G7 to end coal by 2035

TURIN (Reuters) -Energy ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) wealthy countries reached a deal to shut down their coal-fired power plants by 2035 at the latest, in a significant step towards the transition away from fossil fuels.

"We have an agreement to stop using coal in the first half of 2030's... it is an historical agreement," Britain's minister for Energy Security and Net Zero Andrew Bowie told Class CNBC according to a video posted on X.

Italian diplomatic sources said a technical deal had been reached.

The accord will be included in the G7 energy ministers' final communique to be released on Tuesday at the end of a two-day meeting in Turin.

One source told Reuters earlier that diplomats from the G7 nations - Italy, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Japan - discussed the issue until late on Sunday, before the start of the ministerial gathering.

The agreement marks a significant step in the direction indicated last year by the COP28 United Nations climate summit for a transition away from fossil fuels, of which coal is the most polluting.

"It helps accelerate the shift of investments from coal to clean technology in particular in Japan and more broadly in the whole Asian coal economy, including China and India," Luca Bergamaschi, co-founding member of Italian climate change think-tank ECCO, said on X.

Italy last year produced 4.7% of its total electricity through its six remaining coal-fired stations. Rome currently plans to turn off its plants by 2025, except on the island of Sardinia where the deadline is 2028.

In Germany and Japan coal has a bigger role, with the share of electricity produced by the fuel higher than 25% of total last year.

Last year under Japan's presidency, the G7 had pledged to prioritise concrete steps towards phasing out coal power generation, falling short of indicating a specific deadline.

(Reporting by Francesca Landini; Editing by Gavin Jones, Alvise Armellini, Jan Harvey and Jonathan Oatis)

should you shut down your computer?

Shutting off your computer every night has downsides. If you just put your computer to sleep, everything is right where you left it in the morning. But if you shut down, you need to wait for your computer to boot up and then re-open all of your applications and documents. It’s annoying.

I wanted to get an idea of just how little power so I ran a few simple tests. First, I charged my laptop around 6PM after an afternoon of using it outside. In that time, it was just about fully charged, after which I unplugged it and closed the lid. The charge in my laptop barely went down—only by one percent—and this is on a nearly six year old laptop with a battery that doesn’t hold a charge like it used to. 

I wanted a slightly more precise number, though, so I used a Kill A Watt to measure how much power my laptop uses when asleep. Leaving it plugged in and suspended from 4PM until 7AM the following morning—15 hours—used up 0.02 kWh of energy. That’s not a lot. Here in Portland, Oregon the price per kWh for residential use is 19.45¢, meaning leaving my laptop plugged in overnight cost me a little over one third of a penny. Over the course of an entire year this adds up to $1.42. 

Now, this isn’t to say that you should never shut down. I shut down my laptop if I’m leaving town without it for more than a week. At that point the amount of energy the computer will use, compared to the annoyance of having to start it up again, tips back into being worthwhile for me. Plus, sometimes a sleeping laptop will run out of batteries when left alone that long, which is just plain annoying.

And there’s another reason to shut down, or at least restart, your computer regularly: it can sometimes solve annoying computer problems. The main reason for this is software bugs—over time such issues can fill your device’s memory and generally just cause your computer to become unstable.

-- Justin Pot, Popular Science

nuclear fusion breakthrough

The U.S. is on the cusp of announcing a scientific breakthrough that has eluded researchers worldwide for decades — one that could, decades from now, turn nuclear fusion into a practical source of clean, inexpensive energy that doesn’t create long-lived radioactive waste or worsen global warming.

The findings, which Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to announce Tuesday, still leave many obstacles to be resolved in turning the nuclear process that powers the sun into a source of Earth-bound energy. But scientists are embracing the historic milestone nonetheless, cheering that researchers have finally created a fusion reaction that produces more energy than it takes in.

Turning that discovery into a source of power for everyday life would probably take decades and cost several hundred billion dollars, said Dale Meade, a retired fusion expert who worked at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey, one of the Energy Department’s national labs. But such a massive effort would be worthwhile, he said.

“Perhaps the greatest challenge of all is whether the U.S. has the foresight and will to move forward,” Meade said.

The Financial Times first reported the research breakthrough Sunday. A person familiar with the findings confirmed to POLITICO that DOE will announce that its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had used lasers to produce a fusion reaction that generated 1.2 times more energy than was needed to create it.

If reports of the experiment’s results prove accurate, “it’s one of the biggest results of science in the past 20-30 years,” said Gianluca Sarri, a professor at Queen’s University Belfast who researches laser and plasma physics. But even then, hope of a fusion-generation power plant is still more than a decade away, he said.

Fusion, which uses extreme heat to combine two atoms and produce massive amounts of energy as a byproduct, is the engine that powers the sun and the stars, as well as advanced thermonuclear weapons. Unlike existing nuclear plants, which harness heat from a chain reaction of splitting atoms in a process called fission, fusion reactors don’t generate a panoply of radioactive waste or pose a risk of meltdowns. Since the 1950s, supporters of the technology have claimed that fusion could someday produce energy that’s cheap and essentially limitless.

But showing that a fusion reactor is even a practical goal has been difficult. A little over a year ago, though, Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility announced that it was finally nearing the step of creating a fusion reaction that produces a net-positive amount of energy.

That still leaves plenty of enormous technological and regulatory challenges, such as finding ways to convert the energy released in the fusion process into electricity.

Former Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a physicist who was assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, said in an interview that he found the news of the breakthrough "technically interesting, but I'm skeptical about its practicality."

fusion ignition

On 8 August, 2021, 192 laser beams pumped vastly more power than the entire US electric grid into a small gold capsule and ignited, for a faction of a second, the same thermonuclear fire that powers the Sun.

The experiment in fusion power, conducted by the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is explored in detail in three new papers — one published in Physical Review Letters and two papers published in Physical Review E — that argue the researchers achieved “ignition,” a crucial step proving that controlled nuclear fusion is achievable. But definitions of what constitutes “ignition” vary, and however defined, the results of 2021 are still very far away from a practical fusion reactor, despite producing a very large amount of energy.

Nuclear fusion involves the fusion of two elements, typically isotopes of hydrogen, into the heavier element helium, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process, which is the process that powers stars like the Sun.

A fusion power plant would produce abundant energy using only hydrogen from water as fuel, and producing helium as waste, without the risk of meltdowns or radiation. This is in contrast with nuclear fission, the type of reaction in contemporary nuclear power plants, which splits the nuclei of heavy elements like uranium to produce energy.

But while fusion reactions take place in the Sun, and uncontrolled fusion takes place in thermonuclear weapon explosions, controlling a sustained fusion reaction for generating power has eluded nuclear engineers for decades. Experiments of varied design have managed to produce fusion reactions for very small amounts of time, but never have they reached “ignition,” the point where the energy released from a fusion reaction is greater than the amount of energy required to generate and maintain that reaction.

But the team at the National Ignition Facility and authors of one of the three new papers, the one published in the journal Physical Review Letters, argue that “ignition is a state where the fusion plasma can begin ‘burn propagation’ into surrounding cold fuel, enabling the possibility of high energy gain.” That is, fusion began in cold hydrogen fuel and the reaction expanded to generate far more power than in previous experiments.

The 8 August 2021 experiment required 1.9 megajoules of energy in the form of ultraviolet lasers to instigate a fusion reaction in a small, frozen pellet of hydrogen isotopes, — an inertial confinement fusion reaction design — and released 1.3 megajoules of energy, or about 70% of the energy put into the experiment. The output, in other words, was more than a quadrillion watts of power, even if released for only a small fraction of a second.

“The record shot was a major scientific advance in fusion research, which establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible at NIF,” Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s inertial confinement fusion program, said in a statement. “Achieving the conditions needed for ignition has been a long-standing goal for all inertial confinement fusion research and opens access to a new experimental regime where alpha-particle self-heating outstrips all the cooling mechanisms in the fusion plasma.”

But subsequent attempts to replicate the experiment have produced far less output energy, most in the 400 to 700 kilojoules range, leading some researchers to suggest that the experimental design of the National Ignition Facility is a technical dead-end, according to reporting by the news department at the journal Nature.

“I think they should call it a success and stop,” physicist and former US Naval Research Laboratory laser fusion researcher Stephen Bodner told Nature.

The National Ignition Facility cost $3.5 billion, more than $2 billion more than expected, and is behind schedule, with researchers initially targeting 2012 as the deadline to prove ignition was possible using the design.

But the new studies suggest that researchers are willing to keep exploring what the National Ignition Facility is capable of, especially because unlike other fusion researchers, the researchers at the facility are not primarily focused on developing fusion power plants, but better understanding thermonuclear weapons.

“We’re operating in a regime that no researchers have accessed since the end of nuclear testing,” Dr Hurricane said. “It’s an incredible opportunity to expand our knowledge as we continue to make progress.”

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor

PARIS — A hugely ambitious project to replicate the energy of the sun is entering a critical phase, as scientists and technicians in southern France begin assembling giant parts of a nuclear fusion device, an international experiment aimed to develop the ultimate clean energy source.

World leaders involved in the project, or their representatives, on Tuesday appeared virtually at a ceremony for the start of the new stage of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, noting that work has proceeded despite the COVID-19 pandemic in many of the 35 contributing countries.

“Clearly, the pandemic impacted the initial schedule,” said ITER’s director-general, Bernard Bigot, who led the ceremony at Saint-Paul-les-Durance, northeast of Marseille. He said none of the on-the-ground staff has contracted COVID-19.

Scientists have long sought to mimic the process of nuclear fusion that occurs inside the sun, arguing that it could provide an almost limitless source of cheap, safe and clean electricity. Unlike in existing fission reactors, which split plutonium or uranium atoms, there’s no risk of an uncontrolled chain reaction with fusion and it doesn’t produce long-lived radioactive waste.

The project “seeks to create an artificial sun,” said South Korean President Moon Jae-in. “An artificial sun is an energy source of dreams."

Among other elements, Korea is manufacturing four sectors of a vacuum vessel, a hermetically sealed chamber in which plasma particles, derived from heated hydrogen gas, spiral without touching walls. European countries are building five other sectors.

French President Emmanuel Macron hailed ITER as a “promise of peace” because it brings together countries that decided to forego differences for the “common good.” China, the U.S., India, Russia, South Korea and nations of the European Union are taking part in the project.

There was no sign of the acute discord currently roiling ties between the U.S. and China, and India and China.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a statement read by the Indian ambassador to France, called international collaboration “a perfect symbol of the age-old Indian belief ... (that) the world is one family.”

Bigot compared the milestone phase getting under way to assembling a giant, three dimensional puzzle that “must (have) the precision of a Swiss watch.”

Billed as the world’s largest science project, ITER is gigantic. The circular device, called a tokamak, has a 30-meter circumference, stands 30 meters (100 feet) high, and is made up of more than a million parts constructed in numerous countries.

Some pieces transported to France weigh several hundred tons. Tools to put the reactor together match that size, with giant lifts that must transfer components over the walls and down into “the pit.” A key component being built by the U.S., the Central Solenoid, is the most powerful of ITER’s numerous magnets. Together, they will be strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier.

The project begun in 2006 is far from over. The experimental reactor is to head for another landmark moment in five years, described as a “trial run” when scientists launch what is called “First Plasma” showing that the machine functions, including magnetic fields and other operations.

Bigot, the ITER’s director-general, called fusion energy a “miracle for our planet.”

He said that smaller experiments are complementary to ITER. Bigot predicts a bright future for his international baby, saying he foresees a scaled-up ITER, perhaps twice as large, to provide power to the grid. But its viability and economic competitiveness must first be demonstrated, he said.

The project's estimated cost just for the EU was about 20 billion euros ($23.5 billion), Bigot told reporters. He said a full price tag was difficult to estimate because participating countries make their own contributions.

Oahu recycling update

The bad news from China took effect on New Year’s Day, 2018: Due to growth, development and a mounting pile of its own recyclable waste, the world’s second-largest economy was no longer in the market to buy America’s trash as raw materials.

Suddenly, U.S. cities — which had benefited from an easy way to make recycling pencil out, given that for decades, China had been happy to buy up 40-50 percent of the recyclable materials — now had to come up with other solutions.

While the islands face a particular problem given the added factor of shipping costs, Oahu is not alone: Philadelphia, for example, has begun sending half of its recyclables to the incinerator.

The alternative contemplated by the City and County of Honolulu is a variant of that, though in milder form. Noting the falling values of recyclable glass, aluminum and paper now being collected in the city’s curbside recycling program, the city auditor in 2017 proposed redirecting much of it.

The waste, recyclable or otherwise, could go to the garbage-to-energy plant, H-POWER, to reduce the volume of what otherwise is bound for the landfill, according to the audit. The numbers are hard to dispute. From a high in 2011 when the sales value of the collected materials topped $2.5 million annually, it has dropped by more than half — and continues to fall.

Regardless, the notion of abandoning the curbside recycling effort quickly drew opposition from environmental groups, including the Sierra Club. Jodi Malinoski, policy advocate for the Hawaii chapter, said the organization does not want to see the city continually feeding its garbage to the plant, even if harvesting energy from it is a partial offset.

“It seems like we have to keep the fire going,” she said. “It’s time to cut that out.”

Rather than curbing the recycling, Malinoski said environmentalists favor finding a way to cut costs by reducing waste overall and by manufacturing a product with recyclable materials on-island rather than shipping it elsewhere.

There may be a point at which the city and the environmental groups can meet in the middle, said the city’s environmental services chief, and that discussion is likely to happen over the next several months.

***

WHAT’S SUPPOSED TO BE IN THE BINS?

>> Green bins contain the green waste. That’s largely yard clippings: grass and tree and hedge trimmings. But it also can include plain vegetable and fruit waste unmixed with other ingredients.

>> Blue bins contain the recyclables, which can all be mixed together. Paper products are limited to newspaper, corrugated cardboard and white or colored office paper. Paper should exclude glossy paper or inserts, clips, envelopes and sticky labels. Glass bottles and jars, aluminum cans, metal food cans and plastic containers of types 1 and 2 (look for the triangle with a 1 or 2 inside, usually embossed on the bottom of the container).

>> Gray bins contain the regular trash — everything else suitable for general disposal, excluding anything hazardous. These are items such as plastic bags, Styrofoam, junk mail, magazines, cereal boxes and other chipboard, food cans and plastic containers other than those coded No. 1 or No. 2.

***

WHO GETS IT, AND WHERE DOES IT GO?

>> Green waste goes to Hawaiian Earth Recycling in Wahiawa, which processes it into mulch and soil amendments such as compost.

>> Mixed recyclables are screened, separated and packed for shipping at the RRR Recycling plant at Campbell Industrial Park. According to its website: Corrugated cardboard and newspaper are sent largely to Asia to be remade into more cardboard, brown paper bags, more newspaper, wrapping paper and molded packaging. Aluminum cans are shipped to the mainland to be reprocessed into new aluminum cans and other products; glass bottles may be crushed and used as construction backfill locally, but much of it is shipped to the mainland to be melted into new glass products; plastics are shipped to the mainland or Asia to be remanufactured.

>> Trash largely goes to H-POWER to be burned for the heat that drives electrical generators; what can’t be incinerated goes to the landfill.

How we stopped climate change (in 31 years)

we're unleashing our imagination and exploring a dream, a possible future in which we're bringing global warming to a halt. It's a world in which greenhouse emissions have ended.

Mass Electrification (Batteries Hold The Power)

(Editor's note: Each story has two sections, the first reflecting the present and the second imagining the world of 2050.)

2019: I went looking for people who've mapped out this world without greenhouse emissions. I found them in Silicon Valley. 

Sila Kiliccote is an engineer. The back deck of her house, high up in the hills, overlooks Cupertino. Apple's circular headquarters is hidden in the morning mist. It's a long way from Istanbul, in Turkey, where she grew up; a great place to conjure up future worlds.

"Maybe you'd like some coffee?" Kiliccote says.

Her coffee machine is powered by solar panels on the roof. So is her laptop and her Wi-Fi.

"Everything runs on electricity in this house," she says.

This is the foundation of a zero-carbon world: Electricity that comes from clean sources, mainly the sun and the wind, cheap and increasingly abundant.

Today, it powers this house; tomorrow, it could drive the world.

***

2050: The first step was electric cars. That was actually pretty easy

"By 2025, battery technology got cheaper," she says. Electric cars were no longer more expensive. "At that point there was a massive shift to electric vehicles, because they were quieter, and cleaner, and [required] less maintenance. No oil change! Yippee! You know?"

Heating and cooling in homes and office buildings have gone electric, too. Gas-burning furnaces have been replaced with electric-power like heat pumps.

We needed more electricity to power all this right when we were shutting down power plants that burned coal and gas. It took a massive increase in power from solar and wind farms. They now cover millions of acres in the U.S., 10 times more land than they did in 2020. Huge electrical transmission lines share electricity between North and South America. Europe is connected to vast solar installations in the Sahara desert, which means that sub-Saharan Africa also has access to cheap power.

"It just changed Africa," Kiliccote says. "It actually fueled the economies of Africa."

***

The Urbanization Of Everything (A Desire Named Streetcars)

2019: I'm taking a walk through downtown Toronto, in Canada, with Jennifer Keesmaat, the city's former chief planner.

Keesmaat wants me to see one particular street. King Street. It's the seed of a zero-carbon future, she says.

King Street has a little bit of everything: glass-walled office buildings, theaters, old brick warehouses.

Two years ago, a new set of traffic rules went into effect here. "Basically, what we've done is, we've limited through-traffic for cars," Keesmaat says. It forced cars away from King Street and launched a whole cascade of changes.

The streetcars that run down the middle of King Street weren't stuck in traffic anymore.


They became the best way to get across town at rush hour. "The volume of people being moved is astronomical!" Keesmaat says, as one rolls by. The streetcars, of course, are powered by electricity, and one passes every two or three minutes.

Meanwhile, thousands of people have been moving into this downtown neighborhood, buying condos and renting apartments. Keesmaat knows one of them. He's the father of one of her friends.

"He said to me a few weeks ago, he thinks he takes out his car about once every two weeks," Keesmaat says. He walks to shops, restaurants and basketball games. His neighbors walk to jobs in the financial district right down the street. He's not heating a big free-standing house, either.

He has cut his energy use, and his greenhouse emissions, dramatically.

"That wasn't the driver for him," Keesmaat says. "He didn't say, 'How do I in fact live smaller?" It just happened naturally in this new urban geography.

2050: At this point, Keesmaat and I open up our minds and take a leap into a world that could be. Greenhouse gas emissions have dropped to zero.

How did we do it? By gradually reshaping our cities so that they look more like this neighborhood, with lots of people living close together, within walking distance of many of the things they need.
Keesmaat can already see this city in her mind, and describe it. "The vast majority of streets have been pedestrianized; that's how people get around, by walking down the street," she says.

"What has happened to the sprawling suburbs?" I ask. "Are people living there? How are they getting around?"

"Some of the large homes haven't changed at all," Keesmaat says. They've just been turned into multifamily units." Other free-standing houses that once lined suburban cul-de-sacs have disappeared; each one has been replaced with a building that contains five or six homes. With the local population booming, those neighborhoods also attracted shops and offices. Suburban sprawl morphed into urban density.

Cars have mostly disappeared. "There are cars, but people don't own cars," Keesmaat says. "Because a car is something that you use occasionally when you need it." Streetcars and buses go practically everywhere in the city now, and you rarely have to wait more than a couple of minutes to catch one. Fast buses and trains connect towns. For other destinations, there's car-sharing.

And it wasn't just technology, Hoornweg says. Over the past three decades, from 2020 to 2050, a huge cultural shift has taken place.

Just one example: In Toronto, the sharing economy that started decades ago with Uber and Airbnb is everywhere now. "Sharing rides, sharing tools, sharing somebody to look after your dog when you're not there."

Yes, we apparently still have dogs in 2050.

In part, people are forced to share things; cars are scarce and homes are smaller. (Scores of home builders went belly-up in the 2030s when millions of people suddenly decided that big houses weren't just expensive; they were lonely, too.)

But the scale of zero-carbon life also makes it easier to share. We're living closer together and run into neighbors all the time. "We have more acquaintances — somebody we met in our ride pool or car pool or whatever," Hoornweg says. "There's no better way to [meet your neighbors] than sitting in a [shared] car and you can't get away from them for 20 minutes or whatever."

Some people hated losing their yards and their solitary commutes at first. Others loved the changes. Eventually, Hoornweg says, it just became normal. People stopped talking about it.

Life now goes on as it always did. But there's one huge difference. We're no longer heating up the planet.

Hawaiian Electric supports EV

Hawaiian Electric Co. is pushing for more electric vehicles to build the utility’s customer base and make way for additional rooftop solar.

“Hawaii should be the EV capital of the world,” said Alan Oshima, HECO president and CEO, in an editorial board meeting with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Tuesday. The high price of gasoline in the islands and the short distances, especially on Oahu, make Hawaii an ideal location for the expansion of electric vehicles.

HECO is working to increase EV adoption by installing electric vehicle charging stations and partnering with the city to add electric buses. Oshima said HECO is also in talks with the military to get more electric vehicles and charging stations on Hawaii bases.

HECO’s campaign for more EV adoption comes amid a rapid growth in sales of electric cars, albeit from a small base. In February there were 4,209 registered electric vehicles in the state, up 26 percent from a year ago.

More than 100 Hawaii residents lined up at a Tesla Motors office in Waipahu last week and paid $1,000 to reserve the company’s latest electric car. The Tesla Model 3 sedan, which will be available late 2017, starts at $35,000 before state and federal incentives.

“Telsa’s launch of the Model 3 validates that things are changing,” said Richard Wallsgrove, program director at Blue Planet Foundation. “I really feel like we’re at an inflection point.”

HECO predicts there will be 388,500 electric vehicles on Hawaii’s roads by 2045. There are about 1 million vehicles registered in Hawaii.

Increased use of EVs gives electrical utilities a new market and could help replace lost demand due to rooftop solar and greater energy efficiency.

solar battery storage

Companies are lining up to offer battery-storage options to Hawaii customers that own solar panel systems — a move regulators and clean-energy advocates are hailing as a way to help the state reach its 100 percent renewable energy goal.

The need for such energy-storing technology was sewn into different regulatory orders and utility proposals when the state Public Utilities Commission announced it would limit the number of new residential and commercial projects allowed to export solar energy to the grid, but continue to allow solar panel systems that stored excess energy in batteries. Clean-energy organizations and solar energy companies said batteries used with time-of-use rates could provide an incentive for homeowners to continue adopting rooftop solar panels, but the cost of such batteries is still out of reach for most.

“Battery storage is going to become important, especially as we move forward,” PUC Chairman Randy Iwase said. “Especially given the fact that the grid today is reaching near saturation.”

In October the PUC ended the net energy metering (NEM) program that credits solar panel owners for the excess energy their photovoltaic systems send to the grid. The PUC is replacing NEM with a program that gives new solar panel owners a slower return on their investments. New solar panel owners who choose to send their excess energy to the grid will be credited 15.07 cents per kilowatt-hour. This new program has a limit of approximately 4,000 homes.

After that limit is reached, customers still will be able to add solar panels to their houses but will not be able to send power to the grid.

The current program that credits solar owners for the excess energy they send to the grid will enable them to recoup their investment in six to eight years. A solar panel system connected to a battery has an eight- to 12-year payback period. A customer using a battery is eligible for a 30 percent federal tax credit if it is used with PV panels. There is no state tax credit for batteries.

“It’s not quite ready for prime time, essentially,” said Colin Yost, principal at RevoluSun.

The list of energy companies working to provide energy storage solutions includes San Jose, Calif.-based JuiceBox Energy; San Francisco-based Sunverge Energy; Pittsburgh-based Aquion Energy; Honolulu-based Blue Planet Energy; San Mateo, Calif.-based Tesla; and Honolulu-based E-Gear LLC.

David Ige's Energy Vision

For the second time this summer, Gov. David Ige shook up Hawaii's energy establishment when he announced Monday he is opposed to importing liquefied natural gas as a source of electric power.

That followed his statement last month that he won't support Florida-based NextEra Energy Inc.'s $4.3 billion proposed purchase of Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc.

In a nearly one-hour interview Friday with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Ige explained his reasons for the two potentially game-changing announcements.

Hawaii needs an electrical utility with a new business model to get the state to its goal of 100 percent electrical generation from renewable energy resources by 2045, Ige said.

"We are looking for a partner in the electric utility that really embraces 100 percent renewable and, I think, more importantly, changing the business model from the traditional electric utility to what would work in a fully distributed generation renewable future."

Ige, a former electrical engineer, envisions a future where the electrical utility doesn't generate power, but only distributes it. The power will be generated from renewable sources distributed throughout the community, such as the rooftops of Hawaii residents or solar farms developed by parties other than the state's utility.

The typical utility model Hawaiian Electric Co. grew up with has to retire along with the utility's fossil fuel plants, Ige said.

"I think the utility of the future that we would want to see supports 100 percent renewable. It is about distributed generation," he said.

That partner needs to share the state's renewable-energy vision, Ige said. It must embrace the idea that Hawaii is a test bed for renewable-energy research opportunities, help photovoltaic penetration as well as help the state get business and investment partners that will help build research and development.

"I'm not anti-HECO. I'm pro-partner," Ige said. "This environment, with the state setting aggressive policy, we would like to find a utility partner that wants to be part of that environment."

A utility that generates, distributes and sells electricity is not part of that vision. LNG is not part of that vision.

"I definitely would not support, at this point in time, LNG for electricity generation," Ige said, repeating his proclamation from Monday at the Asia Pacific Resilience Innovation Summits & Expo.

The statement caused a stir at the three-day conference on energy strategy. It was praised by environmentalists but criticized by those who argue LNG would serve the state well as a cheaper and cleaner alternative to the oil and coal currently used to generate 80 percent of the state's electricity. Supporters of LNG have said it can serve as a "bridge fuel" as the state shifts to renewable energy.

Blue Planet Energy Systems

High above the bustling city of Honolulu, in a quiet, exclusive hillside neighborhood where some of the island's wealthiest residents live, there is an extravagant home that's not quite like the others.

The 6,000-square-foot house has a view overlooking Diamond Head, Waikiki and the Pacific Ocean, and two Tesla cars in the driveway. It's not the two electric cars that set the property apart from its swanky neighbors.

The difference is that this solar-powered home is completely energy independent.

Homeowner Henk Rogers, 61, hopes the technology he is using in his home can help make other homes across Hawaii — and the world — energy independent as well.

Rogers is famous for discovering the video game "Tetris" more than 20 years ago. He now manages the worldwide rights for the game along with his business partner, Alexey Pajitnov, who wrote the program.

"If you're going to clean up the world, first of all you have to clean your own room," Rogers said, referring to Hawaii, which has some of the highest energy costs in the nation.

Rogers will announce his new company, Blue Planet Energy Systems, on Monday. The new venture, which will sell and install battery systems for homes and businesses running on solar technology, plans to begin sales on Aug. 1. He declined to say how much the systems would cost, but said there will be a five- to seven-year return on the investment for a typical project that his company will install.

The Blue Ion system, which Rogers has been testing in his home for the last year, uses Sony lithium iron phosphate batteries, which can last for 20 years and do not require cooling, he says.

Partnering with Sony, Rogers believes the batteries can be a solution to the long-standing problem of storing the sun's energy and helping lower energy costs in Hawaii.

Sony has been developing lithium ion batteries since 1991, and the units being used in Rogers' home are top of the line.

The batteries store energy from solar panels, allowing people to use it at night without having to rely on expensive energy from the grid.

Rogers' company will sell and install the battery systems for commercial and residential use, supplying everything from the housing to the software to monitor and maintain the systems.

Robert Harris, a spokesman for the Alliance for Solar Choice, a solar advocacy group, said consumers haven't had much call to invest in battery storage systems because of the cost and incentive programs that encourage people to stay linked to the grid. Harris, who is also the director of public policy at Sunrun, a solar equipment supplier in Honolulu, said homeowners with solar panels typically put energy into the grid and take it back as needed, something called net metering.

"A lot of energy can be put into the grid right now, so it hasn't been a big incentive necessarily for a homeowner to invest in storage," Harris said. That could change in the next few months with several new systems besides Rogers' expected to hit the market.

"These products will be capable of storing and putting out energy on a daily basis at a fairly reasonable price point," Harris said.

Rogers, who also owns a ranch on Hawaii's Big Island that is energy independent, said he had an epiphany after suffering a heart attack and near-death experience in 2006.

While recovering, he decided he would take advantage of the second chance. Rogers read about the possibility of losing all the coral reefs in the world because of ocean acidification, which has been linked to climate change and rising carbon in oceans.

"We're going to end the use of carbon-based fuel, and that is my mission No. 1," he said.

carbon emissions not up!

(Reuters) - Global emissions of carbon dioxide in the energy sector stalled in 2014, breaking steady rises over the past four decades except in years with an economic downturn, the International Energy Agency said on Friday.

Emissions of carbon dioxide were flat at 32.3 billion tonnes in 2014 from 2013, according to the IEA.

"This is both a welcome surprise and a significant one," IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said in a statement.  "This gives me even more hope that humankind will be able to work together to combat climate change, the most important threat facing us today."

The Paris-based IEA, which advises governments of developed nations, said the halt in emissions growth was linked to greener patterns of energy consumption in China, the top carbon emitter ahead of the United States, and in developed nations.

“In China, 2014 saw greater generation of electricity from renewable sources, such as hydropower, solar and wind, and less burning of coal,” it said.

Birol said the data provide "much-needed momentum to negotiators preparing to forge a global climate deal in Paris in December: for the first time, greenhouse gas emissions are decoupling from economic growth."

A summit in Paris is due to agree a deal to limit global emissions, blamed by a U.N. panel of climate scientists for causing more heatwaves, floods and rising sea levels. The IEA said that carbon emissions had been flat or fallen only three times since it started collecting data 40 years ago, previously always linked to economic slumps – in the early 1980s, 1992 and 2009.

In 2014, however, the global economy expanded by 3 percent.

"These figures show that green growth is achievable not just for Britain but for the world," said British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey.

"However we cannot be complacent – we need to dramatically cut emissions, not just stop their growth."

Ige's energy vision

Gov. David Ige laid out his vision to wean Hawaii off fossil fuels Tuesday, listing the increased use of batteries with solar systems, the short-term use of liquefied natural gas and the reduction in incentives paid to solar owners as changes he'd like to see.

Ige also said he supports converting Hawaii power plants to LNG, which could potentially lower the cost of electricity in the short term as the state shifts gradually toward more renewable energy sources.

From an electrical utility perspective, "yes, LNG must be just a bridge fuel," he said. "It must be a transitional fuel. … LNG does offer the opportunity to reduce costs in the near term, but it is still an imported fossil fuel."

Ige said his administration will work to add more rooftop solar power, but changes need to be made to how much solar owners are paid for the excess energy their systems produce.

Solar customers will receive lower payments for the power they send to the grid, Ige said, adding that is consistent with the decreasing amounts the utility pays utility-scale power producers, such as wind farm operators.

"We do need to make adjustments," Ige said. "We've changed … the power purchase agreements, and it does make sense that we look at changing the net energy metering."

Despite advocating a change in net energy metering, Ige said helping to increase solar will be a focus of his administration.

"Right now rooftop solar is top of mind with many consumers, and we want to make sure that we can be aggressive with allowing communities and people in our community who want to make that investment to have that opportunity," Ige said.

Ige listed community solar — or larger systems for residents who don't have roof space for solar — as another option to increase the renewable energy resource in Hawaii.

As solar power's reliability fluctuates with the time of day, Ige noted other renewable energy sources that can help get the state to its goals.

"The advantage of wind is it can be blowing any time of the day," Ige said.

Geothermal and wave energy will also be important renewable options to help power the state, Ige said.

Batteries are "the next great breakthrough" for adopting more renewables, Ige said.

"We see battery prices dropping all the time. There is significant interest and investment in that. That will allow us to move forward with the renewables," he said.

Ige said that the state should encourage battery use with solar systems.

"We need to encourage investment in them and figure out how we can get them into the grid," Ige said.

As for his own home — before moving into the governor's residence — Ige said he had rooftop PV and a solar water heater for years.

"I did install solar panels on my previous home," he said. "It was maybe the second year when solar had really taken off."

community solar gardens

MINNEAPOLIS >>  A new concept in renewable energy is catching fire across the country, allowing customers who might find solar panels too expensive or impractical to buy green energy anyway.

Community solar gardens first took off in Colorado a few years ago, and the model -- also known as community or shared solar -- has spread to Minnesota, California, Massachusetts and several other states. Capacity is expected to grow sharply this year, and interest is up among both residential customers who just like the idea and large companies that want to cut their carbon footprints.

The gardens feed electricity to the local power grid. Customers subscribe to that power and get credit on their utility bills, with contracts that typically lock in for 25 years and shelter against rate increases. Some developers say customer bills will drop below regular retail rates within a few years; others say the savings begin immediately.

"This is really the year that community solar becomes mainstream," said David Amster-Olszewski, CEO of Denver-based solar garden developer SunShare LLC, which runs two operations in Colorado and is developing more with Xcel Energy Inc., including in Minnesota.

Rooftop solar panels are becoming more popular among homeowners as the cost comes down, but that market is limited to only about one-fourth of U.S. residences, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an arm of the U.S. Department of Energy. Community solar opens the door to many more, including renters, customers with shaded roofs and those who can't afford solar panels.

iCar?

The Apple Watch comes out in April. But, could the company’s next potentially revolutionary product be called the Apple Car? Or, the iMobile?

Apple is reportedly looking to add an electric car to its list of revolutionary products. The tech giant has apparently put “several hundred” of its employees to work on a secret project to develop its own branded electric automobile, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cites anonymous sources.

The WSJ sources claim the project is code-named “Titan” and that early designs show a vehicle that looks similar to a minivan. Apple is in the early stages of development and, assuming the project isn’t scrapped at some point, it could still be many years before the tech giant unveils the vehicle at one of its much-hyped product events.

Apple (AAPL) did not comment on the WSJ article, nor did it comment on a Financial Times report earlier in the day that said the company had hired a team of auto technology and design experts. FT noted the possibility that Apple could simply have brought on the team to work on its in-car entertainment platform, CarPlay.

Electric cars represent a very small, but rapidly growing, segment of the U.S. auto industry. Almost 120,000 of the plug-in vehicles were sold in the U.S. last year -- a 23% bump from 2013 and 128% more than the previous year. Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors TSLA is one of the best known purveyors of electric cars, but leading automakers such as General Motors GM, Nissan NSANY and Toyota TM all produce popular electric models.

Apple’s tech rival, Google GOOG, has also taken steps to enter the auto industry, though the online search company is working to develop a driverless car. Google is also currently rumored to be working on developing a ride-hailing service that could rival Uber.

going off the grid

When Hawaiian Electric Co. began slowing rooftop solar installations last year, it pushed energy companies, legislators and residents to seek out other options, including a growing interest in going off the grid.

There are 4,500 people on Oahu waiting for approval for rooftop solar systems as a result of a September 2013 rule change where HECO required customers and contractors to be OK'd by the utility before installing photovoltaic panels. Some customers have waited as much as nine months for approval and are afraid they may miss out on lucrative tax credits if they don't act fast.

"We hear from a growing number of customers looking for off-grid solutions," said Chris DeBone, managing partner at KumuKit and Hawaii Energy Connection.

Local solar companies -- including KumuKit, Distributed Energy Partners and RevoluSun -- are working on offering solar systems linked to batteries.

Power from the sun charges the batteries, which are used at night and on cloudy days to provide electricity to the home. In some cases, these systems could provide all the power for a home, as long as its energy use is modest, and allow the homeowner to go off the grid.

In most cases, the batteries would be used in conjunction with the grid. The grid powers the home when the batteries are depleted. This is called a "non-export" system because all the power from the solar system is used in the home and none is exported to the grid.

A non-export system would avoid the problem which led to HECO slowing down solar installations. HECO said it had to slow down installations because too much intermittent solar power on the grid causes instability.

"The time is right" for battery systems, said Mark Duda, Hawaii PV Coalition president and principal with Distributed Energy Partners. "There wasn't a marketplace need. When they had an option, it wasn't compelling to seek out storage."

Going off the grid, while popular on the Big Island, is still rare on Oahu.

RevoluSun installed less than a dozen energy storage systems that allowed customers to live off grid since 2009. In the last month, almost 50 customers have called the company looking to take their systems off-grid, said Colin Yost, principal and general counsel at RevoluSun.

"We are actually developing some completely off-grid systems right now and testing them. The technology has been changing rapidly. Yesterday, we met with another manufacturer," Yost said.

Energy storage is and will be fundamental, Duda said.

"There is too much uncertainty around interconnection and too many options for battery storage," Duda said. "No matter which direction this goes, you need storage."

The solar companies don't advertise off-grid options due to the cost for consumers and anticipation for a better technology to be available soon.

"Most of the battery systems you see generally have to be replaced far sooner than the PV system itself and can make the whole thing less affordable," said Yost. "It's getting close but we aren't comfortable offering it on a large scale yet."

The initial prices for an off-the-grid system are still very expensive, but because of high electricity rates residents can save money over time if they go off-grid, Yost said.

"Hawaii has reached a grid-parity, meaning an off-grid system is just as cheap or even cheaper than getting energy from the utility and the reason for that primarily is because Hawaii's electricity is so expensive," Yost said. "Once the technology gets better, if the prices stay high, you will see an exodus of customers who all leave the grid entirely."

The price of electricity in Hawaii is nearly three times the national average in large part because of the high cost of fuel oil used for power generation.

Hawaii residents paid an average of 38.66 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity in June compared with the national average of 12.97 cents a kilowatt-hour, according to the latest data available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Another issue for homeowners thinking of going solar is the ticking clock on federal tax credits.

A 30 percent federal tax credit available to those who install solar systems ends Dec. 31, 2016. There is also a state tax credit for PV system installations of 35 percent up to $5,000 per system, which doesn't have an expiration date.

the AND car (Elio)

NEW YORK — Some time next year, a company called Elio Motors claims it will begin building a car in its Louisiana factory that will get 84 miles per gallon on the highway and that will sell for a base price of $6,800.

Yes, $6,800.

It won’t be a tiny little deathtrap, either. It’ll have a five-star crash safety rating. At least, that’s what Elio is promising.

That sounds like the wish-list of someone with zero contact with reality, but Elio Motors executives insist it’s possible thanks to the car’s odd lay-out and the complete lack of any new technology. Yes, these folks actually brag that their car has nothing new on it.

Paul Elio, who founded Elio Motors from the crumbled remains of his auto parts design business, said this car isn’t intended to replace the family car, and by the looks of it, clearly it’s not.

“We want to be an ‘and’ not an ‘or’” he said.

The Elio Motors car — it has no model name and they plan to keep it that way — is a three wheeler. There are two wheels out front, separated from the rest of the body, and one back wheel. The engine — 3 cylinders producing 55 horsepower — rides in the nose driving the front wheels.

The weird three-wheeled shape optimizes aerodynamics by cutting way down on frontal area and giving the car a nearly ideal “teardrop” body. Having only three wheels also allows the Elio car to be, in legal terms, a motorcycle.

That should let the company skate by on much looser safety requirements. But, Elio insists, they don’t plan on taking advantage of that loophole. The car will be tested in regular automobile crash tests and, they insist, it will get top marks.

Elio Motors says it’s keeping prices low and chances for success high by keeping things simple. All the parts are being made by established automotive suppliers. The cars will be built in a factory that used to make Hummer H3s and Chevrolet trucks. Even the manufacturing process has been simplified, company executives say. The cars will be built with no options. Most options will be added on after the car is built.

The Elio reminded me of another car: the now defunct Aptera.

The Aptera was an electric car that also used a three-wheel design. It looked like a private aircraft fuselage that was driving itself to the airport. I drove the Aptera back in 2010. That was after years of starts, stalls as the company tried to actually produce its revolutionary new vehicles.

Then, less than a year after I tested the car, Aptera went down for the final time, never having made it to market.

On the other hand, while the Elio car seems crazy and weird, Tesla seemed like a long shot to me once, too. The fact remains, though, start-ups in the auto business have a tough road ahead of them.

*** [8/16/14]

Phoenix-based Elio plans to start making the cars next fall at a former General Motors plant in Shreveport, Louisiana. Already, more than 27,000 people have reserved one. Elio hopes to make 250,000 cars a year by 2016. That's close to the number Mazda sells in the U.S.

HECO could charge more for solar

Hawaii's solar energy boom has grown to the point where rooftop photo­voltaic panels are providing all of the electricity consumed during some daylight hours in about 13 percent of Oahu neighborhoods, the Hawaiian Electric Co. said.

The high level of PV penetration, far beyond what is occurring anywhere on the mainland, is the result of a doubling of solar power generating capacity in Hawaii nearly every year since 2005. The rapid growth has put Hawaii at the forefront of an evolving effort by utilities nationally to accept greater amounts of intermittent solar energy into their electrical grids.

While HECO is taking steps to integrate more solar energy, that could result in added costs for some new solar customers. If HECO determines improvements are needed in a certain area to accommodate additional amounts of solar energy, new solar customers may have to bear the cost.

This week HECO began contacting its Oahu customers planning on installing PV systems, as well as PV contractors, to make sure the customers are informed of any equipment upgrades they may have to pay for.

The upgrades to the Oahu grid are necessary, HECO says, because of the rapid growth in solar installations.

The latest numbers from HECO, unthinkable just a few years ago, show that solar energy provides all of the minimum daytime power needs for 54 circuits, or neighborhoods, out of the 416 circuits on Oahu. The threshold has been reached on 26 out of Maui's 132 circuits and 17 of 143 circuits on Hawaii island.

"Those are impressive figures. Saturation on some of those circuits is higher than any other area in the country," said Tim Lindl, attorney for the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council based in Latham, N.Y.

Roughly 5 percent of HECO's customers on Oahu and Maui, and 4 percent of its customers on Hawaii island, have installed PV systems, according to data from the utility. That compares with about 1.5 percent of the customers served by California's two largest electric utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Southern California Edison.

*** [10/19/13]

Two weeks ago, this column covered concerns on the part of consumers that had contracted to install solar systems and on the part of industry leadership. In the meantime, the state Legislature held an informational hearing during which it questioned HECO about its procedural changes and also heard testimony from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, the Hawaii Solar Energy Association and the Hawaii PV Coalition, ending with a directive to work on a solution and report back next month.

HECO acknowledged that the transition to new procedures on Sept. 6 left many customers that had followed all the company's rules in what the solar industry calls "solar limbo." This then caused a significant slowdown for many solar installers.

HECO announced on Sept. 6 that consumers wanting to install solar systems first had to get HECO to confirm that the grid in their neighborhood could handle the added solar power. HECO said if the grid needed an upgrade to handle more solar power, the consumers installing new solar systems would have to pay for those upgrades.

This week, I had the opportunity to interview Peter Rosegg, a spokesman for HECO. He said that at the informational hearing, all parties agreed that safety cannot be compromised. Responsible solar installers also acknowledged the utility's statement that too much solar on a circuit without proper protective equipment risks the safety of customers and utility crews and damage to customer electronics and utility equipment such as lines, transformers and substations. Still, many solar industry leaders are skeptical, saying that HECO is heavily overplaying concerns about safety, reliability and grid penetration.

Delays both for HECO customers and the solar industry are frustrating and costly. The impact of the changed procedures, from the solar industry's point of view, include 30 percent to 75 percent of their jobs postponed; "millions" lost in revenue; "millions" in commitments to vendors; warehouses full; lost hours for employees; continued payment so as not to lose skilled and hard-to-find electrical journeymen; and six weeks of confusion.

In response, and in an effort to work with the Hawaii Solar Energy Association and PV Coalition, HECO has pledged to try to help some 1,000 customers who may have committed to bank loans, obtained building permits and ordered solar equipment but had not yet notified the utility in advance as is now required.

While HECO is a major reason for the slowdown, the solar industry is also in the midst of an inevitable industry consolidation. The combination of federal and state tax credits together with bonus depreciation in recent years has fueled a dramatic, unsustainable proliferation in the number of companies in the market. Concurrently, as the Great Recession resolves, investment capital, once vying for solar projects, may be pulling back in favor of other competing opportunities.

During the last legislative session, strong consideration was given to reducing state credits now in place. It didn't happen. Legislators should let it go. Federal credits begin to phase down at the end of 2016. Tapering state credits now while HECO is also in transition on its policies and its grid is a dangerous prospect. The phasing out of additional federal Safe Harbor and bonus depreciation benefits together with industry consolidation portend substantial headwinds for solar.

The big picture is that modern civilization is quickly realizing that the health of the planet and its inhabitants is, in part, dependent on our collective ability to move beyond petroleum toward a consortium of clean, renewable energy options including not only solar, but also wind, geothermal and hydroelectric sources. HECO's ability to support this transition to the maximum extent possible is a critical step. The task is huge, but essential. As a society, we will get there in time.

RevoluSun

As the sun beats down on her St. Louis Heights home, Susan Chandler walks to her laundry room in the morning and taps on a DC-AC inverter to check how much carbon dioxide she has kept out of the atmosphere. Her daily average: 14.2 pounds.

Then she walks to the meter box on the side of her house and watches the black line rotate backward.

"I love to see the meter spinning backwards, which means I'm reducing my electricity," she says. "Rather than going to HECO, it's saving the world."

Chandler had earlier installed solar water heating and CFL light bulbs in her five-bedroom residence, but decided to make a bigger leap toward the "green" movement by adding six photovoltaic panels from RevoluSun to reduce her dependence on the grid.

"I'm making my own electricity," said Chandler. "For me, it's pretty exciting."

A professor at the University of Hawaii Public Policy Center, Chandler opened her house to the community yesterday to showcase RevoluSun's solar module, which generated 86 kilowatt hours of power and offset 142 pounds of atmospheric carbon dioxide in just 10 days.

Chandler expects her electricity bill to be around $25 with the addition of the solar panels, compared to the $125 bill she's paid in the past.

RevoluSun, a new company, hopes to educate the community and expand awareness of affordable solar systems to help Hawaii become more sustainable and lower electric bills.

***

[10/27/12] From Consumer Lines October 2012

Because of the many considerations involved with purchasing one of these systems, we developed “Going Solar,” a helpful online resource accessible at: http://goingsolar.heco.com.

Solar water heaters can last 15 years or longer, and PV systems can last 30 years or more.

While these systems will pay for themselves over time with the savings on your monthly electric bills, they do require a financial investment.

An important consideration is connecting your PV system to the grid. Most residential customers select our
Net Energy Metering program, which provides full retail credit for excess electricity sent to the grid. Other
options are the Feed-In Tariff and the Standard Interconnection Agreement. These programs are described
in detail on our website.

BYD is a buy

Warren Buffett is famous for his rules of investing: When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact. You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will. And perhaps most famously, Never invest in a business you cannot understand.

So when Buffett's friend and longtime partner in Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB), Charlie Munger, suggested early last year that they invest in BYD, an obscure Chinese battery, mobile phone, and electric car company, one might have predicted Buffett would cite rule No. 3 above. He is, after all, a man who shunned the booming U.S. tech industry during the 1990s.

But Buffett, who is 78, was intrigued by Munger's description of the entrepreneur behind BYD, a man named Wang Chuan-Fu, whom he had met through a mutual friend. "This guy," Munger tells Fortune, "is a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch - something like Edison in solving technical problems, and something like Welch in getting done what he needs to do. I have never seen anything like it."

-- via chucks_angels