As you may know, wind energy is something I am passionate about. If you are reading this, you may already know that the address of this blog is a subset of my website on wind power. With that in mind, you can see why I am excited for a reason to post an article like this.

It appears that the utilities have had some troubles with wind energy upsetting profit margins. To make things worse for the utilities, remember this article "40x Global Energy Needs Are Blowing In the Wind".

With a potential like 40x our global needs, and awareness growing daily, how does a power company compete or at least manage this type of competition? Bloomberg has an article on the subject that is quite revealing, even if you have to read it twice to really get the message.

What this all amounts to is this: After years of getting government incentives to install windmills, operators in Europe may have become their own worst enemy, reducing the total price paid for electricity in Germany, Europe's biggest power market, by as much as 5 billion euros some years, according to a study this week by Poeyry, a Helsinki-based industry consultant.

This tidbit of information, which will hopefully begin to contradict the usual lies about the need for hefty subsidies for the wind sector, has been publicised by EWEA, the European Wind Energy Association in a report on the merit order effect (PDF). This is the name for what happens when you inject a lot of capital-intensive, low-marginal-cost supply into a marginalist price-setting market mechanism with low short term demand elasticity.

You might simplify the above by saying; To produce power from fossil fuels, you need to collect and use the fuel source which costs money. Once a wind turbine in fully installed, if you need power, all you need is wind. This means when there is wind, there is no cost of fuel to make power. If the turbines are installed in an area abundant with wind, the production of power has almost no cost. The only real cost is the upfront equipment cost. If the utilities have huge incentives, as was the case in Germany, this means the upfront cost was largely paid by a third party. If the utility didn't have to pay for the equipment and the fuel - wind - is free, then the cost to supply power is nearly 0. Having a low cost production like this is what upset the utilities earnings. Supply was high compared to demand and there was no equipment cost to factor in because of the subsidy.

The way I see it, we need the utility, but we need it for stability. I want to see wind turbines in every back yard that gets regular or steady winds. Spreading the load to the residential level like this would mean our existing infrastructure could handle the new source. This keeps the impact to the environment down as well as the cost of the system.

Keep your eye on wind power. Follow the related link for some more study information on wind power.

Many water purification methods introduced into the developing world are quickly abandoned as people don't know how to use and maintain them, says Norma Alcantar at the University of South Florida in Tampa. So she and her colleagues decided to investigate the prickly pear cactus, Opuntia ficus-indica, which 19th-century Mexican communities used as a water purifier. The cactus is found around the world.

The team extracted the cactus's mucilage - the thick gum the plant uses to store water. They then mixed this with water to which they had added high levels of either sediment or the bacterium Bacillus cereus.

Alcantar found that the mucilage acted as a flocculant, causing the sediment particles to join together and settle to the bottom of the water samples.

The scientists see communities in developing countries using the cactus on daily basis. They could boil a slice of it to release the gum and then add it to water just like the scientists did. But there are hurdles to overcome. What resources would be necessary for widespread growth of the cactus for this purpose and how can people ensure the "treated" water is truly bacteria free? If these problems can be solved, cheap, clean water could be accessible for millions of people that currently don't have any.

I am seeing headlines that indicate certain areas around the San Francisco Bay are no longer in drought conditions. This is not a state wide condition. This is also not the condition around the whole San Francisco Bay Area.

The city of San Francisco and County of Marin are not in a drought, their reservoirs are at or above normal levels.

Today I read that EBMUD is ending their voluntary rationing program. They are not saying we should waste water, just that there is now enough and if it is needed, go ahead and use it. Being frugal with water is always recommended. Get the most from every drop.

If we continue to conserve, we will help protect against future droughts. However, as our populations grow, our need for water is growing. It is unlikely that we can completely avoid the drought cycle, but conservation and awareness go a long way toward shortening the dry spells.

The California water system is still below normal in the largest reservoirs and therefore water districts that rely on the state water supply are still being asked to cut back.

Both Lake Oroville and the state's largest reservoir - Shasta Lake, (which can hold 4.5 million acre-feet and is part of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Central Valley Project), have not reached normal levels according to anything I have read at this time and supports the state water systems continued rationing.

The following is a snippet from a radio show:

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"If we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound," Kintisch writes in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. Kintisch isn't talking about greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide; he's talking about another kind of pollutant we put in the sky -- "like aerosols from a spray can," he tells NPR's Guy Raz.

"It turns out that those particles have a profound effect on maintaining the planet's temperature." Greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants work in opposing ways on the Earth's climate, Kintisch explains. "The greenhouse gases warm the planet when they're emitted, because they absorb heat reflected up from the ground -- the greenhouse effect. These aerosols, though, do the opposite. They block sunlight, they make clouds more reflective -- and by doing that, they actually cool the planet. "The problem is that we're cutting the cooling pollution as we make our air cleaner," he says.

Some scientists, he says, are confident that this is connected to global warming, but they don't know how large the effect is. "That's the frightening thing, because if it's a big cooling effect, it means that we've been actually warming the planet more than we know," Kintisch says. "As we take away that unexpectedly helpful cooling mask, we're going to be facing more global warming than we expected.
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I think the trick here is to think logically about what is involved. Switching hair spray and cleaning products from aerosol to a trigger pump is quick and easy compared to cutting back our driving or improving our fossil fuel efficiencies dramatically. As we make decisions to improve our quality of life, reducing airborne pollutants as one example, all of the effects are not necessarily positive. We improve our health and well being as well as general health of the other life on our planet.

As we are generally reactionary, what this tells me is it is time to react. Wow, the aerosols had more effects than killing Ozone and opening higher possibilities for skin cancer? Yes. Apparently along with killing Ozone, they reflected heat away in the upper atmosphere. We had to make this change. Now we need to move faster toward the other changes on our list. Reducing fossil fuel use.

I'm sure we will find draw backs to renewable energies too, but they are currently a lot better choice. Lets keep perspective and seek balance, reduce - reuse - recycle.

For your interest, I have placed the forcing chart from the IPCC on the related link for you to look at. The chart is a summary of primary contributors to Climate Change and the direction of their impact illustrated with margin for error.

In 1953, the Netherlands, always vulnerable to flooding, suffered a major natural disaster. The North Sea washed over half a million acres of land and killed over 1,800 people on the south-western coast.

To protect future generations from similar harm, the Dutch government embarked on one of the greatest engineering projects in history. Over the following decades, engineers constructed a flood defence system of dams, sluices, locks, dykes and storm surge barriers. The Delta Works basically shortened the Dutch coast line and turned sea estuaries into freshwater lakes.

Earlier this month, a committee comprised of representatives of all involved levels of government presented a report outlining the possible future of the south-western part of the Netherlands, a delta of estuaries, islands and peninsulas connecting several large rivers to the North Sea.

One possible future being considered is to turn the famous Dutch dikes into tidal power generators. Openings in the series of dikes would provide ideal locations for tidal power plants.

Opening water locks would also allow the tide to return to now stagnant waters, the report stated. This would be a boon to nature, because certain plants and animals, which have all but disappeared since the estuaries were closed off, can return.

Salt water has advanced far in some places, largely because of the constant dredging in the port of Rotterdam. It may improve nature to allow salt water back in the estuaries of the delta now, but the growing shortage of fresh water caused by climate change needs to be taken into account. The problem seems not so much a lack of drinking water as such, but the locations at which it can be found. "We have plenty, but we need more storage capacity," Kuijken said. "We have grown so dependent on the availability of fresh water here in the Netherlands that it would be economic suicide to change that. Fresh water is the fuel powering our economy."