer management costs by $2.4 billion over 20 years, helping to keep water bills down for utility customers

by Mireya Navarro
FOR FULL STORY GO TO: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/nyregion/new-york-city-set-to-commit-2-4-billion-on-storm-water-control-tactics.html
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com

October 19, 2011

China Takes a Loss to Get Ahead in the Business of Fresh Water

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/world/asia/china-takes-loss-to-get-ahead-in-desalination-industry.html
... The Beijiang Power and Desalination Plant is a 26-billion-renminbi technical marvel: an ultrahigh-temperature, coal-fired generator with state-of-the-art pollution controls, mated to advanced Israeli equipment that uses its leftover heat to distill seawater into fresh water.

... One wrinkle in the $4 billion plant: The desalted water costs twice as much to produce as it sells for. Nevertheless, the owner of the complex, a government-run conglomerate called S.D.I.C., is moving to quadruple the plant’s desalinating capacity, making it China’s largest.
...
As it did with solar panels and wind turbines, the government has set its mind on becoming a force in yet another budding environment-related industry: supplying the world with fresh water.

The Beijiang project, southeast of Beijing, will strengthen Chinese expertise in desalination, fine-tune the economics, help build an industrial base and, along the way, lessen a chronic water shortage in Tianjin....
...
At the government’s order, China is rapidly becoming one of the world’s biggest growth markets for desalted water. The latest goal is to quadruple production by 2020, from the current 680,000 cubic meters, or 180 million gallons, a day to as many as three million cubic meters, about 800 million gallons, equivalent to nearly a dozen more 200,000-ton-a-day plants....

Institutes in at least six Chinese cities are researching developments in membranes, the technology at the core of the most sophisticated and cost-effective desalination techniques.

The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top-level state planning agency, is drafting plans to give preferential treatment to domestic companies that build desalting equipment or patent desalting technologies. There is talk of tax breaks and low-interest loans to encourage domestic production.

... Direct government investment in seawater projects does not exceed 10 percent of their cost....The government’s plans could mean an investment of as much as 200 billion renminbi, or about $31 billion, by state-owned companies, government agencies and private partners.

Beijiang’s desalination complex, built by S.D.I.C. at the behest of the Development and Reform Commission as a concept project, was almost wholly made in Israel, shipped to Tianjin and bolted together. Nationally, less than 60 percent of desalination equipment and technology is domestic.

China’s goal is to raise that to 90 percent by 2020...

Demand for water here is expected to grow 63 percent by 2030 — gallon for gallon, more than anywhere else on earth....

In Tianjin, deemed a model city for water conservation, 90 percent of water used in industry is recycled; 60 percent of farm irrigation systems use water-saving technologies; 148 miles of water-recycling pipes snake beneath the city. Apartments in one 10-square-mile area of town feature two taps, one for drinking water and one for recycled water suitable for other uses.

The Beijiang plant, one of two, supplies an expanding suburb with 10,000 tons of desalted water daily, with plans to someday pump 180,000 tons....

The Beijiang plant has faced some hiccups. The mineral-free distilled water scrubs rust from city pipes en route to taps, turning the water brown....

The global market for desalination technology will more than quadruple by 2020 to about $50 billion a year, the research firm SBI Energy predicted last month, and growing water shortages worldwide appear to ensure further growth.

... The increasingly sophisticated membrane technologies that filter salt from seawater can be applied to sewage treatment, pollution control and a legion of other cutting-edge uses. Far outpaced now by foreign membrane producers, which command at least 85 percent of the market, China is set on developing its own advanced technologies.
...
The list of foreign companies that have plunged into China’s desalination industry is long: Hyflux of Singapore, Toray of Japan, Befesa of Spain, Brack of Israel and ERI of the United States, among others.  And just as foreigners shifted solar-energy research and production to China, desalination companies are leaving their home bases as well. The Norwegian company Aqualyng is a partner with the Beijing city government ... and is studying moving its manufacturing facilities from Europe to China.  ERI, which is based in San Francisco and claims to have the desalination industry’s most advanced technology, is moving research facilities to China and is considering moving manufacturing as well at some later date.  Most of the foreign companies have partnered with state-owned corporations.... ERI and Aqualyng say they can become researchers and manufacturers in China without losing control of their products.
...
by Michael Wines
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/world/asia/china-takes-loss-to-get-ahead-in-desalination-industry.html
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
October 25, 2011

Lines Go Up to Ferry Wind Energy to Major Cities

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/us/lines-go-up-to-ferry-wind-energy-to-major-cities.html

Enormous transmission towers stand beside a West Texas country road, waiting for electric wires to be strung through them.
...
The rush to build transmission lines is part of Texas’ efforts to promote wind power, which provides 8 percent of the state grid’s electricity. Across the state, thousands of miles of wires are being strung at a cost that has soared to an estimated $6.8 billion. The main purpose is to ferry wind energy from remote areas ... to major cities like Dallas and Fort Worth. Texas leads the nation in wind production, and the lines are intended to nearly double the state’s wind capacity.

The build-out, which Texans will pay for in future electric bill increases projected at about $5 a month per customer for years, has been contentious. Some Texas landowners have fought to prevent the lines from crossing their property, even though they receive a one-time payment for hosting them.

Travis Besier, ... said that payments for an easement could range from around $3,000 to $10,000 or more an acre, depending on factors like the property’s proximity to a large city.  In some cases, ... Oncor has needed eminent domain proceedings, in which the utility can take the land if negotiations with the landowner fail.

For [local] businesses ... the construction has brought a boom.
...
All lines are supposed to be completed by the end of 2013. Work is going smoothly, builders say, though there are hitches. Workers must always beware of rattlesnakes and bad weather, including high winds....

Because of the drought and tighter water restrictions, [a contractor]... had trouble getting enough water....

... The completion of the lines, ... should spur more activity in West Texas, ... currently some turbines must stop spinning at windy times because there are not enough wires to carry out the power.
...
by Kate Galbraith

The New York Times www.NYTimes.com

October 21, 2011

FOR FULL STORY GO TO:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/us/lines-go-up-to-ferry-wind-energy-to-major-cities.html

Fancy Batteries in Electric Cars Pose Recycling Challenges

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/business/energy-environment/fancy-batteries-in-electric-cars-pose-recycling-challenges.html 
With fleets of electric cars starting to hit the roads, the next big mother lode for salvage companies is expected to be the expensive, newfangled batteries powering them.

Yet even as automakers vaunt the ways these cars can benefit the environment, they are divided over how best to handle the refuse: recycle or repurpose.

That is worrying some companies involved in “urban mining” — a voguish term that refers to extracting valuable metals from all kinds of discarded electronics, from power tools to mobile phones. They have already begun spending money to build an infrastructure to handle the flood of partly depleted battery packs that are expected to enter the waste stream; Frost & Sullivan, a consulting firm, puts the number at about 500,000 a year by the early 2020s.
 ...
“There is no green car without green recycling,” said Ghislain Van Damme, a manager at Umicore, a company based here in Hoboken that is one of the world’s largest recyclers of precious and specialty metals from electronic waste.
...
Aswin Kumar, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan. [points out] “lithium still costs about five times more to recycle than to mine, so environmental laws will drive recycling for now.”

Shoebox-size, lead-acid batteries have powered ignition and lighting in gasoline- or diesel-powered cars for decades. They already are widely recycled, mainly because lead is such a health hazard.  The batteries for hybrid and all-electric cars are far more powerful and much larger, with some weighing up to around 250 kilograms, or 550 pounds. They also can be the car’s most expensive component, mostly because of the complexity in making them, rather than the value of the materials.  Complicating the question of disposal, a large amount of energy remains stored even in partially discharged batteries. These could deliver harmful shocks and pose a serious fire hazard if mishandled.

For now, automakers are going their individual ways.Toyota Motor, whose experience goes back to 1998, shortly after the introduction of the RAV4 all-electric vehicle, has established partnerships in Europe and the United States to recycle batteries, including from the hybrid Prius. This year, it began shipping some batteries from Prius models sold in the United States to Japan to take advantage of a more-efficient recycling process at home.... General Motors and Nissan Motor, whose Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf are newer to the market ... have agreements with power companies to develop ways of reusing old batteries, perhaps for storing wind or solar energy during peak generating times for later use.

...

In the United States, the Department of Energy has granted $9.5 million to Toxco to build a specialized recycling plant in Ohio for electric vehicle batteries. It is expected to begin operations next year, handling batteries from a variety of makes and models. Another pilot plant being built in the German state of Lower Saxony is expected to open at the end of September. The German government gave Chemetall, which is part of a consortium called LithoRec that includes Volkswagen and its Audi unit, €5.7 million, or $8.2 million, of the €14.3 million cost. The British government this year granted £500,000, or $813,000, for a similar project to a group of companies including Axeon.

...

In Belgium, Umicore plans to formally open a €25 million plant in September in Hoboken, just outside of Antwerp, that can recover nearly all of the elements packed inside electric and hybrid car batteries including cobalt, nickel, lithium and even rare earths like neodymium..... The intense heat — more than 1,300 degrees Celsius (2,370 Fahrenheit) — strips away plastic coatings and creates a plasma, or ultrahigh temperature gas, to separate metals and other materials.The process yields tree-trunk-size chunks of gnarled metal alloy, some weighing more than 2,000 kilograms. Umicore refines those chunks to create metals for resale to manufacturers of car batteries, wind turbines and other high-technology products.  It also recovers a gravelly substance, or slag, that Rhodia, a French chemical company, refines for rare earth elements like neodymium. Given the recent restrictions by China on exporting such materials, more companies are looking at doing the same. Mr. Van Damme said the Umicore plant’s design could be scaled up to handle more than a million car batteries each year from the current capacity of 150,000....  But, so far, the only car company that has announced a deal with Umicore is Tesla Motors, of Palo Alto, California, whose electric Roadsters start at more than $100,000. Tesla will pay to recycle its battery packs from models sold in Europe after seven to 10 years on the road. The final cost to Tesla would partly depend on the market value of the metals recovered by Umicore. 

....

Some manufacturers, like G.M. and Nissan, are focused on deferring recycling for as long as possible. They estimate that even at the end of their motoring life, the batteries should still be able to hold about 70 percent of the power of a new one.

Nissan has formed a joint venture called 4R Energy with Sumitomo, a Japanese conglomerate, aimed at using the old batteries for storing energy from renewable energy sources like wind and solar and for backup power supplies in emergencies.   It might be possible to “make recycling a profitable business in the future,” said Takashi Sakagami, the president of 4R Energy.

By JAMES KANTER 

The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
August 30, 2011
FOR FULL STORY GO TO: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/business/energy-environment/fancy-batteries-in-electric-cars-pose-recycling-challenges.html

Rooftop farms sprouting in Brooklyn -Urban pioneers cater to restaurants and markets

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110828/REAL_ESTATE/308289984
inShare10

Atop an industrial building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the crew at Gotham Greens can harvest the equivalent of six acres of salad greens and herbs without getting their hands dirty. Bibb lettuce, basil and other leafy plants spout from a stream of recirculated, nutrient-rich water in the company's 15,000-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse.

The process actually uses 20 times less water than a soil-based farm, according to Viraj Puri, Gotham Greens co-founder and CEO. “It's a very efficient, productive way to grow,” he said.

...

Gotham Greens, with 25 employees, had its first harvest in June. Two soil-based operations—Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, in Greenpoint, and Brooklyn Grange, in Long Island City, Queens—have started up within the past two years, selling their crops to restaurants and markets throughout the city.

...

But it remains to be seen whether these rooftop farms can compete in a system dominated by national growers.

... The cost of a hydroponic rooftop is about $2 million to $2.5 million, says Paul Lightfoot, CEO of Manhattan-based BrightFarms, a firm that finances hydroponic outfits.

... Mr. Puri would not disclose startup costs for the 0.3-acre farm....

The urban farm's strategy is to focus on growing items that are highly perishable and expensive to ship. “Food goes bad while people own it,”....

Eagle Street co-founder and head farmer Annie Novak says keeping labor costs low is essential to its success. The 6,000-square-foot farm relies on volunteers, apprentices and a partner organization, Growing Chefs, to assist its four paid employees.

The farm focuses on leafy greens and herbs, which provide the best return, says Ms. Novak. “An herb is perfect, because it has a high price and requires zero labor,” she said.

Eagle Street breaks even on crops, with annual revenues of about $1.25 to $1.50 a square foot. The business makes an additional $2,000 from sales of T-shirts and nonperishables such as honey, Ms. Novak said. Building owner Broadway Stages paid for the $60,000 roof, which was designed and installed by New York-based Goode Green. The cost—amounting to about $10 a square foot—was significantly lower than that of many similar projects.

Because Gotham Greens can achieve a denser yield and harvest year-round, Mr. Puri forecasts first-year revenues to be higher “by a factor of hundreds” than those of the average soil-based rooftop farm.

Demand for Gotham Greens items already outstrips supply. Mr. Puri is in talks to open another Brooklyn facility next year and expects to establish several more.

...

According to The Eagle Street Rooftop Farm Fact Sheet at http://rooftopfarms.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/EagleStreetRooftopFarmFactSheet2010.pdf :

• The green roof base system is comprised of 2” of built-up components: polyethelene, drainange mat, and retention and separation fabrics.

• With the approval of the building's engineer, 200,000 pounds of growing medium were lifted onto the roof by crane, in "super-sacks", over the course of a single day. The growing medium, laid directly onto the green roof base, is a mixture of compost, rock particulates and shale and is manufactured in Pennsylvania. It is a green roof component that at the same time retains water, allows for air circulation and is lightweight.

• The green roof can hold over 1.5” of rain, providing a significant reduction in storm water runoff. The captured water, in turn, can help to cool the warehouse below yielding a reduction in cooling costs.

• Installation cost was approximately $10 per square foot. This is significantly lower than most green roof installations due in part to two main factors: the three story building and open expanse of roof were very accessible and, two, that recycled materials such as used rafters were utilized for edging.

• Upon completion of Goode Green's base system installation, the growing medium was moved into by place by a team of farming volunteers over the course of three days. It was arranged into 16 north-south beds measuring thirty inches to four feet in width and divided down the middle by a single long aisle. The beds have a soil depth of 4-7”. The aisles were filled with mulched bark.

• Since overhead watering on a rooftop often evaporates or blows away, irrigation was inititally provided via black plastic drip lines, using city tap water. In 2010, the drip irrigation system was de-installed, as the root systems of the crops rotated and intercropped through the farm during the growing season were incondusive with drip watering (e.g. carrots, microgreens, radishes). Currently, the Farm relies on hand watering (via hose) for seedlings and transplants, and rainwater for established plants (kale, chard, tomatoes).

• In its first season, the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm grew over thirty types of produce, from watermelon to cabbage. Having seen what fared poorly in a greenroof growing environment, in 2010 Annie tightened the crop list to a wider range of varities within a smaller number of crops.

• In 2010, the Farm grows a narrower crop list, with a wide diversity of heirloom and rooftop-acclimated varities of produce within each crop type. In chosing her crops, Annie designed a special rooftop salad mix of seed stock designed to do well on rooftop conditions, yet provide the same colors and spice of traditional popular salad mixes. Currenly, the Farm grows cucumbers, hot peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, spinach, radishes, kale, swiss chard, carrots, peas, beans, salad greens (lettuces, mustards, arugula) herbs (sage, tarragon, oregano, parsley, chives, cilantro, dill), and flowers (cosmos, zinnias, calendula, tobacco, daisys, hops). Additionally, the Farm grows a small amount of corn and squash (winter and summer).

by Sara Eckel
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110828/REAL_ESTATE/308289984

Crains New York Business www.CrainsNY.com

August 28, 2011

Germany Dims Nuclear Plants, but Hopes to Keep Lights On

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/science/earth/30germany.html
Not since the grim period after World War II has Germany had significant blackouts, but it is now bracing for that possibility after shutting down half its nuclear reactors practically overnight.

Nuclear plants have long generated nearly a quarter of Germany’s electricity. But after the tsunami and earthquake that sent radiation spewing from Fukushima, half a world away, the government disconnected the 8 oldest of Germany’s 17 reactors.... Three months later ... Parliament voted to close them permanently. There are plans to retire the remaining nine reactors by 2022.

As a result, electricity producers are scrambling to ensure an adequate supply. Customers and companies are nervous....

“It’s easy to say, ‘Let’s just go for renewables,’ and I’m quite sure we can someday do without nuclear, but this is too abrupt,” said Joachim Knebel, chief scientist at Germany’s prestigious Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He characterized the government’s shutdown decision as “emotional” and pointed out that on most days, Germany has survived this experiment only by importing electricity from neighboring France and the Czech Republic, which generate much of their power with nuclear reactors.

Then there are real concerns that the plan will jettison efforts to rein in manmade global warming, since whatever nuclear energy’s shortcomings, it is low in emissions....
...
The International Energy Agency, generally a fan of Germany’s green-leaning energy policy, has been critical.

Germany’s planners believed they could forgo nuclear energy in large part because of the country’s remarkable progress in renewable energy, which now accounts for 17 percent of its electricity output, a number the government estimates will double in 10 years. On days when the offshore wind turbines spin full tilt, Germany produces more electricity from renewable sources than it uses, according to European energy monitors.

Germany has “exceeded everyone’s expectations on renewable power,” said Mr. Varro, showing that it could be cost effective and reliable.

Until it closed the reactors, Germany was Europe’s leading energy exporter.

With a total of 133 gigawatts of installed generating capacity in place at the start of this year ... the country needs about 90.5 gigawatts of generating capacity on hand to fill a typical national demand of about 80 gigawatts a day. So the 25 gigawatts that nuclear power contributed would not be missed — at least within its borders.

To be prudent, the plan calls for the creation of 23 gigawatts of gas- and coal-powered plants by 2020. Why? Because renewable plants don’t produce nearly to capacity if the air is calm or the sky is cloudy, and there is currently limited capacity to store or transport electricity, energy experts say.

New coal and gas plants will use the cleanest technology available and should not aggravate climate change, government officials said, because they will operate within the European carbon-trading system in which plants that exceed the allowed emissions cap have to buy carbon credits from companies whose activities are environmentally beneficial, thus evening out the environmental ledger.

Electricity prices are expected to rise by 35 to 40 euros ($50 to $60) per household each year, or less than 5 percent, the government estimates. Though nuclear energy generally costs less than newer options, German law has long stipulated that renewable energy must be purchased first even if it is costlier.

But skeptics consider government assumptions overly optimistic. Stefan Martus, the mayor of Philippsburg, says he believes energy costs could rise more dramatically than government estimates; the price of permits to offset dirty power plants is highly unpredictable and variable, like the value of stocks. And the International Energy Agency does not think Germany — or any other country — will be able to reduce its emissions at a reasonable cost without nuclear power.

Energy agency officials also question predictions that electricity use will decline an additional 10 percent over the next decade given the projected expansion of electric growth of the German economy. The average German family already uses only about half the electricity of its American equivalent.
...
Even before Fukushima, nuclear energy’s days in Germany were numbered. ... Germany was already enacting a plan for slowly phasing out nuclear energy by 2023....  Still, Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a physicist, decided last fall to extend the operating licenses of Germany’s nuclear plants over concerns that innovation alone would not satisfy the country’s energy appetite.  Fukushima changed everything....

Biblis and nearby Philippsburg were stunned by the suddenness of the about-face.... Both towns will lose hundreds of jobs and millions in tax revenue.

German energy companies say they have been handed a national energy template that looks good on paper but is technically challenging. Although the country’s production of energy is bounteous, they say it is not always available where and when it is needed. Northern Germany has offshore wind and coal deposits, but southern Germany — a manufacturing epicenter that is home to Mercedes, BMW and Audi — has no plentiful local fuel source other than nuclear. Germany’s current grid is highly decentralized, lacking high-voltage transmission lines to move electricity over long distances.
...
Amprion, the largest of the country’s four grid operators ... had already started working toward a renewable future with no nuclear power, planning for 500 miles of new transmission lines to bring electricity from north to south that would cost $4.3 billion and take 10 to 15 years to build. At most, 40 miles of lines have been completed.

The country has also been pouring money into biomass plants and solar installations — millions of panels now sit on German roofs and fields. Despite recent technological improvements, solar electricity is still far more expensive to generate than wind, gas or nuclear power. And output can be highly seasonal.

Germany’s hope that gas and coal plants will temporarily replace some of the lost nuclear generation may be hard to fulfill — power companies remain lukewarm about building them especially given the German policy of buying “clean” energy first. “Few operators will be willing to build a power plant in a form that may ultimately only run a couple of hundred hours a year,” Mr. Grossman of RWE said.

This winter, Amprion predicts its grid will have 84,000 megawatts of electricity at its disposal, to provide 81,000 megawatts needed for consumption — an uncomfortably slim margin of safety, Mr. Vanzetta said. In prior years, electricity was readily available for purchase on the European grid if the price was right. But exported German power is what helped keep France glowing in winter.

"At the moment, we have a stressed system, but it’s under control,” Mr. Vanzetta said. “If we have days with no wind and no solar and can’t buy energy from abroad, then there is the risk of blackouts.”

by Elisabeth Rosenthal

FOR FULL STORY GO TO: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/science/earth/30germany.html
August 29, 2011

For Coal Plants, a Game of Chicken

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/for-coal-plants-a-game-of-chicken/

On August 15, 2011 Matthew Wald wrote:

In an article in Friday’s paper, I described how some companies that operate dirty coal-fired power plants are playing chicken as they face a decision on whether to retire them or install expensive scrubbers and filters.

 

They are waiting to see what their neighbors will do as new environmental rules take effect:....

 

In fact, in the largest grid jurisdiction in North America, the one operated by PJM Interconnection, money comes to plant owners in several different ways. The biggest is selling energy, or kilowatt-hours, and that price varies by time of day. Plants in areas where there is a lot of congestion on the grid and new supplies cannot easily be shipped in will enjoy something close to a monopoly and take in very high revenues on peak summer days.

American Electric Power, a multistate utility based in Columbus, Ohio, has been arguing that if it and its competitors close some big low-cost plants, customers will face abrupt rate increases of 10 to 35 percent. The nature of the PJM market magnifies the importance of losing a cheap generator; all producers get the same payment, equal to the highest-cost generation running, and if a low-cost generator is retired, then the most expensive generator needed to replace it will set a higher price for everyone.

But the consulting firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance identifies a second mechanism by which prices will increase. In PJM and in parallel organizations covering New York, New England, the upper Midwest and California, electric generating stations are selling several services at once, each with its own price.

The simpler thing they sell is electricity, which is priced in units of megawatt-hours. A megawatt-hour, or 1,000 kilowatt-hours, is the amount of energy that a suburban house uses in a month or so. But they also sell capacity: each utility that serves customers has to go into the wholesale market and buy not only energy but the actual availability of generation.

There are few parallels outside the electricity world; it is as if a restaurant charged upfront for a reservation for a table, independent of the price of the food. The way the electric system works, the equivalent in a restaurant would mean paying for a table of adequate size, whether or not everybody showed up.

The capacity market is not only a way to compensate generators; it can also be used to set a value on the services of “demand response” companies. Those are companies that line up electricity customers who agree, in exchange for a payment, to turn off their equipment on peak days.

Companies that serve retail electricity customers must buy as much capacity as the retail customers used in their last peak load day, plus a margin. And this summer, many of the companies had new peak loads.
Eventually electricity customers pay for both the energy and the capacity. The mechanism is intended to compensate generators that sit idle much of the year but are really important on hot days. The price also serves as a signal to companies thinking about building new plants; if it rises high enough, they know it is time to build.

Capacity payments have mostly been low in the last few years because the recession has cut demand for electricity and supply has been high relative to demand in the auctions or individual deals between utilities that serve customers and companies that own generation.

In a research note released late Friday, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said that capacity payments in 2014 and 2015 would reach a level equal to $7 per megawatt-hour of electricity sold — in other words, about $7 on the monthly bill of that suburban house, or seven-tenths of a cent per kilowatt-hour. The national average retail price of a kilowatt-hour is about 10 cents, although in some parts of the Northeast it can be triple that amount.

Higher capacity payments are one of the mechanisms through which surviving electric plants will get the revenue needed for add-on antipollution devices.

Charles Blanchard, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance and author of the research note, said in an e-mail that capacity payments may reach 25 percent of total revenues as supply is reduced.

For the Independent System Operators, or I.S.O.’s, like PJM, the capacity problem will become more important as fewer generators are coal- or gas-fired power plants, which can be switched on at will to meet peak load, and more are wind or solar, which must be compensated for times it is not sunny or windy.
...

By MATTHEW L. WALD
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/for-coal-plants-a-game-of-chicken/
The New York Times Green Blog www.NYTimes.com
August 15, 2011