I'm writing from Cartagena, Colombia, where "The Business of Inclusion" conference will take place later this week. The conference is organized by the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Multilateral Investment Fund (FOMIN) and NextBillion has been invited to cover the discussions that will take place during the next few days as a media sponsor. As someone whose interest is contributing to a stronger and more maningful development-through-enterprise movement in Latin America, I am grateful for this opportunity. There are two aspects of the conference I am particularly excited about. First, WRI will co-host a panel on Friday, in which we want to highlight creative and entrepreneurial solutions to some of the most pressing challenges faced by our society. Also hosting...
Guest blogger Katherine Yue is a second-year MBA student at Thunderbird School of Global Management where she has assisted in research on business and capacity growth in microfinance and health microfranchises. She interned for FINCA Jordan in its founding year, strengthening business risk management disciplines. Prior to Thunderbird, Katherine was a project manager at the largest health care organization in the US, leading process redesign and enterprise risk management systems. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics with a focus on society and technology. By Katherine Yue The second day of the 2008 Net Impact Conference took me from an interactive workshop on scaling enterprises at the base of pyramid to a session on strategic philanthropy. Bringing it all home...
I had the opportunity to attend the Tech Museum Awards ceremony last week in San Jose, California. What's interesting about this annual event is not just the social entrepreneurs and their sometimes quite remarkable innovations, but also the way Silicon Valley turns out to honor them and, at least for an evening, to focus on applying entrepreneurial skills to benefit poor people. This year the event was attended by some 1,500 people including many of the Valley's wealthiest and most powerful Venture Capitalists, CEOs, and networkers. The mix of enterprises changes every year.This year was especially rich in BoP energy enterprises with seven entries. The prize winner was Distributed Energy Systems India, or DESI Power (desi means land or village in Hindi), which builds biomass...
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Energy
Image credit: Wikipedia
Ramping up policies that encourage the investment in and distribution of renewable energy could help energy sources like wind, solar and hydro overtake coal more quickly.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) released their annual World Energy Outlook today, which states that by 2015 renewable energy resources will become the second largest source of electricity, moving ahead of gas but still sitting behind coal.
The IEA’s World Energy Outlook estimates, however, were made from a "pessimistic" perspective, assuming that no global action will be taken to stem climate change.
Without a climate deal, however, things look pretty grim. According to the Outlook, "without a change in policy, the world is on a path for a rise in global temperature of up to 6...
Simple ideas can save water and energy.
Like many folks these days, I'm really in no financial position to be adding to my list of home projects. Still, it's hard for me not to daydream a little bit -- especially about gadgets that would save water, energy, and space in the home.
Consider, for example, a wonder-appliance that's used widely overseas: a super-efficient clothes washer and dryer in a single unit. Yes, such things do exist, even in the US, but they're far more common in boats and RVs than in people's homes.
Combining two major appliances into one saves manufacturing energy, and is a perfect space-saving solution for apartments and smaller homes. But for some of these combos, the coolest feature is a super-fast spin cycle that extracts most of the water from wet...
Copperbelt Energy Corporation (CEC) is a privately owned company that operates and maintains a network comprising transmission, distribution and generation assets and a control centre on the copperbelt.CEC’s transmission and distribution network consists of 835.7 kilometres of overhead lines and 37 high voltage substations. The current carrying capacity of the network is in excess 700MW.-company...
In a conversation the other night, a friend made the point that it is a natural tendency of politicians everywhere to put off action, to make plans that their successors will be trusted to implement, to delay change until it costs as little political capital as possible.
But with climate change (and our other major sustainability challenges -- let's not succumb to carbon blindness), what we need is fast action. The deadlines we face are too pressing -- and the changes we need to make are too large -- to trust that people later will have the power to change sufficiently if we don't begin changing now.
And so we started kicking around immediate goals, goals that could be accomplished while the elected officials who voted for them were still in office, or even in the same year they...
According to the Conservation of Energy Principle, we can neither create nor destroy energy. This means we will always have as much energy as we ever had. So, how can we experience an energy crisis?
Our crisis develops from another law of energy: The Entropy Law. It states that energy use always results in some overall loss of availability, quality, or order. Physics characterizes such loss as an increase of entropy. This is where informed energy discussions begin.
The inevitable increase of entropy seems to have a slightly different character for each system under consideration. For example, heat always flows from the hotter to the colder body, never the reverse. Perfume molecules escape their container and spread throughout the room, but never gather back into the bottle of...
Image via WikipediaAfter Bush's years of neglect, the new president promises the planet a fresh start
by Terry Macalister
The election of Barack Obama has put the wind back into the sails of the renewable energy sector, where investor confidence had been badly punctured by the credit crisis. Clean technology and green energy stocks have soared as City analysts predict a major boost from the incoming president.
Solar Integrated Technologies rose by 30% yesterday after increases of 22% by Renewable Energy Corporation and 16% by the wind turbine maker Vestas in the 24 hours before, when they were helped upwards by oil prices returning to above $70 a barrel.
Obama has promised to invest $150bn over 10 years in renewables as part of a wider plan to increase US energy security amid...
Obama gets it on energy and climate.
Like a lot of people, I've been reading obsessively through election postmortems, fascinated by the inside stories on the national campaigns. And for some reason, this tidbit at Newsweek on Obama's debate preparations stuck out at me:
When he was preparing for [the debates] during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “…I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve...
Last month, NextBillion ally and BOPreneur Paul Hudnut reported on his blog that Envirofit, a company he helped start, had already sold 10,000 high-efficiency cookstoves to BoP consumers in India. This week, Envirofit announced that it was ramping up production to meet demand - though not on Paul's blog. Was this higher profile? Judge for yourself: And there's more: Congrats to Paul and the Envirofit team. I'm sure their friends at Shell are pleased, as is their sales team. read more...
A consortium of European governments is developing the world's first International Renewable Energy Agency.
The agency, known as IRENA, will serve as a global cheerleader for clean energy. It plans to offer technical, financial, and policy advice for governments worldwide, according to a joint announcement from Germany, Spain, and Denmark - the project's leaders.
Renewable energy is on the rise worldwide as governments attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create domestic energy sources. Despite a variety of international organizations that are helping with the clean energy transition, IRENA's leaders said no single agency addresses the local, national, and international needs of both developed and developing nations.
"IRENA aims to become the main driving...
Position: Research InternLocation: Amsterdam or Bloomfield, NJOrganization: E+Co, a non-profit investment firm focusing on clean energy enterprises in developing countries, is seeking a qualified graduate level (Masters) student for research and writing assignments. The internship will last 3-6 months with flexible degrees of workload. E+Co cannot offer any remuneration. The intern can be based near one of E+Co's offices in Amsterdam (NL) or Bloomfield, New Jersey (USA) or the work can be conducted remotely supported by e-mail and phone calls. E+Co is non-profit investment company that invests business support services and capital in energy businesses in Africa, Asia and Latin America. With almost 15 years of experience and offices in 10 countries, E+Co's innovative business model...
Cool-sounding innovation in the lab, low energy-density, but cheap & non-toxic:
A scientist in Taiwan has invented the world's first chlorophyll organic battery that can supply electricity within 10 seconds of being wetted with water, beverages or even urine.
Chungpin Hovering Liao, a professor at the Graduate School of Electro-Optic and Material Science of National Formosa University in central Taiwan's Yunlin County, told a news conference Wednesday that the battery, when wetted, can provide electricity for two days to a week.
While the strength of the battery is about half that of an ordinary battery, its storage capacity is more than that of Japan's water-powered fuel cells, he said.
The production cost of the chlorophyll organic battery is very cheap -- about NT$1 to NT$2...
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Geologists predict that oil production will decline within a decade.
As I'm sure you've noticed by now, gas prices have fallen back from the phenomenal highs of last summer. The immediate cause has been the economic crisis. When credit markets seized up, some companies that wanted to buy oil simply couldn't get the cash. And perhaps more importantly, the economic slowdown has decreased projections for oil demand. Markets that seemed tight are now looser than they've been in a while.
But those changes are just on the demand side. On the supply side, though, little has changed. If anything, the outlook for oil supplies is somewhat more pessimistic than it was a few years back. Take a look, for example, at this recent survey of petroleum geologists (pdf link), that was...
Join Al Gore and Power Vote
for a live webcast:
8:30 pm (EST)
TONIGHT
The buzz around massive climate voter turnout this election is bigger than ever, and we’re beyond excited for you to join us tonight at 8:30pm Eastern for our webcast with Al Gore to turn it up yet another notch.
http://www.powervote.org/GoreWebcast
Vice President Gore will speak about the role of young people in RePowering America and why it’s so important that we get as many climate voters as possible to turn out on November 4th at our country’s most important battle ground: the ballot box.
The webcast feed will go live at 8pm Eastern - 30 minutes before Mr. Gore begins speaking - so that if you are hosting a viewing party you will be able to set up and test your equipment. Again, the web...
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Chip Ransler is the co-founder of Husk Power Systems (HPS), a for-profit company that cost-effectively converts rice husks into electricity. HPS utilizes a proprietary technology to run 35-100 kilowatt mini power plants, delivering pay-for-use electricity to un-electrified villages in India's "Rice Belt." HPS' five pilot projects have become operationally profitable within six months, delivering sustainable, environmentally-friendly, low-cost energy that is dramatically improving the lives of rural Indians. Chip is also a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow. We sat down this week at the conference for an interview. For more context on Husk Power Systems, check out their profiles in Virginia Business (Chip and his business partner, Manoj Sinha, are MBA candidates at...
Image by Teckie Kev via FlickrInhabitat reports on an Ethiopian initiative to build the largest Wind Farm in the continent:When faced with the need to develop additional sources of energy, the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation recently decided that its best option was not to build conventional power plants. Instead, the electricity provider opted to fulfill its energy needs by building...
Physical oil Trader Michael Prest is the founder of Petrodel an integrated energy resource company.
...the company focuses in developing regional systems,from development of and development of oil and gas reserves to crude trading,processing,supply,storage and wholesale distribution of refined products,shipping and ship's agency services-company websiteMichael is also a founding partner of...
Robert Zoellick leads off with the opening press conference of the Annual Meetings of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank and IMF (video after the jump). Zoellick argues that developing countries now face a triple hit: "In July, at the G8 summit, I said that developing countries were facing a double jeopardy from the impact of high food and fuel prices. But what was then a double jeopardy is now a triple hit--food, fuel, and finance--threatening not just to knock the poorest people down, but to hold them down." Check out more coverage of the Annual Meetings at the Annual Meetings Briefing Center.
And if you're interested in private sector development, here are a few items of interest connected to the meetings:
Global Turbulences and Slow Down in G7 Growth: Can...
Think you can tell the difference between a think tank with a straightforward name and one that's misleading? Nonprofit organization Consumer Reports lets you test your ability to see through green murketing with their new report and interactive quiz, Weeding out ‘green’ groups.
Through the process of taking the quiz, you find out how a number of so-called 'green' think tanks have chosen misleading names. These groups sound good for the environment but actually advocate for unsound industries. This is particularly dangerous because these think tanks are now lending their support to organizations, businesses and candidates looking to appear more environmentally conscious.
Take Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, for example. (You may have seen the name recently, as...
In times like this, when clean energy technologies are the hype and talent in the sector is in high demand, Mathias Craig could have any job in the world. His training inncludes engineering degrees from both UC Berkeley and MIT, and his true passion is wind power. In stead of getting taking one of the job offers he got after graduate school Mathias decided to found blueEnergy Group and bring energy to underserved communities. He is now the executive director of the organization. blueEnergy helps communities in the caribbean coast of Nicaragua develop sustainable energy systems through hybrid wind and solar technologies that are manufactured, maintained and operated by themselves. I learned a lot from Mathias, his passion, vision and commitment. Like most entrepreneurs,...
Seattle Steam Co., a major supplier of heat to buildings in downtown Seattle, Washington, is going to begin turning waste into a source of energy. The company began construction yesterday on a hybrid heating plant, with a boiler that is able to burn waste wood as well as Seattle Steam's current primary energy source, natural gas. According to this article by Seattle Times reporter Will Mari, Seattle Steam plans that about 60 percent of the new boiler's energy will come from waste wood collected from urban construction sites, sawmills, factory crates and pallets, and other products.
Combusting waste wood closes the "carbon loop," said Patrick Mazza, research director for Climate Solutions, a Seattle-based research and advocacy group.
"You're contrasting a fuel source that has been...
Because there's no such thing as clean coal.
by Eric de Place
Apparently, everybody loves clean coal. Barack Obama loves it and John McCain loves it. Joe Biden really loved it during his VP debate -- and Sarah Palin loved it too.
But here's the problem. Clean coal is very much like a unicorn: it doesn't exist.
And because it doesn't exist, it will not save us from climate change.
Via Kate Sheppard, Carolyn Auwaerter of 1Sky nails it:
"Clean coal" is a contradiction in terms. Conventional coal-burning power plants are the leading cause of global warming pollution in the United States. Coal lobbyists will immediately reply that they can develop coal plants in the future that will capture and sequester carbon pollution.But this is misleading. Carbon capture and...
AIDG profiles a series of Biogas plants including the KIST initiative led by TED Fellow Ainea Kimaro, covered......
Technology Review reports on Promethean Power Systems, their:
...design uses off-the-shelf components: silicon PV panels, thermoelectric modules, and a compressor-based refrigeration unit. The company's control system directs the two cooling components to work together so that they squeeze as much juice out of the solar panels as possible, Sorin Grama the cofounder explains. Early in the...
Notore a manufacturer of Nitrogenous based fertilizers is looking to initiate production 4qtr 2008,they have: "...the capacity to produce approximately 500,000 metric tons of Urea fertilizer and blend approximately another 500,000 metric tons of Compound Fertilizer NPK, with plans to grow dramatically to a combined total of well over 2 Million metric tons of fertilizer by 2012..."-company...
In South Korea, wind power would be a likely resource to help the world's tenth largest energy consumer meet government goals to lower fossil fuel dependency through greater investment in renewable energy.
Yet efforts to build wind turbines in South Korea have met fierce opposition, even among environmentalists, due to the lack of open land in the densely populated country. Only about 100 megawatts (MW) of wind power are installed nationwide despite plentiful wind resources and government price controls that keep renewable power competitive with traditional energy sources.
The solution might be found off the Korean peninsula's shores, and South Korea is not alone. As more countries seek to increase their renewable energy ratios, many consider off-shore wind a potential...