Current Savers Blog

Indian wind turbine maker Suzlon Energy’s shares gained 8 percent on Tuesday, after sources told Reuters that Suzlon’s founders are looking to raise up to $48 million through the sale of a 2 percent stake in the world’s fifth-largest wind turbine maker.

Shares in leading solar cell maker Q-Cells closed the day up 2.39 percent after it reported profits that missed market forecasts and CEO Anton Milner and CFO Hartmut Schüning tried to assuage investor fear over solar project funding.

German solar peer Solon posted a bigger-than-expected first-quarter net loss and echoed Q-Cells’ financing concern.

(Track and comment on the emerging greentech sector by joining the Reuters Business of Green Portfolio community)

West Virginians who want to show off their pride in the state’s coal industry can now do so via some catchy, coal-promoting ringtones put together by the West Virginia Coal Association.

Beware, however, that the ringtones have already drawn the ire of environmentalists.

The ringtones are jingles the West Virginia coal group has used for some time to promote the state’s vast coal resources (and presumably to offset the bad rap coal gets for producing about 30 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases).

Below are some of the lyrics:

Coal is WestVirginia/ Coal is me and you/ Coal is West Virginia / We’ve got a job to do/ Coal is energy (coal is energy)/ We need energy (we need energy)/ Coal is West Virginia

And:

When we go down deep through the dark today/ We come up wth a light for America

For all the ringtones’ optimism, however, they are taking heat from environmental group the Sierra Club, which put together a video called “Coal Was West Virginia” that denigrates coal as dirty and a threat to the environment while the mobile phone jingles play in the background.  You can check it out below:

Photo Credit: Reuters/Andrea Hopkins (Retired miner Chuck Nelson, 57, surveys a mountaintop removal coal mine on Kayford Mountain, West Virginia)

By my count there are at least two dozen dead white storks in this photo taken in Saudi Arabia after they flew into the power lines — part of a wider problem in which millions of birds die every year by flying into obstacles put up by people.

This weekend, May 9-10, thousands of people around the world are marking a U.N.-backed “Migratory Bird Day”  (yes, it’s a long day) with a theme about “Barriers to Migration” — such as buildings, wind turbines, power lines and fences.

It’s easy to see how birds might fly by accident into thin wires like those above south of Jeddah but harder to understand why they slam into enormous buildings — some, apparently, may be flying towards what they think is the safety of a tree and end up crashing into a window in which the tree is reflected.

And the blades of wind turbines spin at up to 200 km (125 miles) per hour, making them all but invisible.

“It is estimated that bird-strike due to collisions with man-made structures is responsible for the deaths of many millions of birds worldwide every year,” a statement from the organisers says.

And the obstacles come in addition to problems for birds such as clearing of forests or woodlands for farmland and desertification linked to climate change.

Among recommendations are siting power lines, communications masts, turbines etc away from migratory routes or out of valleys or wetlands where many birds congregate.

Do you have any other good ideas?

(Picture credit above: Abdullah Alsuhainbany, via the African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbird Agreement, which initiated World Migratory Bird Day)

“Green Cities,” a new report by a thinktank called Living Cities, examines how American cities have taken the lead on environmental issues in the absence of strong federal action. 

Based on a survey of 40 of the largest U.S. cities, the report points to progress in mandating more efficient city buildings and promoting recycling but notes that talk of creating “green jobs” has been more talk than action.  

Among the main findings:

* Four in five big cities say sustainability is among their top five priorities. Only about one in six says it is not.

* More than three quarters of big cities have or will soon have detailed plans on how to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly all call for cuts of 10 to 20 percent in the next five to 10 years.

* The typical big city has between three and 10 staff members focused on climate change and sustainability. Several have only one staff member dedicated to these issues.

* Budgets vary widely, from $75,000 to $15 million. Most cities reported budgets of between $150,000 and $500,000. 

The report welcomes efforts to mandate green building standards but said mass retro-fitting of existing buildings would do far more to reduce emissions and create green jobs.

Tell us what you think. Is your city doing enough to help the environment? Should the Federal government be doing more?

“If you liked credit derivatives swaps, you’re going to love cap-and-trade.”

One can presume that Chevron Chief Executive David O’Reilly is not a fan of the current deep worldwide recession — which was worsened by a credit-market lockup blamed in part on hard-to-value securities.

And, he made it very clear on Thursday that he is not enamored of the system the Obama administration hopes to use to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, which are produced through the burning of fossil fuels sold by the No. 2 U.S. oil and gas company.

“It’s smoke and mirrors,” O’Reilly told a Boston business group. “Personally, I think it’s going to be a difficult system. I don’t think the American people trust it.”

A proposal working its way through the U.S. Congress would put in a place a cap-and-trade system that would give individual U.S. companies the right to emit certain quantities of greenhouse gases, which contribute to global climate change. Companies whose emissions are below their allotment could sell their extra rights to other companies.

The Obama administration in its budget proposal released on Thursday called for the initial emissions permits to be sold, rather than given away free. That would give businesses a financial incentive to reduce their emissions.

O’Reilly argued that an easier way to reduce emissions would be to raise taxes paid on gasoline for cars. He said Washington has embraced cap-and-trade to avoid the appearance of raising taxes.

“Politicians like it because they don’t like to talk about taxes,” O’Reilly said.

It was a discussion that would have made George Bernard Shaw smile. The British Nobel Prize-winning writer said America and England were separated by their common language.

Such was evident recently during a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. The panel focused on the effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions by trading carbon credits, commonly called a cap-and-trade scheme, and creating such a system in the United States.

That’s the rub, said Elizabeth Kanna, a marketing professional who said that “scheme” is an awful choice because, for most Americans, it means something sinister.

“Most Americans don’t understand carbon. It’s a confusing subject,” said Kanna. “You can’t convince Americans it’s a good idea by calling it a cap-and-trade ’scheme’. I know ’scheme’s’ a bad word. In other countries ’scheme’ is not a bad word but you cannot create a global market using a word like ’scheme’ that doesn’t work everywhere.”

To the British, scheme means a plan of action. Scheme is also used often for programs at the United Nations, where its meaning is neutral. But to Americans, it implies a plan of action in an underhanded way.

In fact, both definitions are correct. U.S. dictionary Merriam-Webster defines scheme as “a plan or program of action; especially: a crafty or secret one.” However, it also gives another definition: “a systematic or organized configuration.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives similar definitions, including “a secret or underhanded plan” and “a systematic plan”

“We have to come up with a better word,” said Kanna, who lives in Sacramento, California. “Here’s a story to illustrate my point. In January, I was in New York. In the cabs now, they have the news on flat screen.  On the bottom of the screen, it said, ‘Madoff Ponzi Scheme.’ It was a new assessment of the money lost. Scheme. At the same time, the cab driver has on the news and they said ‘The cap-and-trade scheme was going forward in Washington.’ ”

While “scheme” may not evoke images of green fields and clear skies for some, the word is a better choice than what has been used in the past, said Robert Hahn of the American Enterprise Institute.

“We’ve come a long way from ‘license to pollute,’ ” said Hahn, referring to the phrase common in the 1990s when the northeastern U.S. states formed a market to trade sulfur dioxide emissions in a successful effort to curb acid rain. (Nevermind that outside the United States, sulfur is spelled sulphur.)

“Carbon tax” is also a marketing non-starter, said Andrew Treusch of Environment Canada, the federal agency.

What do you think? Is this a serious concern? Should the use of scheme be capped? Scrapped?

Photo Credit: Reuters/Dan Riedlhuber (Petro-Canada’s Edmonton Refinery and Distribution Centre glows at dusk in Edmonton February 15, 2009)

When the Reuters.com editorial and business teams met last year to frame our priorities for 2009, one of the ideas that most excited us was an expansion of our environment section. Our environment correspondents around the world were already ramping up their coverage of the business of clean technology, anticipating increased demand for news about how companies were addressing the challenges of climate change and pollution. This was before the election of President Obama and the promise of economic stimulus money for environmental projects.

So the timing felt right when we relaunched our Environment section as Green Business last week. You’ll still find all the news that was on the old page, from correspondents such as Oslo-based Alister Doyle and Peter Henderson in San Francisco. But we’ve added more financial content and news from partners with complementary coverage.

Here’s a quick tour of the page:
1: Business news from correspondents such as Nichola Groom, who covers alternative energy out of Los Angeles.

2: Featured stories from our partners GreenBiz.com, Matter Network, Wired, Earth2Tech and IDG.

3: The Reuters Global Green Portfolio, an index of green stocks with a related blog and discussion group.

4: General environment news. Here’s where you’ll find the news from the old Environment page.

5: Green Business Topics: News from our partners divided into 10 themed sections.

In addition, you’ll find links in the right-hand column to our Environment blog, environment video channel and the Thomson Reuters Carbon Community. Let us know in the comments if there’s anything else you’d like to see. We value your feedback.

 You need a catchy phrase if you’re going to ban 12 toxic chemicals almost no one has heard of and which have tongue-twisting names – such as chlordane and toxaphene.

So someone dreamt up the “Dirty Dozen” to describe the group of pesticides and other industrial chemicals outlawed by the U.N.’s 2001 Stockholm Convention.  The 12 were linked to damage to the nervous and immune systems, cancers and reproductive disorders.

I reckon that making the chemicals sound like a gang of outlaws helped ensure far wider public understanding of the Convention. High concentrations of some of the chemicals have even been found in people, plants and animals in the Arctic, far from industrial centres.

Now 150 nations are meeting this week in Geneva (for stories, click here and here) to consider adding another nine chemicals to the banned list — many of them with with even more eye-glazing names like alpha hexachlorocyclohexane or perfluorooctane sulfonic acid. The nine are found in products ranging from hairsprays to flame retardants in mattresses.

So what will they be called?

Maybe if the nine are added to the Dirty Dozen they might end up as the “Toxic 21″? 

But perhaps the Dirty Dozen name will stay on and the others will be called something like the “Noxious Nine”?

And what happens if countries don’t outlaw all the proposed nine — maybe there will be something like an “Awful Eight”, a “Filthy Five” or a “Foul Four”?

Any ideas?

(Photo:  A Nenets man leads reindeers near the village of Yar-Sale in the Yamal peninsula, some 2,150 km (1336 miles) northeast of Moscow, on February 25, 2008. The Nenets are indigenous people in Russia’s Arctic region north of the Urals. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko (RUSSIA))

Turns out birds aren’t the only ones with a reason to steer clear of wind farms.

This past weekend, a wind turbine spinning out of control forced California police to shut down a stretch of highway because of concerns that it could break into large, heavy, and very fast-moving pieces.

California Highway Patrol officers late on Sunday morning noticed that a roughly 125-foot tall turbine on a ridge near the desert town of Tehachapi was spinning much faster than any of the others at the Tehachapi farm.

“It looked like a propellor on an aircraft… and it was giving off a loud racket as it failed,” Officer Ed Smith said.

Officials contacted AES, the power company that owns the wind farm, and Smith said “it was determined that if it failed it could cast large pieces of steel and debris up to a mile from where the turbine was.”

Given that the state’s Highway 58 is less than half a mile from the location of the crazy turbine, which could not be stopped, officials resolved to shut down the road. It was closed for about 10 hours, Smith said, at which point the winds had died down enough to reopen it.

AES spokeswoman Meghan Dotter said the turbine was made in the mid-1980s by Denmark’s Vestas and was smaller than more modern models. The turbine’s brake failed, Dotter added, causing it to spin out of control in high winds of more 50 mph. The site is being monitored now, she said.

Turns out this sort of thing has happened before. In upstate New York, a General Electric-made turbine caught fire and collapsed in March after a wiring malfunction at Noble Environmental Power’s Altona Wind Park. No one was hurt, but debris from the turbine was flung a quarter of a mile away.

To see just how dramatic a wind turbine failure can be, check out the video of a separate incident below:

(Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall)

Photocredit: Reuters/Fred Prouser (A large wind turbine is pictured near Palmdale, California)