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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (4558)	8/11/2006 11:40:39 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24213

PG&E vows fivefold increase in solar use PLANTS TO BE BUILT; WILL USE SUN, STEAM TO PRODUCE ENERGY By Sarah Jane Tribble Mercury News In a historic boost for renewable energy, PG&E said Thursday it will increase its use of solar power nearly fivefold. The Northern California utility agreed to buy at least 500 megawatts of solar energy, beginning in spring 2010, from LUZ II, one of the nation's largest solar power developers in the 1980s. The deal calls for at least one 100-megawatt solar-thermal plant, which will use both the sun and steam to produce energy, to be built within four years. Several other plants will follow, said Charles Ricker, president of LUZ II's U.S. operations. If completed, the amount of solar power produced in California would dwarf the 380 megawatts currently being produced by large-scale solar plants nationwide. The project is also one of the biggest solar-thermal investments in the United States in 15 years and could herald a new era for the renewable energy, said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association in Washington, D.C. ``We're back!'' Resch said. ``Utilities are now embracing solar as a cost-effective technology for delivering high-quality, clean energy to consumers. We're, in many cases, going to be the lowest cost option for utilities.'' The LUZ solar-thermal plants will use reflecting mirrors, or heliostats, that will send concentrated sunlight to a collection point that will heat water, turning it into steam. That steam will provide the energy for a turbine that will produce energy, Ricker said. He declined to provide pictures or more detail of the process, saying it was proprietary information. The company also doesn't know exactly where the plants will be built, but Ricker said they may not be in one location. California utilities, pressed with rising natural gas prices and increasing demands for power, are turning to solar and other forms of renewable energy because of economics and political incentives, Resch said. `Million Solar Roofs' In January, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pushed his ``Million Solar Roofs'' plan through the California Public Utilities Commission, which included the largest investment in solar power of any state in U.S. history. The plan tacked a new fee of about $1.10 a month on utility bills to provide $3.2 billion in rebates over the next 11 years for people who install a solar roof on their home. State regulators also set a goal for utilities to supply 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources, such as the sun and wind, by 2010. PG&E says about 13 percent of its power comes from renewable sources. PG&E already has 12,000 residential and commercial customers who generate 88 megawatts of power with solar panels, which it said is more solar energy than any other utility in the country. One megawatt provides enough energy to power about 750 homes. The company has also signed long-term contracts for renewable power, such as an agreement announced last week to purchase up to 169 megawatts of geothermal energy from Geothermal Company, and it is confident the plan announced Thursday will come to fruition, a PG&E spokesman said. Both PG&E and LUZ declined to discuss the terms of the deal. However, LUZ said it was already in talks for financing. LUZ, which is based near Houston, is a reincarnation of the firm that built nine solar-thermal plants in California between 1984 and 1991, before declaring bankruptcy. Building solar plants is often more costly than natural gas plants, experts say. Market cooled in '90s The solar industry's biggest growth came during the 1970s and 1980s, fueled by inflated gas prices and political incentives, such as rebates and research programs. Those benefits petered out in the 1990s when the nation's economy improved and as fuel prices stabilized, energy experts said. But recent investments by federal and state governments nationwide have brightened the picture for solar, and Ricker said he believes the support is here to stay because high fuel and electricity prices are here to stay. ``This is a new reality, and a technology that can compete effectively with gas is a long-term solution.'' siliconvalley.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (4558)	8/11/2006 9:54:29 PM
From: DennyKrane	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24213

[from: Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.] "This text was first published in Le Monde in early 1973. Over lunch in Paris the venerable editor of that daily, as he accepted my manuscript, recommended just one change. He felt that a term as little known and as technical as ``energy crisis'' had no place in the opening sentence of an article that he would be running on page 1. As I now reread the text, I am struck by the speed with which language and issues have shifted..." cogsci.ed.ac.uk * THE ENERGY CRISIS "The choice of a minimum-energy economy compels the poor to abandon fantastical expectations and the rich to recognize their vested interest as a ghastly liability. Both must reject the fatal image of man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated hunger for more energy. In countries that were made affluent by industrial development, the energy crisis serves as a pretext for raising the taxes that will be needed to substitute new, more ``rational,'' and socially more deadly industrial processes for those that have been rendered obsolete by inefficient overexpansion. For the leaders of people who are not yet dominated by the same process of industrialization, the energy crisis serves as a historical imperative to centralize production, pollution, and their control in a last-ditch effort to catch up with the more highly powered. By exporting their crisis and by preaching the new gospel of puritan energy worship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did by selling them the products of now outdated factories. As soon as a poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more carefully managed will always yield more goods for more people, that country locks itself into the cage of enslavement to maximum industrial outputs. Inevitably the poor lose the option for rational technology when they choose to modernize their poverty by increasing their dependence on energy. Inevitably the poor deny themselves the possibility of liberating technology and participatory politics when, together with maximum feasible energy use, they accept maximum feasible social control. The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on the number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which energy corrupts, and to do so by a political process that associates the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research runs counter to that now done by experts and for institutions, I shall continue to call it counterfoil research. It has three steps. First, the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found. Finally, each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying, and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation..."