Hacked climate email inquiry cleared Jones but serious questions remain | Fred Pearce | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Gaunt, beta-blocked and stood down from duty, Phil Jones is the fall guy for the wider failings that triggered the hacked climate email scandals. But at its hearings into the affair a month ago, the Commons science committee was kind to the director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU), but short-tempered with his grinning sidekick, the University of East Anglia's vice-chancellor Edward Acton.

And so, in their report, Jones gets the benefit of a few doubts. At their final drafting meeting last week, only the MPs' in-house cryptosceptic, Graham Stringer, voted against a sentence saying that, on the evidence they had, "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact".

Instead, the university administration gets chastised for presiding over a culture of secrecy and possible illegality within the CRU that led to a public relations meltdown.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Surprise! Republicans Suddenly Oppose Offshore Oil Drilling | Firedoglake

So predictable.

President Barack Obama's plan to allow expanded offshore oil and gas exploration won rebuke from the top House Republican on Wednesday.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) dismissed the president's plan as not going far enough in opening up U.S. waters for exploration.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

If Obama would only approach our involvement in AfPak the way he has approached Health Care Reform and Climate Change we could be out in no time. When he took office he would have given Kabul and Kandahar to the Taliban to encourage them to compromise with the Karzai Government and reach a consensus. If that failed to do the trick, he would then call off strikes into Pakistan. Then convince Karzai to form a coalition with the Taliban so the USA could leave. In that setting those tactics would be progressive.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

but will it win enough Republican votes to get the climate change legislation passed and make up for the damage it will cost Obama in terms of his image among liberals?

The point is not to be right, but to get to right.

Disappointing!

Disappointing!

Cape Wind Signs Agreement to Buy Siemens 3.6-MW Offshore Wind Turbines
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

BOSTON, MA, MARCH 31, 2010 - Cape Wind announced today it has entered into an agreement with Siemens to supply 130 of its 3.6-Megawatt (MW) turbines for America's first planned offshore wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts and, at the same time, Siemens also announced plans to open a U.S. Offshore Wind office in Boston.

"We are pleased to be working with Siemens which is a market leader in offshore wind and we are thrilled Siemens is bringing clean energy jobs to Massachusetts by opening up its U.S. Offshore Wind office in Boston. This agreement between Cape Wind and Siemens represents a major step forward to jumpstarting the American offshore wind industry and increasing energy independence, creating a healthier environment while producing hundreds of green energy jobs," said Jim Gordon, Cape Wind President.

The Siemens 3.6-MW offshore wind turbines are an industry `workhorse' with 1,000 units sold and 150 units installed and successfully operating.

This is a press release, so this is particularly interesting:

Gerard Dhooge, President of the Boston & New England Maritime Trades Council, AFL-CIO, welcomed the news of the agreement between Cape Wind and Siemens, "Skilled maritime workers are ready to get to work to help install these wind turbines offshore Massachusetts and to build America's first offshore wind farm. Thirty to fifty percent of the members of the Maritime Trades Council are currently out of work so we need these jobs now more than ever."

This has been a very consistent theme in the conference I was in last week - the project developers are openly supporting union work in their projects, and are counting on union political support to get the regulatory framework settled. Leo Gerard, boss of the steelworkers union, was present at that offshore conference and gave a keynote speech.

There may be some tension on the issue of local content (a requirement of the unions, but one very difficult to fulfill for the first projects as the industrial base doesn't exist for all components of a project and will be installed only if the country shows it's serious about large scale development), but overall, it's been interesting to see American businessmen praising unions while Europeans are openly worried about their role...

Wind power

Can't say as I blame the PUC. The offer smells over-priced for guaranteed rate of return to Deepwater investors. It's not clear in the reporting if the rate schedule applies only to the 8-turbine (40WH?) installation or capacity added up to 100 turbines over the 20-year period. If these are the terms for 8-turbines alone, I'd tell Deepwater to go to hell, too.

The crux of the proposed agreement was a sale price of 24.4 cents per kilowatt hour, nearly three times the price National Grid pays for energy from fossil-fuel fired power plants and nuclear facilities [improper project comparison]. Over the 20-year contract, the price would have escalated by 3.5 percent annually, so, by the final year, it would have been 48.6 cents per kilowatt hour. Combined with a 2.75-percent markup on clean energy that National Grid was allowed by Rhode Island law, it would have meant hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs to the state's 480,000 ratepayers over two decades.

Setting aside NYMBI and EIS window-dressing on 12.9% UE and Carcieri (R) : This 8-turbine "demo" is no simple installation and MOE demo. Look at the JOBS^TM bait: Why buy, when you can build it all for much, much more?

Deepwater Wind has pledged a significant private investment in Rhode Island of approximately $1.5 billion with the construction of a regional manufacturing facility in Quonset, and creating up to 800 direct jobs, with annual wages of $60 million. The Quonset facility will manufacture support structures upon which the turbine and its tower are based and will serve the entire northeast...

Read more...

When the hearings opened on Tuesday, the director of the Energy Council of Rhode Island, a nonprofit organization that represents 35 of the state's leading manufacturers, universities and hospitals, vehemently argued against Deepwater's proposed price. John Farley told the commission that the high price would harm large businesses in Rhode Island that use a lot of electricity.

Moore began the session on Wednesday by responding to Farley's statements, which were made as part of the public comment period and not submitted as formal testimony that could have been reviewed by the commission and other parties beforehand.

He said Farley failed to consider that power from the wind farm could actually lead to some cost savings by displacing the most expensive types of oil-generated electricity sold on the energy spot market. A study commissioned by Deepwater and issued Tuesday found that 40 percent of the additional costs of power from the Block Island project could be offset by what Moore called the price-suppression phenomenon. The Cambridge, Mass.-based Charles River Associates carried out the study and has done a similar analysis for Cape Wind [!], an offshore wind farm proposed in Massachusetts.

Moore was asked several times about Deepwater's projected return on investment for the Block Island wind farm. He said Deepwater estimates a return of between 15 and 18 percent for its investors. He said that range is relatively low considering the high amount of risk [?!] involved in offshore wind farms, which have been built in Europe, but not in the U.S.

Read more...

FFS. Elsewhere Deepwater claims being awarded DOE grants. How much of its investment capital derive from RGGI proceeds? How many MW available for export to RGGI or other spot exchanges?

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.