EU defines & limits eBikes

Maximum of 25 kph (15 mph) before electric cut-off and 250 watts of electrical assist.

http://www.ecf.com/press_release/20-11-2012-eu-parliament-backs-ecf-and-...

Anything more is not a "bicycle" but a scooter.

Best Hopes for More bicycles and eBikes,

Alan

From the website for the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission.
http://www.tllrwdcc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Article-introduced-at...

Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of the expected. These preliminary data need to be followed up, especially in the light of similar preliminary U.S. mortality findings for the four months after Chernobyl fallout arrived in 1986, which approximated final figures."

(in excess of the expected? Oh pay tell where are THOSE models? Models that show a fission reactor failure 1/2 a world away cause deaths.)

Collapse and the Sorites Paradox

Sorites is the Greek word for "heap." Imagine, for instance, a heap of sand on your desk. A heap contains maybe 1,000,000 grains of sand. If you take away a single grain of sand, is it still a heap? I think most of us would say, "of course it is!" Nothing's changed from any outward appearance, after all. If I take two grains away? Three? Four? Ten? No difference, of course it's still a heap of sand.

The problem is, I can just keep doing this - picking away a grain of sand out of the heap and asking you if it still a heap. Eventually we will be left with a single grain of sand. Is this a heap? Of course it isn't. But exactly when did it stop being a heap? Which grain did I remove to turn it from a heap to something else? Can you point to it? This concept also works with someone who is rich. Clearly if I take a dollar away from someone who is a millionaire, it will make little difference. The rich person is still rich. What if I keep doing it? At what point do they become poor? $100,000? $10,000? $100? $53.76?

We can easily see how this applies to societal collapse. The problem arises from vague predicates. How do we define a heap? How do we define a collapse? When does one become the other? When does pre-collapse become post-collapse? What one single thing, when removed, causes the collapse? What one switch causes a pre-collapse society to become a post-collapse one? Is there a phase shift? Can we define such a thing? If not, how can we really define collapse at all? Does the term have any meaning?

I think that's also essentially Greer's argument, that collapse happens so slowly in a way that most people aren't able to observe and say...aha there it is. I know that it has been discussed endlessly here but I found the article noteworthy for it's clear articulation of the problem, so posting it here.

Re: Will the U.S. Surpass Saudi Arabia in Oil Production? and

What we missed in the global energy report

A couple of articles which dig deeper into the IEA's projections for future US energy production. The first points to the full 672 page report, which obviously includes much more information than that found in the Executive Summary. I suspect that most of the first-to-publish commentaries were written without taking the time to read the full report, so those authors' optimistic comments were premature. The second piece points to specific errors in some of these reports, which, sadly, comes long after the public has absorbed these widely spread errors...

E. Swanson

What is going on with the EIA website that is always down?

www.eia.gov

Stop the Parade! -- Should we be wasting our dwindling supply of helium on floating cartoon characters?

Does anyone have information on what the price of helium has done in the last few years? It seems a shame to be "wasting" it on the balloons in the parade. What do others think?

Re: Will the U.S. Surpass Saudi Arabia in Oil Production?

Isn't the real question more like "Will pigs fly in our lifetime?"

Just sayin'...

;)

Regarding headline up top: "Will the US Surpass Saudi Arabia in Oil Production"

In the text of this Popular Mechanics article the production of North Dakota was said to go from 1000 barrels per day in 2004 to 1,000,000 per day in mid 2012. This is sloppy journalism as ND production as of July 2012 was 674,000 per day (see NDoil.org and go to news section). Maybe by 2015 ND will reach 1,000,000 barrels per day of crude oil production if prices can climb close to $100 for WTI. Even counting equivilent nat. gas they are still not at 1M per day (currently 40% of Bakken gas is being flared due to lack of pipelines across western ND and eastern MT).

A slick example of visualising big numbers ...

Mountain of balls engulfs New York to show GHG emissions

You may have heard that New York City added over 54 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2010. But other than recognising that it's a pretty big quantity, can you picture what that amount actually looks like?

Adam Nieman and a team from Carbon Visuals have now created a visualisation that gives the number a sense of scale by representing carbon emissions in terms of 10 meter-wide balls that pile up around the New York City skyline. The backdrop alludes to the fact that about 75 per cent of emissions are produced by buildings.

Each ball represents a ton of carbon dioxide: the volume of gas that would fill a sphere of that size. The video shows the mountain of balls that would build up after an hour, a day and a year, as well as visualising the emission rate of about two tons per second in real time, if it all emerged in one place.

The visualisation aims to give the general public a better understanding of greenhouse gas emissions by representing volume in a more intuitive way.

... would be cool to do this with barrels of oil

Cloudy future for cash-soaked solar technology
Ominous sounding title, but this is cigs thin film. I see this as yesterdays, technology that was then falsely thought to be the future. Cigs made sense, when silicon was expensive, now it is just a cantankerous also ran technology. They can have it.

Cuba's Oil Quest to Continue, Despite Deepwater Disappointment

... It's not unusual to hit dry holes in drilling, but the approach in offshore Cuba was shaped by uniquely political circumstances. Benjamin-Alvarado points out that some of the areas drilled did turn up oil. But rather than shift nearby to find productive—if not hugely lucrative—sites, each new company dragged the rig to an entirely different area off Cuba. It's as if the companies were only going for the "big home runs" to justify the cost of drilling, he said. "The embargo had a profound impact on Cuba's efforts to find oil."

... Cuba's disappointing foray into deepwater doesn't end its quest for energy. The nation produces domestically only about half the oil it consumes. As with every aspect of its economy, its choices for making up the shortfall are sorely limited by the 50-year-old United States trade embargo.

At what could be a time of transition for Cuba, experts agree that the failure of deepwater exploration increases the Castro regime's dependence on the leftist government of Venezuela, which has been meeting fully half of Cuba's oil needs with steeply subsidized fuel. And it means Cuba will continue to seek out a wellspring of energy independence without U.S. technology, greatly increasing both the challenges, and the risks.

First Big Dengue Fever Outbreak in Europe Since 1920s, EU Reports

Europe is experiencing its first sustained transmission of dengue fever since the 1920s after an outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease in Madeira, Portugal that has infected more than 1,300 people, an EU agency said.

According to the UN's World Health Organisation, between 50 and 100 million dengue infections occur each year in more than 100 countries. In 1970, the disease was endemic in just nine countries.

Rooftop Solar Stood Up to Sandy

Big solar installers report almost no damage, even in hardest hit areas

Study Details Natural Gas Leaks in Boston

... The new study comes in the wake of devastating fires fueled by natural gas during Hurricane Sandy. Potential damage to gas pipeline pressure regulators, caused by flooding in Hurricane Sandy, has raised ongoing safety concerns in New York and New Jersey.

The researchers report finding 3,356 separate natural gas leaks under the streets of Boston. "While our study was not intended to assess explosion risks, we came across six locations in Boston where gas concentrations exceeded the threshold above which explosions can occur," said Nathan Phillips, associate professor in BU's Department of Earth and Environment and co-author of the study.

Toshiba Shows Four-Legged Robot for Nuke Disaster

Toshiba Corp. unveiled a robot Wednesday that the company says can withstand high radiation and help in nuclear disasters. But it remains unclear what exactly the new machine will be capable of doing if and when it gets the go-ahead to enter Japan's crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.

... the machine, which looks like an ice cooler on wobbly metal legs, also appears prone to glitches. The robot took a jerky misstep during a demonstration to reporters, freezing with one leg up in the air. It had to be lifted by several people and rebooted.

The robot was also notably slow in climbing a flight of eight steps, cautiously lifting its legs one by one, and taking about a minute to go up each step.

With obstacles that aren't as even and predictable as steps, such as the debris at the plant, it may need as much as 10 minutes to figure out how to clear the object, Toshiba acknowledged.

And if it ever falls, it will not be able to get up on its own.

Climate change evident across Europe, says report

The report - Climate Change, Impacts and Vulnerabilities in Europe 2012 - involving more than 50 authors from a range of organisations, listed a number of "key messages", including:

- Observed climate change has "already led to a wide range of impacts on environmental systems and society; further climate change impacts are projected for the future";
- Climate change can increase existing vulnerabilities and deepen socio-economic imbalances in Europe;
- The combined impacts of projected climate change and socio-economic development is set to see the damage costs of extreme weather events continue to increase.

... In the report, the agency says the past decade in Europe has been the warmest on record.

$63k for the right to buy a car in Singapore

Are there any TOD folks from Singapore who could comment on how this system is working?

Maybe a sign of the times to come...

Amazing what you can do with a little wind ...

Sailing Boat Smashes World Speed Record

... The Vestas team hit a top speed on this run of 64.78 knots (120 kilometres per hour). For pilot and project leader Paul Larsen that one record-breaking run was payback for ten years of hard work.

"These latest runs represent a real breakthrough in the world of sailing. It's the hydrodynamic version of going supersonic...and it feels like it," he told New Scientist. "The acceleration just kept coming. It was like a rev limiter was removed.

"Things went into fast forward and my mind had to race with the decision-making process required for this new reality, i.e. can I stop the thing at the end.

Ron P. (Darwinian) states:

Their problem, as I see it is that their reason is influenced far too much by wishful thinking. That is a problem most all of us have, but some are far more subject to letting wishful thinking influence their reason than others.

Here's a try.

The intended purpose of the first operative electricity feed-in tariffs laws, for instance the ~1990 German FIT, was to kickstart the industries and it was assumed that the tariffs could slowly be phased out by reducing them as the crafts would become competitive with respect to fossils. While the method spread to more and more legislations it became consistently so effective and refined that it outgrew its deployment targets when it wasn't impeded, but i'm not aware of a place where the original intent has been realised to date. There are a variety of good explanations of why i don't think that it was a realistic scope in the first place, the development of which i will save space for here. And that one should care about it in the first place.

That outgrowth can however create some distorsions with more or less disruptive consequences that are to be dealt with below, basically meaning that what follows is me more re less academic wishlist for a Federal US renewables FIT.

I take it from the EIA that retail electricity in the US is sold presently roughly at 12 cents, up by two over the last few years. Which is comparatively cheap and replicates the pattern for gas in the US.

I do estimate that there can be a federal renewables FIT in the United States that sells for 12 cents all inclusive (transmission and the rest) provided a tight ship is run. And i'd put a more comfortable tight ship at 15 cents; better too, but thats a statement of preference. Now i want both options to be safe when they are to reach high wind^D^D^D^Dpenetration rates, and here's how.

First issue is that as capacity builds up there will be an oversupply because existing business models want to stick around, which tends to cause a number of weird and not very healthy arbitrations. Thus i'll come up with a way to maintain equilibrium prices under these conditions that also contains a throw of lifebelt to the old players.

Its convoluted nature will likely require a tad of patience at the first encounter, as optimization was attempted for workability not purity. A weak spot with respect to the lifebelt feature is that business models tend to be adverse to adapation (aka never change a running system), not least in energy matters, ergo i guess that the modus operandi 'd have to be pretty persuasive. Human brains use convolution by the way to a substantial degree, no kidding. So thats that and now the goods.

As far as i can see from a distance the juice in the US is sold by the electricity companies who then commission network operators for delivery. Feed-in priorities hand over that key from generation to transport in a more or less explicit fashion; in all practice i know the electricity companies keep their sale contracts but have to manage somehow their loss of control over transmission, i.e. they may have to sell electricity they didn't produce, for which on occasion they tend to charge a price that mirrors their economic position.

In consequence the first proposition 'd be to hand over retail price finding to transmission, while maintaining its existing remunerations for quantity or service delivered. Electricity companies can continue to sell electricity, only at a price tag not set by them. Again in practice this probably requires having the Untouchables keeping an eye on that mutual interdependence which i guess should be in the ballpark as we've come some way since the roaring twenties, though the recent Walker walks the walk Calvin Coolidge emulation attempt and the Enron case seem to warrant calls to caution. Possibly there are better implementations of the above principle i didn't think of. Then there also likely needs to be a transparent framework that regulates retail price setting by asking network operators to keep it within wanted boundaries. Likely there is already regulation as network delivery is a natural monopoly. I remember one example where millers threatened competition here and thereby got the executive into gears. Pickens seems to have tried something similar in Texas. Maybe giving Danny Williams a call, alternatively maybe pondering Noramel would do.

The whole trick may look ugly but I do think that it can moot most of the distorsions resulting from oversupply.

One way of avoiding contracts from the existing plays on that miserable proposal is to provide both them and newbies with a fair share of the new system, for instance by providing credit for investing in feed-in generation. The Farm Credit System springs to my mind here.

My second issue are generation technologies and their feed-in prices. I'm tempted to declare faisablity here and issue a call to the parallel universe of reader's acumen, too curious if the knots and bolts are common knowledge. L'intendance suivra.

Not me.

Spoils: Film Documents Americans Who Reap An ‘Extraordinary Harvest’ From Waste

... Part money-saving opportunity, part political-statement, and part environmentalism, the modern freeganism movement — also known simply as dumpster diving — has spawned a culture of its own.

A new short documentary film, called “Spoils: Extraordinary Harvest,” intimately explores this culture. The film follows groups of dumpster divers in New York City and paints a portrait of the people who dig for wasted food.

Energy minister's dilemma no 'light' matter

If, as the court found, the JPS's all-island licence was indeed invalid, and the decision should be enforced, what would happen to the company's operations? At what point would the JPS turn off the lights, send its employees home, and call time on its business interest in Jamaica?

What would Portia Simpson Miller, her Government and the citizenry do when JPS, with justification, demanded the return of the billions of dollars invested in its business, on the premise of being a monopoly, since 2001?

How would Government deal with the fact that it now has to foot a massive bill for a licence that it granted to the utility provider to meet the country's energy needs?

For anyone in the dark about why the attorney general was moved to advise the Government to appeal the ruling, I ask only that you think very carefully on these things

Three guesses, which comment is mine?

Back in recession - Jamaican economy contracts for third quarter

Largest declines

The PIOJ head pointed out that the industries recording the largest declines during the nine months were mining and quarrying, down 8.5 per cent; construction 4.3 per cent and transport, storage and communication, down 3.2 per cent.

"The short-term prospects for the Jamaican economy is expected to be challenging due to the continued subdued performance for the global economy resulting in weakened external demand for Jamaican goods and services," Hutchinson said.

In addition, he said, the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the agriculture industry, as well as lost production time in other industries, will have a negative impact on real value added.

As a result, the PIOJ is forecasting real GDP for the October to December quarter to contract within the range of 0.5 to 1.5 per cent. The institute is now estimating real GDP for calendar year 2012 to fall within the range of negative one per cent to zero per cent.

I'd say

"The long-term prospects for the Jamaican economy is expected to be challenging due to the continued subdued performance for the global economy resulting in weakened external demand for Jamaican goods and services,"

but then, I'm a pessimist/doomer/peak-oiler or whatever you want to call it so, as far as

Despite the underperforming economy, Hutchinson said he is satisfied that significant progress has been made since he announced two years ago the start of work to develop a short to medium-term growth-inducement strategy for Jamaica.

goes, I say, "Good luck with that!".

It is my considered opinion that, any plans for economic growth have only a remote possibility of success if they fully plan for declining world oil production, declining net exports and higher prices and figure out a way to work around those issues. If they don't plan for Peak Oil, they are doomed to fail.

Alan from the islands

Innovative Heating And Cooling Projects Prove The Benefits Of Geothermal

The project is a breakthrough for the geothermal heat pump industry for a couple reasons. First, its massive size. Second, it is extremely economical and shows that geothermal heat pumps are ready for district heating and cooling applications.

To give you a sense of the size, the project is a 10,000 ton system, which is equivalent to 35 megawatts of power. That’s large enough to heat and cool 47 buildings — replacing four old, dirty coal-fired boilers. The project will also help create 2,300 direct and indirect jobs throughout the construction period.

The project will cost $60 million dollars, which equals $1.71 per watt of power, beating the cost of utility-scale solar projects. Utility-scale solar PV projects have an average installed cost of $4.69 according to the Open PV Project in November 2012; although this number if falling.

total electric production of roof top solar array, today, is 7.3 kwh. i saved myself $1.24 from dah man, i.e. profit driven centralized electric company. plus i had tons of passive solar heating. house wuz cozy all day while i wuz at work.

CIGS is supposed to work better under cloudy conditions. silly-con needs bright sun. silly-con has constant output over life of panels. CIGS starts out over 25% and then drops to around silly-con. however it will always out generate silly-con under cloudy conditions. CIGS absorbs a different wavelength of infrared than silly-con.

i suspect an array consisting of both silly-con and CIGS is the optimal way to go.

i believe that the NJT bosses should get big raises just as CEO's in private corporations get big raises and bonuses when they drive their companies into the ground. in fact, the NJT bosses should get some sort of award or medal for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence. really. NJT bosses should get great pensions and medical care for life. if this has to be done by denying the truly needy, i say LET'S DO IT! if it has to be done by raising fares on commuters and taxes on everyone else, i say LET'S DO IT!

there is no limit to human greed and folly. the smartest men make the biggest mistakes.

Princeton geoscientists report Greenland ice sheet melting rate is increasing

(Phys.org)—Princeton geoscientists Christopher Harig and Frederik Simons have been applying new methods to study the amount of ice melt in the Greenland ice sheet. They report in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the rate is approximately 200 billion tons annually and is rising at a rate of approximately 9 billion tons per year.

If exponential acceleration in the meltrate is maintained at this level it leads to an ice-free Greenland in about 100 years time.

Musings: If You Believe The IEA, Our Energy Worries Are Over

by G. Allen Brooks, Rigzone

While the IEA study received significant attention from the mainstream media, most reporters do not understand the dynamics of oil reservoirs to ask the right questions and point out the possible weaknesses in the study. The IEA has conducted extensive research into oilfield decline rates in the past, but we sense little of that research was brought to bear in this study. It seems from reading the summary of the report prepared by the IEA that there are enough qualifiers to the assumptions underlying this long-term forecast to cast doubt on how firmly to embrace the report's conclusions. At this point, we plan to use the study as just one possible scenario for how the industry might evolve in the future. We are less inclined to embrace it than many others. What we worry about is that our policy makers do embrace the report and its conclusions and begin instituting policies and investments designed to capitalize on its projected outcomes. If those outcomes fail to materialize, we will be faced with having to make numerous mid-course corrections with unknown, and potentially significant, economic and social costs.

Choosing an Efficient Refrigerator

I track down a new refrigerator rated at 335 kWh per year

Marc Rosenbaum, GBA

It took me some time to realize that the weird sounds I occasionally heard coming from the fridge was it cranking out the cubes. We don't use much ice, and being middle-aged actually learned in our youth how to fill ice cube trays (similar to being able to count, and tell time by the big hand and the little hand, and other lost arts), so eventually I turned that feature off.

Researchers at NIST recently reported that they tested four new refrigerators and the icemakers added 12 to 20 percent to the rated energy consumption. The not-so-cool discovery was that 75% of this energy comes from heating the molds to release the ice. Duh.

Oh, and the ratings you see on the big yellow sticker don't include the energy used by the icemaker, apparently because someone decided it would be too hard to measure. Double duh.

Nothing like putting a heater in a fridge to increase it's electricity demand.

Canada’s crude export pipelines clogged

The surge in Canadian oil production must now face a new reality: The biggest mover of crude says the pipes out of the country are full.

In recent years, estimates by analysts and energy consultants predicted that Canada stood to run out of room on export pipelines some time between 2014 and 2018. And it has become clear that the pipes are filling, amid rising oil output from both the oil sands and fast-growing U.S. oil fields.

But Enbridge Inc. has now formally declared the pipes full, meaning that date has arrived far sooner than expected.

“All of the crude oil export pipelines are pretty much full, running at maximum capacity,” Vern Yu, a vice-president of business development and market development for Enbridge told a Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada conference in Calgary Tuesday. “And we’re not likely to see any meaningful capacity added to these networks until the end of next year.”

For the energy industry, the likelihood of choked market access for months to come stands to cut off billions in profits as oil shipments back up behind stuffed pipelines. A growing glut of product waiting for export is pressuring prices for Canadian crude.

California’s CO2 Now Has a Price, but a Low One

A free-market auction has established a price for pollution in California: for each metric ton of carbon dioxide emitted, businesses, utilities and industries that bought allowances last week will pay just $10.09.

I think this is an extremely high price. A ton of coal, if pure carbon, will create (12 + 2 x 16)/12 = 3.67 tons CO2. Assume coal is 82% carbon (it varies), say 3 tons CO2 per ton of coal in round numbers.

Quality coal is $65 a ton. Paying for the 3 tons of CO2 it produces will add $30 to the price. So the utilities' fuel costs will be going up a massive 50%.

This has to have a big impact on electricity prices.

Thinks: Will this apply to all utilities who supply electricity to California, or only to plants located in California?

The wide variety in coal prices on a per-Btu basis is surprising, even allowing for differences in SO2 content. Anyone have an explanation?

http://www.eia.gov/coal/news_markets/

Spot coal prices by coal commodity regions
Dollars per short ton, 09 November 2012

Central Appalachia    12,500 Btu,  1.2 SO2  $65.95/ton  $5.28/kBtu
Northern Appalachia   13,000 Btu, <3.0 SO2  $64.50/ton  $4.96/kBtu
Illinois Basin        11,800 Btu,  5.0 SO2  $47.90/ton  $4.06/kBtu
Uinta Basin           11,700 Btu,  0.8 SO2  $35.75/ton  $3.06/kBtu
Powder River Basin     8,800 Btu,  0.8 SO2  $10.35/ton  $1.17/kBtu

A fine example of how bad data gets propagated in a system and can remain there for some time:

South Pacific Sandy Island 'proven not to exist'

A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say.

The supposedly sizeable strip of land, named Sandy Island on Google maps, was positioned midway between Australia and French-governed New Caledonia.

But when scientists from the University of Sydney went to the area, they found only the blue ocean of the Coral Sea.

The phantom island has featured in publications for at least a decade.

Scientist Maria Seton, who was on the ship, said that the team was expecting land, not 1,400m (4,620ft) of deep ocean.

"We wanted to check it out because the navigation charts on board the ship showed a water depth of 1,400m in that area - very deep," Dr Seton, from the University of Sydney, told the AFP news agency after the 25-day voyage.

"It's on Google Earth and other maps so we went to check and there was no island. We're really puzzled. It's quite bizarre.

One wonders if any distressed mariners headed for this island because it was on their charts.

For Sale

CHARTS: The Great Decline Of American Driving

Clearly, when we adjust for population growth, the Miles-Driven metric takes on a much darker look. The nominal 39-month dip that began in May 1979 grows to 61 months, slightly more than five years. The trough was a 6% decline from the previous peak.

The population-adjusted all-time high dates from June 2005. That's 87 months — seven years ago. The latest data, for September 2012, is 8.60% below the 2005 peak, a new post-Financial Crisis low. Our adjusted miles driven based on the 16-and-older age cohort is about where we were as a nation in March 1995.

EU struggles while US & China improving

How will the situation be resolved in the EU?

I actually just put this here to test my new found ability to link articles with red lettering, but had no idea there would be no responses in the many hours since posting it. Oh well, maybe the EU situation is failing to gain interest after crying wolf so many times regarding their precarious debt positions. Their drowning, their fine, their going down for the count, their ok, rinse, repeat ad infinitum...

Interesting point about the Energy Bill. It should however be notet, that ramping up on green energy costs lots of money too. Whether or not it will create flourishing industries, is completely unclear - in Germany, heavy subsidizing created huge sunk costs. Recently blogged on this subject: http://energyingermany.com/2012/11/10/green-energy-subsidies-uk-should-l...

When contemplating the future of the US it is worth remembering the oft-quoted statistic that there are about 30 citizens of Chindia for every one citizen of the US. Yet only now are they beginning to be able to outbid us for oil. This didn't happen by accident. To a large extent our foreign policies kept it that way.

I believe that similar logic and methods are being mobilized by the 1% against the rest of America in response to peak oil. And I think their schemes will succeed to a large extent. Looking at examples around the world and throughout history, people will put up with fantasic amounts of oppression to avoid chaos. Fossil fuel use by the average American will decline because it has to, but the 1% will maintain their lifestyle at all costs.

I think we will soon have a republic in name only. Oh sure, we will still be allowed to vote, but not about the issues that really make a difference. In other words, much like what is happening today only squared and cubed.