Sustainable Energy in the News

A European joint-venture energy company has two years to determine the best possible site for wave-energy off the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Pumping compressed air underground so it can be extracted later to generate electricity could prove one of the most effective ways in the short term for Ontario to add vast amounts of renewable energy to the power system, industry experts say.

So-called compressed-air energy storage, or CAES, has been around for more than 20 years and while only two facilities have ever been built – a 110-megawatt plant in Alabama and a 290-megawatt plant in Germany – officials from New York, California, Texas and a number of other U.S. states are beginning to seriously explore the potential. Iowa has already taken the leap.

The basic concept is that cheap, surplus electricity available overnight is used to compress air and inject it into underground reservoirs, like a salt cavern or depleted gas field.

Even in countries that tax gasoline much more heavily than the United States, the alternative of electric cars has had little success. The limited range of electric batteries and the hassle of getting them recharged have kept electric cars out of the mainstream.

Now a California company has a plan to change all that. Shai Agassi, founder and CEO of Better Place, has persuaded three countries, Hawaii, and the San Francisco Bay area to buy into his ambitious vision of an electric-car infrastructure. He calls for a system of ubiquitous plug-in charging points as well as roadside stations, much like gas stations, where motorists can switch fully-charged batteries for their depleted ones in three minutes.

Automakers may be pushing forward on plans to introduce plug-in vehicles within the next few years, but the drive toward electric transportation could hit a yellow light if the grid isn't prepared to handle the extra load. And it's not just about having enough power generation to support the charging of hundreds of thousands of cars plugged into a wall socket.

David O'Brien, president and chief executive officer of Toronto Hydro Corp., said the wires in distribution networks can behave in strange ways when major changes are introduced to the system.

British Columbia has become a last refuge for a growing number of species in North America, but if the "biodiversity ark" is to be maintained in the face of global warming, government will have to change the way it manages the environment.

That's the conclusion reached by researchers at Simon Fraser University who have formed a group known as the Adaptation to Climate Change Team that is exploring the risks of global warming and proposing possible policy responses.

Sometimes deferring pain simply makes matters worse. We can only hope this point is not lost on the government delegates currently gathered at the United Nations climate change conference in Poznan, Poland. There to continue negotiations for a new treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol, the representatives of some 190 countries are finding that progress, even on this burning concern, can be tortuously slow.

There is near unanimous agreement about one thing: not acting quickly to curb global greenhouse gas emissions could have catastrophic consequences.

Against a backdrop of global financial crises, the UN Climate Change Conference opened today with a call for a new climate deal by 2009.

At the same time, conference leaders cautioned that competing national interests and conflicting objectives should not trump the urgency of the climate issue and the need to reach a global agreement in time for the Copenhagen conference next year.

“Today, we are starting our two weeks of difficult work. Don't let particular interests obscure objectives and the need to change the present direction taken by humanity,” said Maciej Nowicki, the conference president.