Energy

Handelsblatt Global Edition

Germany’s massive push into renewable energy has a dark side. As green policies drive up the cost of power, entire industries are shrinking.

Germany is a world leader in green power is by now familiar. Much less familiar is the price the country is paying for it, not just in cold hard cash, but in growing losses and dislocations across the entire economy.

A vast economic upheaval began when Germany launched its energy transition that simultaneously phases out all nuclear power, winds down coal and other fossil fuels, accelerates the push towards alternative sources of energy, and builds the new grid infrastructure to make it all possible.

The losers include once-stalwart utility giants like E.ON and RWE that are struggling with rising debt and falling shares. Manufacturing companies, from chemicals maker BASF to carbon fiber producer SGL Carbon, have shifted investments abroad, where energy costs are often a fraction of Germany’s.
Losers include laid-off workers in these industries, but also millions of ordinary consumers. Their utility bills have skyrocketed, largely driven by subsidies for eco-friendly fuels. As much as the transition creates new jobs building wind turbines, farming biofuels or installing solar panels on rooftops, the changes are cutting a deep swathe through other parts of the economy. Germany’s “green” revolution has a dark shadow.
The reengineering of Germany’s economy is of course deliberate. When the environmentalist Green party first began co-governing at the national level in 1998, Berlin quickly drafted plans to exit nuclear energy. Generous subsidies to support wind and solar power, tacked on to consumers’ electricity bills, got their start in 2000.
Already struggling to expand renewable energy fast enough to compensate for the nuclear phaseout, Germany had to move even faster after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s surprise decision to accelerate the shift just days after the news from Fukushima. Now, the country is rushing to replace what was once 35 percent of German electricity generation by 2022.

Hit hardest, of course, are the traditional utilities. After all, the energy transition was designed to seal their coffin. Once the proverbial investment for widows and orphans because their revenue streams were considered rock-solid — these companies have been nothing short of decimated. With 77 nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants taken off the grid in recent years, Germany’s four big utilities — E.ON, RWE, Vattenfall and EnBW — have had to write off a total of €46.2 billion since 2011.
RWE and E.ON alone have debt piles of €28.2 billion and €25.8 billion, respectively, according to the latest company data. Losses at Düsseldorf-based E.ON rose to €6.1 billion for the first three quarters of 2015. Both companies have slashed the dividends on their shares, which have lost up to 76 percent of their value. Regional municipalities, which hold 24 percent of RWE’s shares, are scrambling to plug the holes left in their budgets by the missing dividends.…

Ampy’s Move harnesses your own body energy and pumps it back into your cellphone or any other device.

Checking the expected battery life of any new mobile gadgetry has become a key consideration. We all know that feeling of peering anxiously at the last sliver of charge just when it’s needed most. Ampy has introduced an alternative to solar or wind-up for off-grid power by tapping one’s own kinetic energy to recharge. Buy Ampy’s Move for $129+ shipping a pair of inductors convert your body’s movements to energy. There are optional accessories to strap it on a limb for cycling or running for maximum effect.

An hour’s exercise promises an hour of smartphone charge or 24 hours of smart watch use. There’s an app too, of course, with fitness tracking and so on. The more vigorous the movement the better: so plenty of imaginative ways to harness your kinetic potential.

Torchscope

As portmanteau names go Torchscope doesn’t quite do what it says on the can as it’s actually a flashlight with a built-in camera rather than a “scope” of any sort. It combines a powerful LED 1,000 lumen torch with an HD video camera which can time-stamp footage. The casing is military-grade aluminium, and the Torchscope is 1m drop-proof and waterproof to 10m. There’s an integrated mic for audio and an SD card slot to store your productions. $299 from borescopestore.com…

(MENAFN – Gulf Times – Wash DC, Dec 3) IKn a development which will give hope to the Climate Change talks in Paris, the stench of clogged toilets fills the air at a Washington DC wastewater treatment facility.

Its all about decarbonisation – as one of the world’s largest projects to transform human waste into electricity gets under way.

“They make green energy,” said engineer Chris Peot of Washington’s toilet-goers during a tour of the sprawling space in the southeast of the city.

DC Water’s Blue Plains plant treats 370mn gallons (1,400mn litres) of dirty water from more than 2mn households on a daily basis, purging it with micro-organisms that first ingest carbon and then transform nitrates into nitrogen gas.

Once that’s done, the water is clean enough to flow into the nearby Potomac River or Chesapeake Bay without disrupting the fragile ecosystems.

As for the excrement, it is either recycled as compost or, in a new step implemented six months ago, used to produce 10MW of electricity.

The “poop power” generated is theoretically enough to supply some 8,000 households, although in practice the energy is ploughed straight back into powering the plant.

To do so, plant workers collect the solid matter that slips to the bottom of the treatment pools and subject it to a Norwegian hydrolysis technique that is being used in North America for the first time.

According to Peot, DC Water’s director of resource recovery, the process allows the plant to extract organic material and convert it to methane.

When burned, the methane generates power that is used to help run the plant.

“This project embodies a shift from treating used water as waste to leveraging it as a resource,” said DC Water’s chief executive George Hawkins as he inaugurated the $470mn facility on October 5, financed by water bills.

The methane is produced through the decomposition of organic waste by bacteria in huge vats that stand 80 feet (25m) tall, with each capable of “digesting” 3.8mn gallons of solid matter.

The biogas is then used to operate three turbines, each the size of a jet engine, to produce 13MW of electricity, three of which are immediately used for the hydrolysis.

The remaining 10MW are used by the water treatment plant the biggest energy consumer in Washington reducing its carbon footprint by a third and cutting operating costs by millions of dollars a year, according to Peot.

“It saves us money, avoids us having to buy power off the grid, which largely comes from coal,” he said.

According to Todd Foley, chief strategy officer at the American Council on Renewable Energy, it’s a “way to diversify the energy mix and control our energy costs”.

“There will be an increased role for that kind of activity,” he predicted.

Wind, solar and biomass combined accounted for just 6% of the world’s electricity supply in 2014, according to the …