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Commentators expect global demand for NdFeB to almost quadruple by 2030 and quantities required for specific applications can be significant. Industry sources quote, for instance, that the 60 kW fast speed electric motor fitted in a Toyota Prius hybrid vehicle contains at least 0.5 kg of NdFeB magnet material. For a PM-type generator fitted in a 5 MW direct drive wind turbine, these same sources quote a figure of up to 200 kg of NdFeB per MW power rating, around one tonne per machine. This is a much higher quantity compared to the relatively light and compact fast speed systems.

Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping observed years ago that the ‘Middle East has oil, but China has rare earth-elements.’ Xiaoping’s quote reappeared in the world’s press as the issue of supply of the materials resurfaced last year. This coverage followed a leaked Chinese government report named ‘Rare Earths Industry Development Plan 2009-2015’, which stated that China currently accounts for 93% of the world’s production of rare earth-elements (other sources speak of at least 95%). China also produces more than 99% of the output of dysprosium and terbium, which are vital for a wide range of green energy technologies and military applications.

The report stated that within six years (2015) Chinese rare earth-material exports might be restricted to 35,000 tonnes annually. By comparison, global demand during the past decade increased three-fold to about 125,000 tonnes and might reach 200,000 tonnes annually by 2014. By that time, China is expected to need its full annual rare earth-metals output for its local industries, with exports being reduced to zero. Simultaneously, China is said by the report to contain ‘only’ 53% of the world’s cumulative rare earth-element deposits. A major reason for this huge discrepancy between resource availability and China’s current near-monopoly market position is said to be largely economic.

During the 1990s a combination of surplus production, resulting low price levels and stringent environmental legislation led to a spate of mine closures in the West. China kept its mines open, benefitting from lower wage levels and, it is claimed, less stringent environmental legislation. Any prospect of rare earth-element/materials scarcity represents a worrying scenario for the many non-Chinese high-tech industries that increasingly depend upon their unrestricted availability on the open market.

Options to counteract a looming future shortage include – as some have already done – shifting industrial activity that depends on these materials to China itself, in order to safeguard supply.

However, besides the potential conflict with strategic and national security interests, this strategy might also severely hamper goals in other countries and regions to build strong ‘green Industries’.

A second option is accelerated mine reopening outside China, which is already being implemented in the US at Mountain Pass and Australia’s Mount Weld. Apart from these mines there are at least four additional, but smaller, mining locations spread over Canada and Australia. A third option is to search for other solutions outside the rare earth-material scope.

In a sign of its concern, the Japanese government has compiled a ‘Strategy for Ensuring Stable Supplies of Rare Metals’. Europe, like Japan, is not in a favourable strategic position as it lacks any significant resources in this area leaving the continent, according to some experts, fully dependent on imports for supplies.

The scheme, which would be known as the Standard Offer, would enable electricity consumers to claim a rebate in respect of the amount of energy they had saved from the electricity system.

Department of Energy director-general Nelisiwe Magubane told journalists at a media briefing in Cape Town that the incentive was linked to the new electricity tariffs and allowed for a rebate to be paid for every megawatt hour saved.

It was understood that the National Energy Regulator of South Africa would shortly hold public hearings on the Standard Offer initiative and it was anticipated that the standard offer would be operational before the end of May.

Speaking to journalists in Cape Town, Aphane elaborated that the project was an extension of State-owned enterprise Eskom’s solar water geyser installation programme, under which 3 000 solar water systems had been installed over the past three years.

The idea was to start “massifying” the roll-out, Aphane said, indicating that the 200 000 target had been set for the end of the current fiscal year.

The project was due to be formally launched by President Jacob Zuma in Winterveldt, north-west of Pretoria, on April 28, where 7 000 units would be installed.

Energy Minister Dipuo Peters told journalists that the DoE was working together with the South African Bureau of Standards to ensure that the technology, which had been flooding into the country over the past few years, was up to standard.

It was also stressed that the DOE was working with the Department of Trade and Industry to promote solar geyser local content.

“We believe that by next year we would have localised the solar water heater technology so that we do not have to import systems,” said Peters

April 19 (Bloomberg) — Iberdrola SA won approval to build the world’s largest onshore wind-energy project in Romania, requiring at least $2 billion in investment through 2017.

The Spanish utility said today it acquired rights from the Romanian government to build 1,500 megawatts of capacity. That’s almost five times the power coming from Europe’s largest wind complex and triple what’s proposed offshore Massachusetts in a project opposed by the late U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy.

Iberdrola, which became the world’s biggest wind-farm owner by using government incentives and charging above-market electricity rates for clean energy, now operates in 10 markets including the U.S. and U.K. The Romanian mega-park, near its operations in neighboring Hungary, may extend the Spanish company’s lead over second-ranked wind producer FPL Group Inc. of Florida.

Romania generates much of its electricity by burning oil and gas, which can be easily scaled back during a windy day to allow for surges of power from windmills, said Will Young, a wind energy analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in London.

“That makes Romania an attractive market,” Young said today in an interview. “Romania has relatively high power prices and flexible energy generation that allows power producers to feed in electricity easily.”

Additionally, the government may approve a law later this year to double the number of “green certificates” eligible for wind power and boost the total price per megawatt-hour by 25 percent, Young said.

The company’s Iberdrola Renovables SA renewable-energy unit plans 50 Romanian wind parks that would supply the equivalent of almost 1 million homes, it said in astatement. The project amounts to a third of the new wind power

Iberdrola plans for Eastern Europe, after investing 100 million euros there in 2009.

Black Sea

The average cost to buy and install wind turbines around the world is about 1.3 million euros ($1.75 million) a megawatt, according to New Energy Finance. Using those figures, Iberdrola’s Dobrogea project in southeastern Romania on the Black Sea would cost more than $2 billion.

A spokesman for Iberdrola Renovables in Spain, who declined to be identified in line with company policy, wouldn´t comment on the investment needed.

Iberdrola’s total net investment last year was 2.06 billion euros, the company said in a February presentation to investors. Iberdrola has a “flexible approach to investment” and has only committed to spend 9.6 billion euros of the estimated 16 billion-euro net investment planned through 2012, the company said at the time.

T

urbine Prices

Prices for turbines fell about 18 percent last year and wind farm operators like Iberdrola are benefiting from the lower costs, said New Energy Finance’s Young. European Union policies to help reduce dependence on fossil fuel-based power generation a

re also an incentive for the project, he said.

Iberdrola reported installed capacity at the end of last year of about 44,000 megawatts, of which natural gas-fired plants account for 30 percent, renewable energy 25 percent and hydropower stations 23 percent. Iberdrola Renovables plans to increase its installed capacity to 16,000 megawatts by 2012 from 11,294 megawatts at the end of March.

Like FPL, Iberdrola has grown to be one of the world’s largest investor-owned utilities partly because of rapid expansion in wind energy. Wind and biomass are typically the cheapest sources of renewable energy and plants using them can be built faster than large-scale solar or geothermal installations.

FPL, China

The company, ranked by megawatts of wind-energy in operation, is followed by Juno Beach, Florida-based FPL and China Guodian Corp. of Beijing, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Iberdrola’s American depositary receipts in the U.S. fell 11 cents to $34.70 as of 5:10 p.m. New York time.

The Dobrogea complex will dwarf Whitelee, Europe’s current record-holder, a 322-megawatt wind installation near Glasgow that is owned by Iberdrola’s Scottish Power unit. Whitelee is scheduled to be expanded to about 600 megawatts in a few years.

The Cape Wind offshore wind project in Nantucket Sound would have capacity of 420 megawatts. The project, proposed by Energy Management Inc., has been fought by Kennedy, whose family owns a compound on the shores of Cape Cod.

Iberdrola’s Romanian partner is Eolica Dobrogea. That company, part-owned by Swiss engineering firm NEK Umwelttechnik AG and C-Tech Srl. and Rokura Srl., both Romanian, will secure building permits, Iberdrola said.

Pacific Light & Power will build a 10-megawatt solar thermal plant that will combine a trough solar collector from Spain’s Albiasa with a turbine traditionally used in geothermal systems.

Why? Ten megawatts is unusually small for a solar thermal field. BrightSource Energy, by contrast, wants to build one in California that will produce 396 megawatts of power. Most solar thermal systems, however, collect heat from the sun to turn water into steam and then feed the steam into gigantic turbines. The heat requirements and the size of the solar thermal fields mean that solar thermal parks can only be built economically in places like North Africa or Arizona where the sun shines almost every day of the year, lots of empty land exists, and humidity remains almost nonexistent. Even the presence of a few clouds can depress the power output.

Geothermal turbines swap water and steam for organic fluids like butane, which turn to vapor at lower temperatures. Thus, geothermal turbines require less heat, which in turn allows for smaller solar fields in a wider range of climates and geographies. Like traditional solar thermal systems, excess heat can be stored and run through the system in the evening or when cloud cover descends.

Jesse Tippett, the managing director of Albiasa, likens it to thin-film solar panels. The underlying technology may not be as efficient but it can generate energy in a wider variety of circumstances.

When completed in 2011, the plant — located on the island of Kauai — will provide close to seven percent of the power needed on the island.

Alibasa and PLP describe it as a hybrid plant, but it’s more of an unusual concatenation. Generally, hybrid plants are power plants that combine renewable energy generation — like solar thermal systems or biogas burners — with gas turbines to provide more baseline-like power. Florida Power and Light and Abengoa are currently building hybrid plants.

Power from the plant will be “close to Hawaiian (grid) parity,” he said, which means expensive. Electric power in Hawaii costs around 25.78 cents a kilowatt hour, the highest rate in the U.S., according to the Energy Information Administration. Hawaii generates most of its power from diesel generators. But Albiasa will study ways to bring the cost down to make these systems feasible elsewhere.

It’s true, sort of. The mechanical meters that still adorn the sides of most homes in the U.S. are inaccurate slightly more often than smart meters, but it is not enough of a discrepancy to account for the wildly higher bills that have incensed customers.

Recent side-by-side testing by Oncor, the energy delivery company in Texas that has recently been battered with reports from irate customers, found mechanical and smart meter readings were somewhat close.

Oncor says it has not found a single smart meter to date that is inaccurate (except for about 1 percent that were installed incorrectly). However, about 5 percent of mechanical meters tested are usually found to be off.

Just how off is off? Oncor spokesman Chris Schein said nearly all of those meters were running slow, but generally they were only lagging behind by a few percent (mechanical meters are considered accurate within 2 percent). Thus, 5 percent of meters were lagging by a few percentage points.  Some utilities have reported instances of outright fraud, i.e., customers figuring out the schedule of meter readers in their areas and disabling the meters when they aren’t around. Fraud, though, is likely somewhat rare and isolated.

Itron, which formerly produced mechanical meters and now makes smart meters, said that older instruments generally have a lifespan of about 30 years before they start to slow down.

Even if nearly 150,000 of 3 million Oncor customers may be getting a break on their bills due to slow-paced meters, the aging infrastructure does not explain the extreme hike in bills with the switch to advanced metering.

“You’re not going to have that kind of spike,” Schein said. Pacific Gas & Electric spokesman Paul Moreno was also quick to point out that only a small percentage of analog meters were running slow when tested and are replaced afterwards.

Unseasonable temperatures, poor choices in home heating and cooling along with a lack of customer education are just some of the reasons utilities say people have seen a price increase with smart meters. Higher rates and temperatures could have occurred before the meters were installed, but the fact that the smart meters came in at the same time goes a long way toward explaining why many customers are clamoring for their old meters. Even though Oncor has done a small side-by-side testing of old versus new, it is obviously not enough to appease people who have seen their bills double or triple recently. Any reasoning for high bills by PG&E has also not instilled confidence in consumers.

Old-fashioned meters also come with built-in familiarity. They may not be perfect, but at least consumers have never had many reasons to question them.

Mentioning the slight inaccuracy of mechanical meters is only a disservice to customers who are obviously angry (and ill-informed in some cases) about what smart meters can do to help them take control of their energy usage. As of right now, it looks like there’s still an uphill battle to convince people that they should want to take control of their energy use in the first place, hence the recent announcement of a consumer group for smart grid.

If smart meter rollouts do not come with the demand pricing and software that allows people to better understand and tweak their home energy use from day one, accompanied by the education to allow people to embrace the technology, then it is easy to see why an aging mechanical meter looks as good as a smart meter.

Just weeks after announcements fromAutodesk that it would be taking its startup program across the Atlantic and from Veolia that its new incubator program would be looking to partner with cleantech startups around the world, IBM announced this morning its Global Entrepreneur Initiative, a program of such scale and depth that it almost seemed like Big Blue is trying to prove something.

The program takes what IBM did with its Solution Architecture for Energy and Utilities Framework (SAFE) rollout earlier this year and expands it to different industries and more startups. The SAFE program is an enterprise software made to be compatible on the one hand with any company’s smart grid application or service and on the other with any utility’s infrastructure. When it was released in September, IBM called the software the “glue” of the smart grid.

According to Drew Clark, director of strategy with IBM’s Venture Capital Group, the Global Entrepreneur Initiative takes that same idea — IBM as the infrastructure and thus the connector between new technologies and end users — and runs with it.

“The idea is not to just throw out some free software and assistance using it in the hopes that we’ll snag some startup that will accidentally hit on something we care about,” Clark says.

“This program is more of an onramp to help bridge the gap for smaller, early stage startups that have a difficult time engaging with customers. Take electric or water utilities. A small startup trying to have a meeting with the CIO of PG&E, for example, that wouldn’t happen, but we can make those connections.”

Open Door to Expertise, Connections

If that sounds like every venture capitalist’s dream come true, it’s not by accident.
Several years ago, when IBM was looking into launching its own venture fund, the venture capitalists it spoke with encouraged the company to instead create what is now the IBM Venture Capital Group, where Clark works. The division helps IBM stay on top of business and technology trends and find venture-backed companies with interesting technologies that might make good partners for the company.

While the Global Entrepreneur program does that as well, it goes further, providing startups with access to the company’s research community, as well as sales, marketing and technical skills. The program is focused primarily on early stage companies working on technologies that mesh with one of IBM’s Smarter Planet industries, which include energy and water.

Clark points out, not every startup that signs up for the program will wind up being an IBM partner:

“You have to play to win, as we say, so you have to think about how you combine your startup with IBM and the frameworks we’re supplying through this program will make that a lot easier. The second step is ensuring that your technology or service is something really special, something our customers will find appealing and useful.”

While IBM’s program, as Clark puts it, “goes way beyond just helping companies save a few bucks on software,” access to a variety of resources from various companies is proving hugely important to both cleantech startups and the companies that hope to either partner with them or, as is the case with some companies, turn them into clients. Autodesk’s Cleantech Partner Program, for example, provides software packages worth $150,000 to cleantech startups, and according to Susan Gladwin, Autodesk’s Cleantech Program manager, several of the 100 startups that have participated so far have used the company’s modeling software to streamline their products, thereby cutting costs.

Electric bike manufacturer Pi Mobility, for example, in the first three weeks that it had the software, created a digital prototype of its e-bike, was able to see that the diameter of the bike tube could be reduced by half an inch, and used that knowledge to shave $335,000 off its production costs.

By combining benefits like that with access to marketing, sales and research teams, as well as high-profile customers, IBM ensures that it will get first dibs on promising new technologies, and that’s exactly the position the company wants to be in.

“We’re all after the same thing, but I don’t see us as necessarily competing with companies like Veolia and Autodesk, both of which are to be commended for stepping up to this,” Clark says. “We’re operating in different markets, and Veolia is actually a customer of ours, so of course we want to help them find good technologies, too.

“We’re all out to find the next great innovations and to pull them through to our customers.”

Reaching Out to Startups Where They Live

In order to reach more early stage companies, IBM is also hosting a series of SmartCamps.

Hosted in various cities, the camps give early-stage companies the chance to get their ideas in front of IBM executives. The top five companies, selected after an online application process and short-list interviews of the top 20 companies, get a day-long mentoring session culminating with a pitch and Q&A session with industry experts and a cherry-picked audience of influencers and investors.

Also in the interest of reaching very early stage companies, IBM is partnering not only with venture capital firms but also with industry associations throughout the world, including the SD Forum, TiE Silicon Valley, Mass Tech Leadership Council, TiE Austin, MassInno and Dogpatch in the United States.

“To keep the deal flow going, it’s necessary for us to go out to where a lot of startups and entrepreneurs are, so partnering with organizations and consortia is important,” Clark says. “We plan to work closely with them so members of those organizations also become members of ours to get that crossover.”

Big Blue’s Universe

Once companies have been sufficiently vetted and groomed, they may well become part of IBM.

IBM acquired 63 companies last year, 35 of which were venture-backed startups, so clearly there’s potential for startups in the Global Entrepreneur program to be acquired. But Clark points out that for every company that’s acquired, there are hundreds or thousands more that find a partnership with the company, and those partnerships are valuable for both parties.

“IBM builds the infrastructure that allows all these ‘smart’ applications to run,” Clark says. “But we don’t create applications, for example, or sensors, so we need to partner with companies that do those things, and we need to be sure that we can continue to source those things, so there’s a real need for us to have a top-flight pool of innovation to draw from. That’s what underpins this whole proposition.”

As the cleantech universe continues to mature and the need for innovative green technologies increases, corporations will continue to seek out partnerships with startups. That’s good news for startups and their investors. Given that IPOs in the space are still infrequent and the road from concept to customer is long and bumpy, having a company like IBM take you down it makes the ride a whole lot smoother

Europe could meet all its electricity needs from renewable sources by mid-century, according to a report released Monday by services giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

A “super-smart” grid powered by solar farms in North Africa, wind farms in northern Europe and the North Sea, hydro-electric from Scandinavia and the Alps and a complement of biomass and marine energy could render carbon-based fuels obsolete for electricity by 2050, said the report.

The goal is achievable even without the use of nuclear energy, the mainstay of electricity in France, it said.

Over all, about 50 percent of Europe’s energy demand is met with imported fuels.

Under so-called business-as-usual scenarios, that share could increase to 70 percent in coming decades, according to several projections.

The switch to renewables is more than a matter of energy security, said the report, backed by research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the European Climate Forum, both based in Potsdam, Germany.

“Substantial and fairly rapid decarbonisation… will have to take place if the world is to have any chance of staying within the 2.0 degree Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) goal for limiting the effects of global warming,” the report said.

Many scientists have warned that if global temperatures rise more than 2.0 C (3.6 F) by century’s end, Earth’s climate system could spin out of control, unleashing human misery on an unprecedented scale.

Achieving all-renewables electricity will depend less on new technology than on revamping Europe’s legal and regulatory framework, the report argued: “Most of the technical components are available in principle already today.”

To become a reality, such a vision will require a regional power system based on a super-smart grid and the rapid scaling up of all forms of renewable power.

It also depends on a unification of the European power market, and its integration into the North African one, allowing for free trading of electricity between all countries, it said.

“Policies would also need to incorporate mechanisms to disincentivise construction of new fossil fuel power plants,” the report added.

The European Union is on track to meet its goal of supplying 20 percent of its total energy needs from renewable sources by 2020, the European Commission reported earlier this month.

Solar energy leader Spain, along with Germany and Austria, have forged ahead of their targets, more than compensating for Italy, which has lagged behind, the Commission said.

Story from AFP

Clear Policy and and a nationalaly unified system seem to be the best method for a quick transition to renewable energy. Read this report from Renewable Energy.com:

Imagine if we had never invested in computer or mobile phone technology because of cost. And that is the point — some things are worth paying more for because they make our lives better, and we can all participate and help push society in a new direction. If ever there was a need to do so, and a time to do it, it’s now.

Achieving true sustainability requires shifts in almost everything we do. This level of undertaking, in scale and complexity, means teamwork, a sense of common purpose and an unleashing of all our human ingenuity, energy and goodwill. People must be facilitated, empowered and engaged — willing and able to be a part of the solution. As things stand it is hard for most of us to avoid simply being a part of the problem. We talk of “fighting climate change,” but the conflict is really with our beliefs, our systems, our lifestyles and ourselves. Politicians know this, and therefore find it particularly difficult to come up with solutions that are both politically deliverable and truly effective, especially when compromised by the power and influence of corporate lobbyists.

This is where feed-in tariffs (FITs) come into play. Solar panels and wind turbines in the cityscape and landscape are adverts for action. They demonstrate that we are implementing working solutions. Other countries are leading the way. They are building new industries, delivering energy security, and safeguarding business continuity and local authority service delivery. This is something that each nation has to do; it is not optional.

Without underpinning our economies with renewable energy, we cannot be sustainable. A fossil fuel and nuclear energy system is inherently unsustainable as it runs on finite resources, vulnerable to sudden cost escalations and political gamesmanship. This can never be the foundation of a safe and stable economy, and therefore society. Local, small-scale generation — and PV has ease, efficiency and rapidly falling costs in its favour — allows people to become aware of and engaged in sustainable energy production, saving and use. That is progress.

Whilst it is a risky strategy to push all this on the basis of the financial incentives — because you are effectively saying “money is good,” not so much “sustainability is good” — it is still a strong driver, and in this economic climate people are looking for good investments. What we require therefore, and many major investment banks have attested to this, are clear policy signals. The signals, however, must point all of society in the same direction, and help sustainability become politically, economically, socially and culturally embedded.

Over time, the quantitative change — the number of sustainable investments and activities of all kinds — can become a qualitative change, and we can create the opportunity for more”sustainable” social values and a sense of positive ethical responsibility to emerge. This is not idealism; this is practicality.

The main problem with this theory of change however, is that it will probably take too long. We don’t have a lot of time to turn the cultural tanker around. Our values are rooted in self-interest rather than the social good, all of which is politically and economically driven and reinforced, creating a vicious circle.

The last thing on the political agenda today is creating policy that demonstrates care for those distant from us in space and time. This seems to upset, among others, people who are desperate for work today, and particular sections of the media. And both business and politics are, perhaps more than ever, almost pathologically short-term in their interests. It is simply not a system set up to ensure our future, and our efforts so far cannot possibly add up to enough in time, on climate change, biodiversity loss or resource security.

To make the breakthrough, past the sceptics, deniers and vested interests, we therefore need a total commitment from government on the sustainability agenda. Business and the public must receive the right incentives and signals, the messages that continually reinforce the fact that we are all going to take on this challenge together. We need to end mixed messages, and shift policy towards that which favours the long-term needs of the many over the short-term wants of the few. Among other things, this means prioritising the transition to an energy system running on free, benign, domestic fuel.

Feed-in tariffs are a proven method of rapidly delivering the largest volume of this renewable energy at the lowest cost, and they build in a bigger stakeholder group for greening the economy and creating a sustainable society. Green industries and jobs, tax and subsidy shifting, new technologies and markets, new approaches in agriculture, biological carbon sequestration, water, transport, the built environment, industry and waste — these areas and more can help create economic opportunities that simultaneously reinforce support for a green economy, drive down prices, breed more innovation, raise awareness, and create more economic opportunities, and so on. A virtuous circle.

This is the big picture, and it is what really matters today. This is a viable political strategy that can have enormous positive impacts at the social and cultural level, and create a sustainable economy. There are plenty of things in the world that are worth paying more for, and this is one of them.