Project Helios to the rescue for Greece?
A plan to harvest solar power in Greece and sell it to Germany could be an ironic benefit of the ongoing Eurozone crisis, in which Germany has contentiously found itself having to bail out the weaker economies.
The €20 billion Project Helios was discussed by Greek and German ministers during talks in Athens in August. It would involve development of solar power parks covering 30,000 hectares and the possible creation of around 60,000 jobs. The first of the sites could be at former lignite mines around the northern city of Kozani, where 520 hectares would be developed at a cost of €600 million, producing up to 200 MW of power. The ultimate target would be 10 GW of capacity, which would rival the 10.2 GW produced by Public Power Corporation, Greece’s main electricity company.
Solar installations have so far been slow to develop in Greece, and have not been helped by the country’s problems of massive debt and uncertainty. The government has, however, set a target of 2.2 GW installed solar capacity by 2020 – including all solar technologies – with an intermediate target of 1.3 GW by 2015. Germany already has photovoltaic capacity of more than 17 GW.
Intensified hybrid vehicle collaboration
Car manufacturers Ford and Toyota have announced that they will collaborate on developing a hybrid-electric car ‘powertrain’ for sport utility vehicles and light trucks. Powertrains are the drive units for electric cars that include a battery, charging system, inverter, motor, gearbox and associated software.
Ford and Toyota will jointly develop a rear-wheel-drive electric powertrain and then introduce it in separate vehicle lines for each company. The light trucks and SUVs should be ready sometime later this decade, the companies said in an official announcement. It is assumed that the collaboration will cover extended range electric vehicle powertrains, which are becoming increasingly popular with manufacturers. Extended-range electric vehicles use an electric motor to power the car for a certain distance before switching on a fuel-powered motor to recharge the battery.
Maintaining the pace of wind power development
Total installed wind power capacity worldwide increased to around 200 GW in 2010, an increase of 39.4 GW over 2009, according to industry consulting firm BTM Consult. But the rate of increase showed a significant slowing down over previous years, largely as a result of the global economic uncertainties. For the industry as a whole, the year-on-year growth rate in 2010 in fact decreased from 35 percent in 2009 to just 3 percent – the first year the market has slowed since 2004.
The industry remains buoyant as the Asian market continues to grow and as capital costs around the world continue to fall, and there are confident predictions that the overall growth rate should pick up again very quickly. BTM predicts an average growth rate of 15.5 percent per year for new annual installations up to the end of 2015. By then, the annual rate of new capacity is expected to surpass 81 GW per year.
China made the greatest contribution to global wind power installations in 2010, with some 48 percent of the world’s installations over the year. Two large manufacturers of wind turbines – Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems and GE Energy of the USA – together held around 25 percent of the global market, although their leading position was clearly being challenged by China’s Sinovel.
Global investment in renewable power and fuels set a new record in 2010, according to fresh analysis commissioned by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Investment hit $211 billion last year, up 32 percent from a revised $160 billion in 2009, and nearly five and a half times the figure achieved in 2004.
According to the president of the specialist renewable energy analyst, EurObserv’ER, Alain Liebard: “Not only have the renewable sectors arrived, they have become the very cornerstones of national energy and economic policies. The under-achievement of targets for energy development in these sectors, set a decade ago, must not be viewed as a failure. We are at an interim point and today the baton is being taken up by the new aim to achieve 20 percent of renewable energies in our final energy consumption by 2020.”
Wind was the dominant sector in terms of financial new investment in 2010, with a rise of 30 percent to $95 billion.
Although the number of GW of wind capacity put into operation last year was lower than in 2009, the amount of money committed was higher. This reflected decisions to invest in large projects from China to the USA and South America, and a rise in offshore wind infrastructure investment in the North Sea.
Cleaning up a backlog of pollution in Nigeria
The cleaning up of oil spills in Ogoniland, Nigeria, would be the biggest such operation in human history and could take up to 30 years, according to a special UNEP report commissioned by the Nigerian government. It recommended the establishment of an Environmental Restoration Fund for Ogoniland with an initial capital injection of $1 billion.
Because of the wide extent of the pollution in the area, there would need to be a programme of land-based remediation before work could start on cleaning up contaminated creeks, the report declared.
Most of the oil infrastructure in the area is jointly owned by Royal Dutch Shell and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Although it was forced out of Ogoniland by community action in 1993 and says most spills in the Niger Delta are caused by oil theft and sabotage, Shell recently admitted liability for substantial spills at Bodo, in 2008.
