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  • Turkey implements wind power

    But in spite of the huge potential of the Turkish wind power sector—the country is surrounded by the Aegean, Mediterranean and Black Sea—so far Turkey has made a slow start in exploiting its wind energy potential.

    In 2006, only 19 MW of wind power capacity were installed, and this year, installed wind capacity increased to a little under 140 MW.

    There are ten wind farms—mainly on land—clustered together in the west of the country and in the Aegean region, including in Çanakkale, close to the site of ancient Troy, Çeþme, Akhisar and on the island of Bozcaada,

    Tanay Sýdký Uyar, Vice President of the World Wind Energy Association and Associate Professor of Renewable Energy at Marmara University, said that Turkey had a huge potential for renewable electricity from wind, solar and geothermal sources. He estimated that Turkey could install a wind capacity of 100,000 MW of electricity.

    Currently, Turkey has a total installed capacity of about 40,000 MW for electricity from all energy sources.

    "Wind power could supply Turkey’s electricity needs twice over within five to ten years if the government had the political will to develop this sector," he told RenewableEnergyAccess.com.

    However, Uyar said that the government was slow to give licences to build new wind parks.

    A backlog of applications to build wind farms with a total operating capacity of 8,000 MW is still waiting for approval from the government. So far the government has issued about 40 licences for wind parks, each with an installed capacity of between 20 and 60 MW.

    The country’s capacity for solar energy is also estimated to be huge, with an average of 7.2 hours of sunshine each day, according to the Research Institute for Electricity Affairs (EIEI) in Ankara.

    Also, Uyar said that geothermal energy has the potential to supply 5 million households with heating.

    In 2005, Turkey passed a new renewable energy law to bring it into line with European Union legislation to support renewable sources, including wind power, by giving a government guarantee to purchase electricity at a set price for a period of 7 years.

    But the tariff of about 5 euro cents per kWh of electricity is much lower than in most other European countries, and economic studies say it discourages investment in the renewable energy sector.

    "We have terrific geographic conditions for solar and wind power in Turkey. Exploiting it is already economically and technically possible, but the problem is that the government favors fossil fuels and nuclear energy," Uyar said.

    Turkey is locked into long-term agreements to purchase natural gas at fixed prices and also nuclear energy technology and these agreements are a financial disincentive to developing renewable energy, Uyar said.

    The government is planning to build 3 nuclear reactors with a total capacity of 4,500 MW by 2012.

    Uyar also said that more needed to be done in Turkey to make energy use more efficient.

    "There is a huge amount of energy waste. Turkey can cut its electricity needs by 50% if it uses more up-to-date energy efficient technology and so help keep down carbon emissions," he said.

    The share of energy that comes from renewable energy sources in Turkey is tiny. In 2006, the country had an installed biomass capacity of 35 MW and 15 MW of geothermal energy.

    In addition, Turkey had an installed capacity of 13,100 MW of hydro power, 38,867 MW of thermal power, 11,850 MW of natural gas, 7,491 MW of lignite, 1,845 MW of hard coal, 2,230 MW of oil.

  • How Israel has turned war into economic oil

    Political chaos means Israel is booming like it’s 1999 – and the boom is in defence exports field-tested on Palestinians

    By Naomi Klein

    09/16/07 "The Guardian" — — Gaza in the hands of Hamas, with masked militants sitting in the president’s chair; the West Bank on the edge; Israeli army camps hastily assembled in the Golan Heights; a spy satellite over Iran and Syria; war with Hizbullah a hair trigger away; a scandal-plagued political class facing a total loss of public faith. At a glance, things aren’t going well for Israel. But here’s a puzzle: why, in the midst of such chaos and carnage, is the Israeli economy booming like it’s 1999, with a roaring stock market and growth rates nearing China’s?

    Thomas Friedman recently offered his theory in the New York Times. Israel "nurtures and rewards individual imagination", and so its people are constantly spawning ingenious hi-tech start-ups, no matter what messes their politicians are making. After perusing class projects by students in engineering and computer science at Ben-Gurion University, Friedman made one of his famous fake-sense pronouncements. Israel "had discovered oil". This oil, apparently, is located in the minds of Israel’s "young innovators and venture capitalists", who are too busy making megadeals with Google to be held back by politics.

    Here’s another theory. Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-90s, when the country was in the vanguard of the information revolution – the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack, and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.

    Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms, Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of 24-hour-a-day showroom, a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.

    Discussions of Israel’s military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country – US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank, and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel’s huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2bn in "defence" products to the United States – up dramatically from $270m in 1999. In 2006, Israel exported $3.4bn in defence products – well over a billion more than it received in American military aid. That makes Israel the fourth largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

    Much of this growth has been in the so-called homeland security sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2bn, an increase of 20%. The key products and services are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

    And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror".

    It’s no coincidence that the class projects at Ben-Gurion that so impressed Friedman have names like Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images, and Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance. Thirty homeland security companies have been launched in Israel during the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the country’s universities into incubators for security and weapons start-ups – something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic boycott.

    Next week, the most established of these companies will travel to Europe for the Paris Air Show, the arms industry’s equivalent of Fashion Week. One of the Israeli companies exhibiting is Suspect Detection Systems (SDS), which will be showcasing its Cogito1002, a white, sci-fi-looking security kiosk that asks air travellers to answer a series of computer-generated questions, tailored to their country of origin, while they hold their hand on a "biofeedback" sensor. The device reads the body’s reactions to the questions, and certain responses flag the passenger as "suspect".

    Like hundreds of other Israeli security start-ups, SDS boasts that it was founded by veterans of Israel’s secret police and that its products were road-tested on Palestinians. Not only has the company tried out the biofeedback terminals at a West Bank checkpoint, it claims the "concept is supported and enhanced by knowledge acquired and assimilated from the analysis of thousands of case studies related to suicide bombers in Israel".

    Another star of the Paris Air Show will be Israeli defence giant Elbit, which plans to showcase its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned air vehicles. As recently as last month, according to press reports, Israel used the drones on bombing missions in Gaza. Once tested in the territories, they are exported abroad: the Hermes has already been used at the Arizona-Mexico border; Cogito1002 terminals are being auditioned at an unnamed American airport; and Elbit – also one of the companies behind Israel’s "security barrier" – has set up a deal with Boeing to construct the Department of Homeland Security’s $2.5bn "virtual" border fence around the US.

    Since Israel began its policy of sealing off the occupied territories with checkpoints and walls, human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the West Bank to open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of Israel’s homeland security sector, a topic explored in greater detail in my forthcoming book, it strikes me that they are something else too: laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested. Palestinians – whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling Hamastan – are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.

    So in a way Friedman is right, Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn’t the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target "suspects". And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.

    Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, will be published later this year by Picador; a version of this article appears in the Nation, www.thenation.com and www.nologo.org

    More about academic boycott of Israel:

    http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7640

    http://www.pacbi.org/

    http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=588_0_1_0_C  

  • Turnbull launches windfarm working group

    "While primary responsibility in these matters rests with state and territory governments, there should be a more consistent approach than currently exists across Australia," Mr Turnbull said.

    Members of the working group represent a balance of community, rural, local government and wind energy industry interests. The members are:

    • Denis Smedley, a senior executive of the Department of the Environment and Water Resources (Chair)
    • Ms Liz Johnstone, senior planning adviser at the Municipal Association of Victoria
    • Andrew Richards, chair of the Australian Wind Energy Association, a vice president of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, and Executive Manager, Corporate Affairs and Marketing, Pacific Hydro
    • Brett Thomas, managing director of Melbourne arm of Acciona, a world leader in renewable energy
    • Tim Le Roy, spokesperson for the Tarwin Valley Coastal Guardians
    • Yvonne Wenham, spokesperson for Friends of Future Generations (SA)
    • David Clarke, a farmer from Waubra, Victoria
    • Di Jay, CEO of the Planning Institute of Australia
    • Colin Griffith, CEO, Australian Council of National Trusts

  • The 100-Mile Diet


    The Origins

    The concept of the 100-mile diet started to spread in 2005 when pioneers James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith decided to eat foods produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home, which is surrounded by mountains, a valley and water. “That was big enough to have the potential to feed us, but small enough to feel genuinely local,” says MacKinnon. They lived to tell about their experience in the book Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, which hit shelves last May. Fiction writer Barbara Kingsolver’s testament to eating mostly homegrown food with her family, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, came out the same month.

    Confining “local” to a certain radius is not a new idea. Gary Nabhan, author and founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a nonprofit organization that preserves heirloom seeds that connect Native Americans with the land, ate foods produced within 250 miles of his Arizona home for a year in 2000.

    Although I was inspired by these conscientious consumers, just deciding what I would eat for breakfast made me nervous. I planned to make few exceptions—no coffee, tea or orange juice. I prepared menus and talked to people who had tried the diet themselves, but since my success depended on my locale, out-of-towners’ advice wasn’t very helpful. Still, I became more encouraged as I watched shoppers test for ripeness in the over-stocked stands.

    Shopping Around

    Leaving Union Square, lugging two bulging bags of produce, I mentally reviewed my purchases: five ears of corn and a cucumber from Migliorelli Farm, $2.50; a half pound of flounder from Long Island Sound, $2.25; and tomatoes, a chili pepper and an eggplant from Oak Grove Plantation, $8.80. Unfortunately, I still needed items like butter and milk—which would have melted or curdled, respectively, if I lugged them home from the market.

    At the Union Square market, produce prices ran high, but a new study conducted at the University of Seattle shows that the prices at most farmers’ markets might actually be lower than at traditional grocery stores. Normally, I spend about $125 on food every week. When I totaled all my farmers’ market purchases and added the items I had left to buy, I saw that for me, the 100-mile diet cost about $160 a week—almost 30 percent more than usual.

    For milk and butter, I walked to my neighborhood organic market. The cashier explained that they used to carry local dairy, but there was always at least one broken package in the delivery, so they stopped ordering it altogether. Finding local staples was proving more frustrating than I imagined. I tried my luck at Whole Foods. The store’s greeter told me that 80 percent of the food sold there is local and signs above the produce state the food’s price and origin. I even found dairy items that had eluded me at my neighborhood organic grocery, including butter from Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, almost exactly 100 miles away.

    But few grocery stores make it easy to learn where their products come from. Raoul, the assistant manager at Steve’s C-Town, a grocery chain near my apartment, said the store buys its produce from many of the 50 merchants that distribute out of Hunt’s Point in the Bronx, the most profitable distribution site in the world.

    Pineapples from the Philippines, bananas from Costa Rica and avocados from California travel to Hunt’s Point via truck, train, boat or plane, and then to supermarkets like C-Town. Mean-while, many foods grown nearby are not sold locally. “Most Americans would be surprised to hear that most of the garlic found in most of the supermarkets is from China,” says Brian Halweil, author of the book Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket.

    Dining In

    My kitchen table was barely visible beneath all the fruits and vegetables. My dinner plan included acorn squash with a pat of butter, brown sugar and cooking sherry. I debated using the brown sugar and sherry—neither are produced locally—and decided to use them anyway. After all, what good is any diet without a little wiggle room?

    I’m a terrible cook, but when I smelled the baking acorn squash, I almost called the Food Network. When I tasted my masterpiece, I was in heaven. It was flavorful, filling, and especially comforting, knowing my community and the larger world all benefited from my food choices.

    In the weeks that followed, I dined on red onion, cucumber and dill salad; red potatoes with sautéed eggplant, zucchini and rosemary; and tomato and basil with goat cheese, delighting in each fresh dish. Although I no longer eat 100-mile (or 200-mile) foods exclusively, I still incorporate them into my diet—and I always visit the Union Square or Prospect Park Green Markets. A community of epicureans, traditionalists and environmentalists is growing around the appreciation of local fare. As Cheryl Nechamen, an activist who organizes her community to try the 100-mile diet, says, “It touches a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons.”

    SUSAN COSIER is a science, health and environment reporter from Brooklyn, NY.

     

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  • Murray River officially runs dry

    The river bed of the River Murray was running dry just across the border in Victoria and water had been kept upstream of South Australia as part of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission’s management plan to ensure flow across the border in coming months, reported The Advertiser (10/9/2007, p. 8).

    River impassable to larger craft: "Within weeks State Cabinet will consider plans for Adelaide’s first desalination plant to reduce reliance on the river," The Advertiser reported. "The river flow has been checked at Lock 7, between Renmark and Mildura, reducing it to barely a trickle over the past week. A small channel on one side of the river allows for the passage of small boats through the lock but houseboats are unable to navigate the shallow waters."

    September dry unusual: Riverland photographer Glenn Milne said "a couple of garden hoses" would squirt more water past the lock. "There’s a huge sand bar that’s three-quarters the way across the river and the rest of it is only very shallow," he said. Lock masters said the river bed often dried out in June when river flows were reduced but it was unusual for the river still to be dry in September when irrigation water usually was released.

    Less than 25pc of monthly average flow: Monthly inflows into the River Murray had been below average for the past 23 months. In August, 360 gigalitres flowed into the river, compared with the long-term monthly average of 1570 gigalitres. The release of water from Hume reservoir has been as low as possible in winter.

    The Advertiser, 10/9/2007, p. 8

  • New lamp saves electricity

    Scientists working for Ceravision, a company based in Milton Keynes, in Britain, have designed a new form of lamp that eliminates the need for electrodes, reported The Economist (8/9/2007, p.4). Their device uses microwaves to transform electricity into light. It consists of a relatively small lump of aluminium oxide into which a hole has been bored, with a gas-capsule, inside. The lot is bombarded with microwaves generated from the same sort of device that powers a microwave oven. As electrons accelerate in the electric field, they gain energy that they pass on to the atoms and molecules of the gas as they collide with them, creating a glowing plasma. The resulting light is bright, and the process is energy-efficient.

    Energy efficiency greater than 50 per cent: Indeed, whereas traditional light bulbs emit just 5 per cent of their energy as light, and fluorescent tubes about 15 per cent, the Ceravision lamp has an energy efficiency greater than 50 per cent. The lamp’s small size makes them compatible to light-emitting diodes but the new lamp generates much brighter light than those semiconductor devices do.

    Cheap, and does not need mercury: A single microwave generator can be used to power several lamps. Another environmental advantage of the new design is that it does not need mercury, a highly toxic metal found in most of the bulbs used today, including energy-saving fluorescent bulbs, fluorescent tubes and high-pressure bulbs used in projectors. And Ceravision also reckons it should be cheap to make. With lighting accounting for some 20 per cent of electricity use worldwide, switching to a more efficient system could both save energy and reduce emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

    The Economist, 8/9/2007, p. 4