Industry headlines

Matthew R. Simmons, founder of the Ocean Energy Research Institute in Rockland, Maine, passed away suddenly on Sunday. He is survived by his wife, Ellen, and their five daughters. Mr. Simmons was also former chairman of Simmons & Company International. Details of the services are pending. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Ocean Energy Research Institute. Click here for full story

Householders tempted by a rash of new "solar for free" offers could double their financial savings by paying for the panels themselves, experts have warned. The advice comes as installations of solar photovoltaic panels have exploded in the UK, with the number installed in four months in 2010 more than doubling on the whole of 2009 since a government financial incentive was launched in April. Click here for full story

Europe's booming wind energy industry is being exploited by criminals, according to Kroll, the corporate security group. Criminals see an opportunity to tap into billions of euros' worth of European Union subsidies. Organised groups linked to the Italian Mafia are among those to have infiltrated the industry, Jason Wright, senior director of Kroll's consulting group, told The Times. While emphasising that the overwhelming majority of European wind projects were "entirely legitimate", he said that criminals were increasingly investing in the industry, both to qualify for subsidies and to launder profits from drug-running and other illegal activities. Click here for full story

Plans for a multimillion-pound waste reprocessing plant on Teesside which will create 50 jobs have been unveiled. Power company Sembcorp UK and waste management firm Sita UK want to build the energy recovery facility at the Wilton International site in Redcar. The plant would reprocess non-hazardous business and household waste into renewable energy. The firms said the green development would also help reduce carbon emissions. Click here for full story

Bio-oil could become a more efficient source of renewable energy with a potential of replacing fossil fuels such as diesel, according to a £1.4 million project. The Bio-oil Refinery Project, part funded by the Research Council of Norway, aims to develop integrated bio-oil technology to transform biomass more efficiently into biofuels through fast pyrolysis. Click here for full story

Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has insisted the government is fully behind the opening of a new nuclear power station in eight years' time. He was responding to calls from the CBI business group to reassure investors that ministers were prepared to make a big push for nuclear power. Click here for full story

Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, has been the victim of a terrible misunderstanding, he claimed on BBC’s Today programme this morning (9 August). We all believe he’s anti-nuclear power – but he’s not. Dear me, no. His previous position, he insisted, had been “misunderstood” and he is actually in favour of nuclear being part of the UK’s energy mix because he had “no intention of the lights going out on my watch.” Click here for full story

Greenpeace has launched a competition to design a visual message supporting the use of renewable energy sources and opposing nuclear power. Germany is on the brink of a crucial change in its energy policy and the winning design will be used ahead of the submission of the concept by the German government in September. Click here for full story

Local councils will be allowed to sell renewable electricity to the National Grid from today (9 August), with the energy secretary, Chris Huhne, urging them to position themselves at the forefront of a power revolution. Huhne has lifted a ban on the sale of surplus electricity to the grid by councils, which say the scheme could raise £100m a year for cash-strapped local authorities in England and Wales. Click here for full story

Key energy and planning reforms must be delivered by the Government within six months or it risks missing targets for reducing carbon emissions and improving energy security, business leaders will warn today (9 August). Uncertainty about the planning regime is making investors wary of committing to new energy projects and possibly jeopardising supplies, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) says. Launching a report, No Time To Lose: Deciding Britain's Energy Future, the CBI says that without greater clarity, Britain risks missing out on as much as £150bn of private sector investment in low-carbon infrastructure. Click here for full story

Work to lay 25km (15.5 miles) of cable off Cornwall for a £42m wave energy scheme has been halted. The process, delayed three times last week because of equipment failure and weather, finally started on Saturday. However, problems recurred with a flotation device, and part of the cable sank while being floated to land from a ship 2km (1.25 miles) offshore. The work has now been put on hold until at least Tuesday while divers attach new buoyancy units to the sunken cable. Click here for full story

Rural Affairs Secretary Richard Lochhead has announced the first contract has been awarded for developing small-scale hydro schemes on the national forest estate in the north-west Highlands. Green Highland Renewables Limited will carry out the projects, which cover Inverness-shire, Ross & Skye, Lochaber and the northern Highlands. It is the first of three lots that are open for small-scale hydro development. Click here for full story

Capturing pollution from European power plants and using it to force oil from underground reservoirs may turn a profit for the first time as crude prices rise toward $100 a barrel. Gathering carbon dioxide and pumping it into deposits to extract more crude for so-called enhanced oil recovery became too costly for companies after Brent crude fell 73 percent between its record high in July 2008 and December that year, according to Thomas Greenwood, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The 115 percent rebound since then may make it profitable even without government subsidies that are designed to curb the emissions, he said. Click here for full story

Alex Salmond's £10million green energy competition has attracted just four entries - and only one from Scotland. The Saltire Prize Challenge invited entrants to come up with a commercially viable wave or tidal energy scheme for Scottish waters. According to the First Minister, it is the world's biggest award for renewable energy projects. But opposition parties claim the competition is Salmond's "Millennium Dome". Click here for full story

With feed-in tariffs for generating your own electricity now a reality, what are the options for poultry producers, and do they stack up financially? Ken Randall reports. Click here for full story

Honda is working with the European Youth Parliament to support its 64th International Session, taking place in Frankfurt, Germany between 30th July and 8th August. On Tuesday, a representative from Honda Motor Europe took part in an “expert hearing”, giving members of the Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN) a chance to learn about Honda’s environmental technology and to discuss the subject of sustainable mobility. Members of TRAN were also offered the unique opportunity to ride in the FCX Clarity, Honda’s zero emission hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle. Click here for full story

The Greens are proposing that the federal government almost quadruple support for large-scale solar, geothermal and other forms of renewable energy by guaranteeing up to $5 billion of loans to new power stations. Greens deputy leader Christine Milne said the existing program for $1.75 billion of renewable energy grants was too small to spark the full use of Australia's potential resources of ''sun, wind, ocean, earth, and human ingenuity''. Click here for full story

The EU is set to contribute 45% of the construction costs for ITER, the new international fusion reactor being built in France, which some estimates now put at EURbillion, three times the 2006 cost estimate. But the EU’s financial problems may mean it can’t deliver all of it’s share of around EUR7.2 billion. Click here for full story

Work is finally under way in Cornwall to lay 25km (15.5 miles) of cable as part of a £42m wave energy project. The cable laying element of the Wave Hub scheme is about a week behind schedule following delays caused by equipment problems and the weather. The first part of the operation will see the cable floated to land from a ship 2km (1.25 miles) offshore. Click here for full story

EDF Energy will bank windfall profits of an estimated £350m a year at the expense of British customers, when the Government introduces a new green tax. The French-state owned utility would be the major beneficiary of Government plans to artificially raise the price of carbon allowances traded in the UK. The move is intended to make it more expensive to run fossil-fuel power stations than low-carbon nuclear plants. Click here for full story

The US Department of Energy yesterday awarded $1bn to a pioneering near-zero emission carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, in a move designed to help establish the US as a leading player in the emerging market for CCS technology. The project, dubbed FutureGen 2.0, replaces long-standing plans to build an experimental coal-fired power plant, which would capture and store carbon dioxide underground. Energy secretary Steven Chu confirmed the grant, announcing that the funding is expected to help create almost 2,000 jobs in the state of Illinois with work scheduled to start next spring. Click here for full story

“…… Across the world, coal is the dominant fuel and that’s not going to change soon. The biggest contributor to reducing carbon emissions on a global scale will not be renewables or nuclear, but coal-fired power stations fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. Since coal is here to stay, we must decide how to generate low carbon electricity from it – and Scotland can lead this process by developing clean coal technologies. Installing CCS on new high-efficiency power stations will lead to lower carbon emissions than fitting it to older, less efficient facilities. The best result will be achieved by designing in CCS from the start rather than adding it to the end of an existing pipe.” Muir Miller, project director of Ayrshire Power. Click here for full story

A little-known Perthshire company backed by Scottish and Southern Energy has won a contract worth in the region of £100 million to develop small hydroelectric schemes on land owned by the Forestry Commission. Green Highland Renewables (GHR), based in Aberfeldy, has been selected to exclusively develop the schemes in the Highland region, the largest and most lucrative of three nationwide zones that are being tendered by the Forestry Commission (FC) to raise money to increase the rate of tree planting across the country. Together with Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), which bought a third of the company in 2008, GHR will develop well in excess of 100 hydroelectric dams across the Highlands, many of them in the most remote glens in the region, in what is expected to be a 10 year programme. Click here for full story

Aston University’s (UK) Bioenergy Research Group (BERG) is involved in a £1.4-million (US$2.2 million), two-year project aimed at developing technology for producing and fractionating bio-oil components as a basis for a biorefinery producing green chemicals, transportation fuels and energy. The Bio-oil Refinery Project is part funded by the Research Council of Norway (RENERGI) program, and will develop new, integrated bio-oil technology to transform biomass more efficiently into biofuels through fast pyrolysis. Click here for full story

Wales could at last be taking the lead when it comes to renewable energy thanks to the go- ahead for trials of an undersea tidal power scheme off Pembrokeshire. The pioneering technology for harnessing the vast energy in our reliable-as-clockwork tides has been dreamed up and produced in Wales. Marine engineer Richard Ayre came up with the idea then developed it at his base in Pembrokeshire’s Little Haven. Trademarked DeltaStream, the technology could eventually produce thousands of jobs for recession-hit Wales. Click here for full story

The world's first genuinely green energy deal is about to be sealed. In a plan which could be a blueprint for saving large tracts of the planet from exploitation, a greater value is being put on a pristine wilderness than on the oil that lies beneath. While the world's industrialised countries are building complex carbon markets to enable them to carry on polluting, Ecuador has come up with a much simpler idea for mitigating climate change: leave the oil underground. It is promising to lock up as much as a fifth of its oil reserves indefinitely, providing rich nations pay out at least half the market value of the oil – some $3.6bn – as compensation. Click here for full story

New Energy Technologies, a wood- chips-to-pellets supplier to the power industry, is planning its debut on the Alternate Investment Market next month to raise £5m tfor new plants. Robin Parker, NET's chairman, said he is bringing the fledgling biomass company to the stock market to raise capital to build the latest wood-generation plants, allowing it to supply local users as well as the UK's big power stations with renewable fuel. Click here for full story

The Microgeneration industry today (6 August) called upon David Cameron to intervene personally to fulfil his pledge to make this “the Greenest Government Ever” as squabbling between Government departments starts to cost jobs and cause investors to flee the UK Microgeneration sector. In an “end of term” report (attached) the Micropower Council highlights how the Treasury is blocking the wishes of Energy and Climate Change Ministers Chris Huhne and Greg Barker to introduce a key policy that will encourage millions of householders to install renewable heating or hot water. The report also highlights how the civil service machine has caused Ministers at the Department for Communities and Local Government to break the law, as well as ignoring the publicly expressed wishes of two Ministers. Click here for full story

A 3 MW wave and tidal drive train technology development and testing facility, Nautilus, is now under construction at the National Renewable Energy Centre (Narec) in Blyth, UK. Project Nautilus is the first of a number of site developments planned over the next two years, which will also see the construction of a 100 m wind turbine blade test facility and a 12 MW drive train facility for the offshore wind industry. Click here for full story

…. Goldhofer has launched a new flatbed semi-trailer for transporting wind power plant blades up to 62 metres long. The latest SPZ-P 3AAA extendable is the first trailer to be designed to carry turbine blades still in their shipping frames, and has the capacity to extend from 20 to 62 metres! Its deep extendable spine can take a 13-tonne load 10 metres from the front, which is where the frame's front bolster supports the blade. The rear bolster can then be transported at the extreme rear of the trailer, with the blade extending 10 metres behind it. This increases manoeuvrability and reduces trailer length to 52 metres. Click here for full story

The production and use of biofuels for transport has increased dramatically in recent years and is set to continue, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and meeting growing consumer demand. As most biofuels will be transported by sea, the industry needs to take stock of its growing experience of what can go wrong aboard ship and develop safe and efficient shipping, loading, handling and storage practices. Click here for full story

Perthshire is leading the way in heralding a new era of managing our water environment. Hydro power, fishing, agriculture and tourism will all be affected under an important piece of European legislation, transposed into Scottish law via two important Acts focusing on new ways of water management. Click here for full story

Hopes are running high that windfarm projects could rejuvenate a Moray harbour. The harbour at Buckie would be “well placed” to maintain and repair offshore wind turbines, community leaders said last night. Buckie shipyard is currently building catamarans suitable for transporting engineers to and from such windfarms. Click here for full story

Tests are being carried out on a pioneering generator to harnessing the power of the Humber estuary to create green electricity. The Proteus NP1000 is set to be the first full-scale tidal stream power plant in the region. It should produce enough energy to help power the Deep visitor attraction during the day. Click here for full story

Some of Shetland’s rarest plants are being saved from possible extinction with the help of a new wind turbine. The 15 metre high 6KW turbine was formally launched at Shetland Amenity Trust’s horticultural unit at Staney Hill on Friday morning. The unit propagates and grows plants that are either native to Shetland or do well in the local climate. It is also undertaking important biodiversity work to preserve some of the islands’ rarest flora. Click here for full story

ABB has helped a European renewable energy company develop an award-winning wind turbine for urban environments that helps make towns and cities more sustainable and consumers more energy efficient. Designed and manufactured by quietrevolution of the U.K., the QR5 wind turbine has already won eight awards and nominations as well as the attention of the world media, including the BBC, CNN, Financial Times and MSNBC….. quietrevolution approached ABB at an early stage of product development for advice and guidance on an electrical solution for this potentially revolutionary wind turbine. Click here for full story

BBC Online publishes a “clickable” map of windfarms in Wales showing existing windfarms, those under construction, those consented and those in planning. Click here for full story

The devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico dramatically raises the stakes in confronting the challenges we face in balancing America's energy needs with protecting its precious natural resources. In his recent address to the nation, President Obama made a compelling case for passing a comprehensive energy bill that would reduce the nation’s dependence on oil, noting that the spill is, “the most painful and powerful reminder that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.” Click here for full story

UK company HomeSun is offering free solar panels to homes with south-facing roofs in return for receiving the Government’s feed-in-tariff. The company says it will provide and install 2.5 kWh- 4 kWh systems, which typically cost £11,000-15,000 for free on homes with optimally sited and sized roofs. Households will be able to benefit from the free electricity generated to lower their household energy bills, while HomeSun will receive the feed-in tariff over its 25 year guaranteed lifetime. Click here for full story

In a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) today, a coalition of renewable energy industry groups, environmentalists and labor unions called for passage of a renewable energy standard in September. Click here for full story