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Archived material from historical editions of The Generator

  • Eight US Cities exceed 5% renewable target

    Oakland has strongly supported solar energy and encouraged citizens to do the same, said Wentworth.

    "We are excited that SustainLane Governments figures show that we are achieving positive results. The results that are happening in Oakland are derived from increasingly effective collaboration between government agencies, utilities, for-profit businesses and non-governmental organizations," he said.

    Wentworth noted that Oakland works with other California cities like San Francisco and Marin to learn from one another and develop stronger renewable energy and energy efficiency programs. San Francisco, Sacramento and San Jose all tied for second place with 12 percent of their energy coming from renewable energy sources.

    Percentage of Power from Renewable Energy

    1

    Oakland, CA

    17%

    2

    Sacramento/San Francisco/San Jose, CA

    12%

    3

    Portland, OR

    10%

    4

    Boston, MA

    8.6%

    5

    San Diego, CA

    8%

    6

    Austin, TX

    6%

    7

    Los Angeles, CA

    5%

    8

    Minneapolis, MN

    5%

    9

    Seattle, WA

    3.5%

    10

    Chicago, Il

    3%

    Source: SustainLane U.S. City Rankings data 2006/2007

    "The San Francisco Bay Area is one of several places in the nation where there is a very active and very constructive dialogue about renewable energy, backed up by a public and private will to invest in real projects," Wentworth added.

    In 2004, SustainLane Government reports, more than one-third of greenhouse gases produced in the U.S. came from electricity production, making it a leading polluter in areas such as transportation (27.9 percent), industry (19.6 percent), and agriculture (7 percent).

    The more renewable energy a city generates, the better equipped it will be for costly environmental regulations in the future. For example, if the greenhouse gases that cause climate change get taxed, cities with strong renewable energy programs could save a lot of money and their economies could gain a tax advantage. That puts Oakland and other top cities in a good position when such regulations arise.

    Another economic benefit of implementing renewable energy technologies is the creation of regional jobs. As cities generate more power locally, many more direct and indirect jobs will spawn as a result. Domestic energy production also limits the importation of energy from other nations, reducing security risks.

    Four of the top five cities in the report are located in California. California cities rank higher in general because of the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), which set minimal requirements in 2002 for utility purchases of renewable energy for the state’s electric grid. The RPS requires a 20 percent renewable energy total for the state’s utilities by 2020.

    "Results in Oakland are built on the substantial foundation of renewable energy created by California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard," said Wentworth.

    In addition to state portfolio standards, some U.S. cities have set goals for increasing renewable energy, ranging from Chicago’s 20 percent goal by 2010, to Portland, Oregon’s goal of obtaining 100 percent renewable energy by 2010.

    Other cities, such as Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon have leading residential and business green choice programs as part of city-owned utility service offerings. As communities worry about the economic and environmental impacts of climate change, many cities and towns are implementing their own renewable energy programs instead of waiting for the federal government to act.

  • 64 Megawatt solar plant to power 48,000 homes

    "For the industry, it’s a huge project. And it’s extremely important because this industry is kind of unknown," Cohen said.

    Don Soderberg, chairman of the Nevada Public Utilities Commission, said the project is significant both for the solar energy industry and for Southern Nevada.

    "It’s a big coup for Nevada because of its size, but also because of the technology," he said. "The generating unit is not dissimilar from what has been producing electricity today with fossil fuels plants and geothermal plants. That’s why we’re pretty excited. It’s not only large in size but it’s also a technology leap."

    Cohen said that has raised Nevada Power Company’s comfort level with Nevada Solar One, which uses technology that mimics traditional power generation techniques except that it uses the sun as fuel rather than a fossil fuel.

    "To have something this advanced in our own backyard definitely puts us on the map," Soderberg said.

    Unlike photo voltaic solar technology common on roofs throughout the valley, the solar thermal technology being used at the plant uses parabolic solar collectors to heat to 750 degrees an oil-based liquid in pipes running throughout the complex. The heated liquid is then run through the pipes into a power generation complex, similar to a traditional power plant, and used to create steam which runs a turbine to create electricity.

    "They’ve been pretty confident that it works like any of the other power plants that they have," Cohen said.

    He said the project is also important for Nevada Power Co. because it will help the utility meet its renewable portfolio standard, a minimum percentage of energy generated from renewable sources set by the state.

    Nevada Power Co. has contracted to purchase Nevada Solar One’s 64 megawatts and will use about 68 percent of the power in Southern Nevada and 32 percent in Northern Nevada. The northern part of the state is powered by Nevada Power’s sister Sierra Pacific Power Co.

    A spokeswoman for the utility said the company is very excited for both the Nevada Solar One project and a solar project at Nellis Air Force Base to come online this year.

    "Once both of these solar facilities are completed in 2007, Nevada will be the number one state in the nation on solar watts per capita and solar as a percentage of retail sales," said Sonya Headen, public information officer for the utility. "We’re very pleased that we’ll be able to diversify our portfolio and increase our percentage of renewables."

    Cohen said an official opening ceremony is being planned for some time in June, but that power generation should begin by late April or early May.

    The remaining work on the site is being done in the power generation area, where 400 people are still working two shifts per day. The oil, which will be heated by the sun and then used to heat steam to run the plant, was scheduled to be delivered this week.

    Cohen said he also expects an occupancy permit to be granted this week.

    Construction on the site began in February, 2006.

    Once the plant is up and running, 28 people will staff it full-time.

    The plant is located on 400-acres near the intersection of U.S. 95 and State Route 165 south of downtown Boulder City in the Eldorado Valley.

    Phoebe Sweet covers banking and marketing for In Business Las Vegas and its sister publication, the Las Vegas Sun. She can be reached at (702)259-8832 or by e-mail at phoebe.sweet@lasvegassun.com.

    IBLV Homepage

  • Wolfowitz just an errand boy

    That’s not to say, of course, that we weren’t misled into Iraq, or that strings aren’t being pulled for a war on Iran, or that flames aren’t being fanned to widen the Middle East war – or that the gaggle of third-rate thinkers and first-class troublemakers loosely grouped under the rubric "neocon" aren’t intimately involved in all of these affairs. They are, in spades. But to accuse them of playing the central role in America’s on-going Götterdämmerung gives them an importance they don’t deserve – and unduly mitigates the guilt of the true culprits: the good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon boardroom buccaneers of the American Establishment, bred for generations to feast on war and rumors of war, and to regard the hoi polloi as mere cannon fodder and cash cows to be mulched and milked as needed.

    For what’s the underlying implication of the "neocons über alles" meme? It’s that hard-core, down-and-dirty inside operators like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld – who have spent their entire adult lives at the dark heart of the government-corporate-warbiz-spygame power nexus – are actually innocent lambkins led astray by the wicked blandishments of Richard Perle. It’s that the world-striding oil barons, Wall Street dynasts and CIA scions of the Bush Faction are just wide-eyed rubes bamboozled into acting against their own interests by the dazzling sophistry of William Kristol and Michael Leeden. It’s that no U.S. administration would ever undertake the kind of rapacious policies we’ve seen in the last five years – unless they’d been tricked into it by wily Zionists and their ideological outriders. It is, in short, our old friend "American exceptionalism," decked out in dissident drag.

    Shakespeare pegged the neo-cons’ true place in the scheme of things more than 400 years ago in Julius Caesar. Listen to Marc Antony dismissing his fellow triumvir Lepidus, and you will hear the authentic voice of Great Gamesters like Cheney, Rumsfeld and James Baker, dicing for world empire and using anything at hand – neo-cons, evangelicals, Caucasian despots, Arab tyrants, Israeli proxies, British lapdogs, Shiite death squads – to further their ambitions:

    "This is a slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands…and though we lay these honours on this man, to ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads, he shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, to groan and sweat under the business, either led or driven as we point the way. And having brought our treasure where we will, then we take down his load and turn him off, like to the empty ass, to shake his ears and graze in commons." Or at the World Bank, as the case may be.

    Again, this is not to deny that neocon fingerprints are all over the various shivs and bludgeons that the Bush Regime has used in its whack jobs on the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Magna Carta and the Ten Commandments. After all, the veritable blueprint for the whole godawful shebang – the infamous "Rebuilding America’s Defenses" document of September 2000 – was concocted under the aegis of that quintessentially neocon think tank, the Project for the New American Century….But without the presence of long-time Establishment power players like Cheney and Rumsfeld on the PNAC board, the plan would have remained the pipe dream of a few curdled academics and comb-licking policy wonks. Indeed, it was the Great Gamesters themselves who set the neocons to work on devising ways to extend the "unipolar moment" of unchallenged American power that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Union; the first version of the PNAC plan was drawn up at Cheney’s order by Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter "Leaker" Libby in 1992, in the last months of the Bush I administration.

    Under Bush II, the neocons were brought in as shock troops; their mindless zealotry was a perfect tool for implementing the plans drawn up by the real players in the new regime: Cheney’s notorious "Energy Task Force" and the much lesser-known "Joint Task Force on Petroleum" formed by the Council on Foreign Relations and – who else? – the James Baker Institute at Rice University. It was here that the final solution for Iraq was hammered out…

    These are dark days, serious times. The whiff of apocalypse is in the air. For it will be virtually impossible for the Gamesters to carry off their next immediate goal, subduing Iran – much less their long-range aim of dominating the world throughout a "new American century" – without the use of nuclear weapons. So let’s be done with the comforting fairy tale that the vast crimes we are witnessing are the work of a few cranks who have somehow hijacked the noble U.S. government and are using it for their own purposes, or Israel’s purposes, or whatever.

    The reality is that Iraq was invaded because a powerful faction of the old-line American Establishment wanted to do it and the rest of the Establishment – the Democrats, the media, the "respectable" intelligentsia – countenanced the crime. The belligerence and oppression that the Israeli government is inflicting in Lebanon and Palestine are receiving unquestioned – and armed – support from the United States because this suits the larger strategic purposes of the "global dominance" faction of the Establishment, and the domestic political purposes both of the Democrats, heavily reliant on Jewish-American backing, and the Republicans, dependent on their rabidly pro-Israel evangelical base. [As many others have pointed out, whenever the Israelis try to do something that the American elite don’t like — such as sell sophisticated military technology to the Chinese — they are called on the carpet and forced to back down. ]

    It is the American elite – pursuing, as always, the enhancement of its own power and privilege, heedless of the consent of the governed or the genuine interests of the American people (or the Palestinian people or the Israeli people or the Lebanese people or the Iraqi people) – that bedevils us. The emergence of the cretinous neoconservative cult is just a symptom of a deeper moral corruption coursing through the dominant institutions and structures of American society. The body politic is rotting from the head.

  • Russia forms Gas Cartel with Arabs

    There is a growing feeling in Europe that Moscow is consciously working towards the establishment of a "gas cartel," stretching from Algeria to Central Asia, to use as a political and economic weapon in its dealings with Europe.

    Although the officials of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF), which was created in May 2001, claim it to be a talking-shop only and not a cartel-in-the-making, the Europeans are quite wary of its proceedings.

    In a recent report by Nato’s economic committee, there is a detailed description of how Moscow has been trying to a draw Algeria, Libya, Qatar and central Asian countries into a Russian-backed cartel, "Opec for gas," which will straddle about two-thirds of the world’s total gas reserves and wield huge control over the gas market.

    During the three-day tour that took him to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan, Putin consciously worked in the direction of increasing cooperation among the major gas producers, and even openly broached the possibility of the so-called gas-cartel.

    "Who said that we rejected the idea of creating a gas cartel? We haven’t rejected anything. I said that it was an interesting proposition. Are we going to create this cartel, do we need it, that’s another discussion," he said while responding to media reports about Moscow’s controversial role in concocting a gas cartel.

    Putin’s visit to Qatar, which has the world’s third largest gas reserves after Russia and Iran, was indirectly focused on selling the cartel idea. Whereas, in Saudi Arabia, his main intent was to project Russia as a potential and reliable partner who could provide "cost-effective" military hardware, as well as technological support in the field of telecommunication.

    Apart from offering to build the much-desired civilian nuclear-energy technology in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Putin announced that Russia would launch six Saudi-made information satellites for Saudi Arabia this year.

    At the same time, he discussed the possibility of selling 150 Russian T-90 battle tanks and an unknown number of Mi 17 helicopters to Saudi Arabia.

    Furthermore, his team also signed numerous MoUs – ranging from cooperation in the fields of culture, aviation and banking — with the Saudi counterparts.

    On the last leg of his tour, with a view to making Russia’s presence felt in the Palestinian issue, Putin went to Jordan to exchange ideas on the subject with King Abdullah II.

    Washington’s influence in the Middle East is a blatant reality with which Moscow has been living for decades — though with a visible uneasiness. Putin’s visit was a direct attempt to make inroads there and take full advantage of Washington’s current predicament in Iraq, which has drastically shaken America’s image as a dependable guarantor of security and stability in the region.

    The Bush administration’s growing precariousness on the question of its Iraq policy has indubitably created unprecedented anxiety among its close, traditional allies in the region.

    In such a shaky scenario, where President Bush is finding it hard to assuage the genuine apprehensions of the regional leaders Putin, being a shrewd player, has made a move to carve a role for Russia in the Middle East political arena.

    To achieve this, Putin is even ready to swallow the involvement of some Arab countries’ alleged support to the Chechen fighters.

    In fact, during his Middle East yatra, he kept on chanting the unusual mantra of Russia’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious complexion, and the role of Russian Muslims in the development of the country.

    In its capacity as a member of the Quartet — along with the US, the European Union and the United States — Russia has been involved in the Middle East process, but its involvement has always been eclipsed by the belligerent attitude of Washington, which has close ties with both Tel Aviv and the Arab capitals.

    President Bush’s fiasco in Iraq, and his desperation to "show" some progress on the Palestinian issues in the last half of his stint have certainly provided an opportunity to Vladimir Putin to jump into the fray and encroach upon the Americans’ influence in the Middle East.

    The apparent success of his recent Middle East visit indicates that Putin’s strategy is working well.

    _____

    Dr Imran Khalid is a freelance contributor to The Daily Star.

  • US Iran budget blitzes China’s total military

  • Climate change now a global security issue

    But China’s deputy ambassador, Liu Zhenmin, was blunt in rejecting the session. His nation’s economy is growing fast and still depends heavily on coal and other fossil fuels that scientists say are contributing to climate change.

    “The developing countries believe that the Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change, nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading up to widely acceptable proposals,” he said.

    Russia, China, Qatar, Indonesia and South Africa, among others, also said the Security Council was not the place to take concrete action, though no resolution is expected.

    Pakistan argued against the debate on behalf of 130 developing nations, with many saying the Council was encroaching on more democratic bodies, like the 192-member United Nations General Assembly.

    Other developing nations, like Peru and Panama and small island states, among the most threatened by climate change, agreed with Britain. So did Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. “Projected changes in the earth’s climate are thus not only an environmental concern,” Mr. Ban said. “And, as the Council points up today, issues of energy and climate change can have implications for peace and security.”

    The United States, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases that spur climate change, opposes mandatory caps on emissions but has instead pushed alternative fuels and energy efficiency.

    The acting American ambassador, Alejandro D. Wolff, said the issue must be dealt with in a way that does not effect economic growth and development.

    Most industrial nations, including the European Union, agreed with Britain. As did Papua New Guinea, head of the Pacific small island states, which fear they may disappear under rising oceans levels as the earth warms up.

    “The dangers that the small island states and their populations face are no less serious than those nations threatened by guns and bombs,” Ambassador Robert Guba Aisi of Papua New Guinea told the Council.

    Italy’s deputy foreign minister, Vittorio Craxi, said members should support Mr. Ban’s effort to create a new United Nations Environmental Organization to coordinate action on climate change.

    “It is clear that climate change can pose threats to national security,” said Ambassador Kenzo Oshima of Japan. “In the foreseeable future climate change may well create conditions or induce circumstances that could precipitate or aggravate international conflicts.”