Solar power
The Goethe Galerie shopping mall next to the headquarters of Jenoptik is pictured in Jena, Germany March 21, 2019. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
April 25, 2019
By Paul Carrel
JENA, Germany (Reuters) – From the 12th floor of Jenoptik’s headquarters, chief executive Stefan Traeger points to his laser factory and the university that provides it with talent. Welcome to “Optics Valley” – a role model for Germany’s East in a big year for the region.
Three elections in eastern states this autumn are focusing the minds of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her allies, who want to win over voters unhappy that their living standards still lag the West 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
They have work to do. The East was given big promises after reunification but its economy languished.
After cash injections of 2 trillion euros ($2 trillion) over three decades, the East’s economic output per capita is still three quarters of western German levels.
But the East is slowly closing the gap and several tech hubs are giving it hope of catching – and maybe eventually overtaking – the West.
In Jena, Traeger says his predecessors turned “the ruins of the old East German Carl Zeiss conglomerate” into Jenoptik – a multinational lasers and imaging equipment group.
With most of the East’s old industries long gone, Merkel’s government is trying to encourage hubs like Jena to profit from disruptive new technologies.
“I do feel at times that here in the East, still today, there is this feeling of ‘well, maybe it’s okay that we just play’. No, we want to win,” Traeger told Reuters after presenting record earnings for 2018 and a bullish outlook.
Many East German firms closed after reunification, so why was Jenoptik different? Traeger says its first CEO, Lothar Spaeth, a former premier of Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany’s West, saw potential to create a world-class business out of an “unpolished gemstone”.
With the aid of government loans, Spaeth built Jenoptik from the Carl Zeiss group, but at a price.
“It was a very difficult time. Several thousand people lost their jobs,” said Helmut Bernitzki, 62, who joined the forerunner to Jenoptik in 1984.
“We had to expand into new markets,” Bernitzki, now an expert in optical coatings at Jenoptik, said. “We fought to be profitable and to create jobs here again.”
In a city of 110,000 inhabitants, 22,000 of them students, Jenoptik has channeled ideas from the university into specialized laser and optics products to give the company a technological edge.
(For a graphic: https://tmsnrt.rs/2GGQUVz)
PRODUCTIVITY PREMIUM
The upshot is high productivity: Jena’s output per worker is the highest in the eastern state of Thuringia, and slightly higher than towns like Bielefeld and Bochum in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Federal Statistics Office data show.
“Here in the ‘Optics Valley’ in Jena, we have a very closely connected community and it does feel like Silicon Valley, on a smaller scale,” said Traeger.
He aims to turn ideas stimulated by Jena’s university into high-tech products that “create and justify price premiums”.
Generating this added value has eluded other industries in Germany’s East. Solar power firms made a promising start in the early 2000s before Asian rivals undercut many of them, with the loss of thousands of jobs.
Developing products that rivals cannot beat on price is the holy grail for the optics, biotech and artificial intelligence start-ups taking root in the East – many around universities and research institutes.
But for the East as a whole, productivity was three quarters the western average in 2017, the latest government figures show.
“The availability of skilled labor is much lower in east Germany,” said Reint Gropp, head of the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
His policy prescription: make the East more attractive to qualified migrants, and invest in universities, research facilities and urban centers. In short, be more like Jena, home to the Fraunhofer optics research institute and the Friedrich Schiller University, where 14 percent of students are foreign.
The East’s appeal to foreigners took a hit last year, however, when Chemnitz, a town east of Jena, saw Germany’s most violent right-wing protests in decades after the killing of a German man, for which two immigrants were arrested and one later released.
INNOVATION CLUSTERS
The federal government is now encouraging high-tech hubs in Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Dresden and Jena.
The initiatives are bearing fruit. For the first time since reunification, more people moved from the West to the East – excluding booming Berlin – in 2017 than the other way around, government figures show. Small and mid-sized enterprises are driving the revival.
Success stories include Halle-based ProBioDrug, which is developing products to treat Alzheimer’s disease, and Jena medical devices maker Avatera Medical, which people close to the matter say is considering a stock market flotation.
Not all areas are thriving. In the Lausitz region south of Berlin, plans to phase out coal mining are worrying locals.
Unemployment in the East – at 6.7 percent – is still 2 points higher than in the West, and the population is older.
Easterners also feel their prospects are poorer. A recent study by the DeZIM institute for research on integration found a third of ‘Ossies’ believe they are treated as second-class citizens, about the same proportion as Muslims.
FAR-RIGHT CURSE
In Jena, mayor Thomas Nitzsche wants to export his city’s success to surrounding areas, where the far-right and left play on people’s fears of being left behind.
Between 1990 and 2016, the East’s population fell by 11.2 percent to 16.2 million, government figures show. The number of working-age people is expected to decline up to 2030, with those over 65 rising to a third from a quarter.
Nitzsche is trying to meet Jena’s demand for talent.
“Even if we retained all the school leavers and university graduates we have here, that would still be too few,” said Nitzsche, a liberal Free Democrat.
“So we need to attract people here – not just from Thuringia, but across the country and abroad.”
Ahead of the regional elections on Sept. 1 in Brandenburg and Saxony and on Oct. 27 in Thuringia, the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling close to 20 percent in all three states – putting it in second or third place.
None of the major parties want to share power with the AfD. Mainstream politicians, business leaders and think-tanks agree: the East can continue on an upward trajectory if remains open to skilled outsiders to help its young firms grow.
The East, said Gropp at the IWH institute, has less to lose by taking a chance on new technologies than the West, where the auto sector and other mature industries face challenges from innovations like electric cars.
“East Germany has a better chance of handling this more disruptive structural change, which can take place much more easily in new firms,” Gropp said. Could the East even overtake the West? “I think it could, absolutely.”
(Additional reporting by Michael Nienaber and Markus Wacket; Editing by Giles Elgood)
Source: OANN
A Tesla Model 3 is touted as a zero-emissions car by government regulators, but it actually results in more carbon dioxide than a comparable diesel-powered car, according to a recent study.
When the CO2 emissions from battery production is included, electric cars, like Teslas, are “in the best case, slightly higher than those of a diesel engine, and are otherwise much higher,” reads a release from the German think tank IFO.
“It’s better read as a warning that new technologies aren’t a climate-change panacea. Recall the false promises about corn and cellulosic ethanol,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote of the study.
Driving a Tesla Model 3 in Germany, for example, is responsible for 156 to 181 grams of CO2 per kilometer, compared to just 141 grams per kilometer for a diesel-powered Mercedes C220d — that includes emissions from producing diesel fuel.
IFO looked at electric car production in Germany, which is heavily reliant on coal power. Electric car emissions in other countries depend on their energy mix, but Germany is the world’s third-largest electric car maker.
China and the U.S. are the first- and second-largest electric car producers, respectively. China gets 65 percent of its electricity from coal power and the U.S. relies on coal for 27 percent of its electric power.
China is also the top battery-producing country, using coal power to produce batteries for electric vehicles that are then subsidized for being “zero” emissions.
California, for example, requires automakers to cut greenhouse gas emissions in cars by producing lower emissions vehicles or buying credits from companies, like Tesla, that make electric vehicles. At the federal level, the U.S. gives tax breaks of up to $7,500 per electric vehicle.
Federal subsidies for Teslas are set to be phased out since the company, founded by Elon Musk, hit the 200,000-vehicle production cap. However, Congress is debating whether or not to extend electric car subsidies.
It’s not just battery production, but charging vehicles that emit lots of CO2. Germany gets 35 percent of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, so charging a Tesla in, say, Bavaria results in 83 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven.
“Over the long term, hydrogen-methane technology offers a further advantage: it allows surplus wind and solar power generated during peaks to be stored, and these surpluses will see a sharp increase as the share of this renewable energy grows,” study co-author Christoph Buchal, professor of physics at the University of Cologne, said in a statement.
IFO isn’t the first research group to conclude electric cars might not reduce carbon dioxide emissions as promised.
A study released in 2018 also found driving electric cars might come with higher emissions than diesel vehicles, largely because of lithium-ion battery production.
Likewise, a Manhattan Institute study from 2018 also found putting more electric cars on the road would likely increase emissions compared to internal combustion engine vehicles.
Source: InfoWars
A cargo train loaded with coal dust, moves past the port area near City Station in Karachi, Pakistan September 24, 2018. Picture taken September 24, 2018. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro
April 24, 2019
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – People living in countries along China’s new “Silk Road” favor investment in renewable energy over the construction of coal-fired power plants, according to a poll released on Wednesday ahead of a major summit in Beijing.
Environmental group E3G, which commissioned the poll, said the results showed there was little support for investment in coal, despite China’s role as a major funder of new plants.
“China should now work with governments, business and investors at the upcoming forum to make sure these demands are met,” said Nick Mabey, chief executive of E3G.
The survey was released ahead of China’s second international forum on its 2013 Belt and Road initiative, which is designed to build infrastructure and encourage trade and economic cooperation along the old Silk Road route connecting China to Europe and elsewhere.
According to a draft communique seen by Reuters, world leaders attending the summit will call for sustainable financing that promotes green growth.
But concerns have been raised that China is using the program to export substandard polluting technologies, even as it boosts the share of renewable power at home in a bid to cut smog and climate-warming greenhouse gases.
The YouGov poll of more than 6,000 people covered Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa, Turkey and Vietnam, which are among the top 10 locations for the construction of new coal-fired power plants, with many backed by Chinese developers.
Over 85 percent of those surveyed said they favored investment by foreign governments, banks and companies in renewable projects, while less than a third said they favored investments in coal.
More than 90 percent said solar power should be a priority. Coal-fired power was less popular than nuclear in four of the six countries.
In a separate announcement on Wednesday, a coalition of Chinese environmental groups urged Beijing to draw up green guiding principles for investment in Belt and Road countries.
“The host country’s climate objectives and the long-term impact of investment activities on the local environment must be taken into consideration,” said Yang Fuqiang, a senior climate advisor with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
(Reporting by David Stanway; editing by Richard Pullin)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Solar panels face the sun from balconies of an apartment building in Mangyongdae District, Pyongyang August 27, 2014. REUTERS/Staff/File Photo
April 17, 2019
By Hyonhee Shin
SEOUL (Reuters) – Years after they first appeared in North Korea, increasingly cheap and available solar panels are giving a boost to consumer consumption and industry as Pyongyang tries to limit the impact of tough international sanctions.
Electricity shortages have been a perennial concern for North Korea, and leader Kim Jong Un has called for greater use of renewable energy as part of his drive for self-sufficiency as sanctions have ratcheted higher in response to the country’s nuclear and missile programs.
Now ever more households, factories and businesses are equipped with solar panels, leading to a greater variety of home electronics products available in increasingly common private markets known as jangmadang, defectors and recent visitors say.
Among the hottest selling items are water purifiers, hair straighteners and electric bicycles, mostly from China but some made in North Korea or even smuggled in from South Korea.
“A few years ago, such things as water purifiers, mixers and rice cookers were only seen at some restaurants and rich households, but they are becoming commonplace, especially in cities,” said Kang Mi-jin, an economic expert who regularly speaks with North Koreans for Daily NK, a website run by defectors.
“Some would look just like an ordinary middle-class South Korean home, with a wall-hanging LED TV, multiple laptops and electric mini cars for babies.”
CONSUMER CULTURE
North Koreans started using solar panels several years ago, mostly to charge mobile phones and light their homes as a backup to the unstable, mostly hydro and coal-fired national grid.
As well as markets brimming with electronics products, there are more teahouses, computer games rooms, karaoke bars and billiard halls open longer after switching to solar from diesel generators, according to recent visitors and defectors.
Such entertainment venues are becoming more widespread, not only in cities, but also the countryside, where grid power is even less reliable.
“At night, often it is only those places that have solar panels and batteries that have lights on,” a source with knowledge of the issue told Reuters on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of North Korea affairs.
Use of the panels spread after they were used at a now-closed inter-Korean factory park in the North’s border city of Kaesong that opened in 2004.
“Now many apartment balconies have them out in the sun during the day collecting energy so they are readily visible, the source said.
Private use of solar panels has gone from being officially banned, to tolerated, to encouraged by the ruling Workers’ Party, which keeps a tight rein on the economy and the populace.
Early this month, the official Rodong Sinmun ran an article about a team of laborers at a cooperative farm who earned solar panels and LED TVs as a reward from the Party for surpassing a production goal.
State television has also aired a series of reports on the growing use of solar energy over the past year, including a 17-minute documentary from October introducing locally made devices, such as high-voltage inverters and even a portable charger for electric bicycles.
Kim Yun-soung, a research fellow at the Green Energy Strategy Institute in Seoul, said the North’s push for domestic production of solar equipment was spurred by sanctions banning imports of metal products.
“Electricity was the biggest problem but we achieved such a highly advanced, cutting-edge technology ourselves from scratch, which was once monopolized by developed nations,” the film’s narrator said, referring to the inverters.
State media has listed the central bank, schools, factories, and even ferries as entirely powered by solar panels.
“A solar panel gives you ‘free’ power once it is installed,” said Kim Young Hui, a defector and an economist at the South’s state-run Korea Development Bank.
“So the nature of the panels perfectly fits Kim Jong Un’s mantra of self-reliance – or in other words, creating something out of nothing.”
‘FREE POWER’
Most of the panels sold in markets were brought in from China, and prices have dropped by up to 40 percent over the last few years amid a global glut and rising North Korean production, defectors and experts said.
In 2015, sources told Reuters a small 20-watt panel was sold at about $44. These days a 30-watt panel – a more widely used model – costs only about $15, Kang said.
Pyongyang does not provide data on its use of solar power, but Kang said about 55 percent of North Korean households are equipped with the panels. The ratio is higher in Pyongyang and other cities, as well as border regions where Chinese goods are widely available, she said.
David von Hippel, an Oregon-based senior associate at the Nautilus Institute, a U.S. think tank, said North Korea has imported a total of 29 megawatts of solar panels from China through 2017, citing Beijing’s custom data.
Experts say solar energy still account for less than 0.1 percent of the country’s generation capacity, estimated by South Korea’s statistics agency at some 7,700 megawatts as of 2017.
Pyongyang aims to boost its renewable capacity to 5,000 megawatts by 2044, with a focus on wind power, according to state media.
Panels play a key role in soothing public discontent toward the Kim regime over chronic power shortages and sanctions, defectors and observers say.
“Kim Jong Un appears to be committed to economic reform,” von Hippel said. “So the increased access to energy in some ways relieves the government from having to supply its citizens with energy.”
(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin. Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks at the North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) 2019 legislative conference in Washington, U.S., April 10, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas/File Photo
April 15, 2019
By Valerie Volcovici
(Reuters) – U.S. presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said on Monday she would ban all fossil fuel extraction on federal land and in coastal waters, setting herself apart from a crowded field of Democratic hopefuls who have made climate change a central campaign issue but have yet to outline specific policies.
Warren said in a post on Medium that she would sign an executive order on her first day in office for a “total moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases including for drilling offshore and on public lands.”
“We must not allow corporations to pillage our public lands and leave taxpayers to clean up the mess,” she wrote.
Warren’s stance on public lands contrasts starkly with that of President Donald Trump, whose Interior Department has sped up permitting for drilling and mining on public lands as a part of the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda.
The United States approved nearly 40 percent more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands in 2018 compared to previous years, and has moved to roll back environmental regulations to speed up more approvals.
The Interior Department is also expected in the coming weeks to announce a new five year plan for drilling on the Outercontinental Shelf that would open up vasts swaths of U.S. coastline to oil and gas exploration.
Warren said that any “serious effort” to combat climate change needs to include public lands since fossil fuel extraction from these areas account for a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
Several Democratic candidates, Senators Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and others have announced support for a proposed Green New Deal – a loosely-woven climate action policy to address concerns about jobs and wages as part of a radical shift away from fossil fuels and the building of a new low-carbon economy.
But only Warren so far has announced how public lands will play a role in drastically cutting global carbon dioxide emissions, which have climbed to an all-time high.
As part of her plan she said she would reinstate regulations targeting methane emissions from oil and gas projects, as well as create a 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps, a one-year fellowship program for young people who want to work in conservation.
Warren also said she would expand renewable energy projects on federal lands.
“A decade ago, there were zero major solar power projects on public lands. Today, the Bureau of Land Management has approved 11,000 megawatts of renewable wind, solar, and geothermal projects ,” she said. “But to make a real dent in the problem, we’re going to need a whole lot more.”
(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Tom Brown)
Source: OANN
The Zephyr, a High Altitude Pseudo-Satellite (HAPS) UAS/UAV that runs on solar power, is launched in Arizona, United States, in November 2018. Airbus Defence and Space/Handout via REUTERS
April 11, 2019
SYDNEY/MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Airbus SE said on Thursday that a test flight of its Zephyr surveillance and communications drone in Australia for the British Ministry of Defence was “interrupted” due to adverse weather conditions last month.
The solar-electric-powered drone was believed to have crashed during a test flight following a mishap after the take-off, The Australian newspaper reported on Thursday, citing unnamed sources.
The flight on March 15 was “interrupted earlier than planned due to adverse weather conditions”, an Airbus spokeswoman said.
“We are working hard on preparing for the next trial,” she said, declining to provide further details.
Zephyr is designed to linger at an altitude of about 70,000 feet (21 kilometers) for months at a time for surveillance or to provide a temporary boost to communications.
Airbus had said in February it built its first Zephyr global operations site in a remote part of Australia’s northwest because it had ideal launch weather.
Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau declined to comment.
(Reporting by Byron Kaye and Sonali Paul; additional reporting and writing by Jamie Freed; Editing by Darren Schuettler and Sherry Jacob-Phillips)
Source: OANN
Rep. Tim Ryan, who on Thursday joined the widening number of Democrats seeking the 2020 presidential nomination, said Friday he believes he can bring back people who voted for Donald Trump, and that he’ll win in several Midwest states while representing the working class.
“The country is divided and I believe I can heal it,” the Ohio Democrat told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I got a lot of voters who President Trump go,t and I think we can bring those folks back into the fold. I can win Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.”
Ryan, whose home district in the Youngstown area has been hit hard by layoffs in the auto industry, said the United States needs an industrial policy and is losing to China on electric vehicles, solar power and more.
Ryan said the problems with the economy are not new, but he wants to push forward to make sure the United States has its place as technology emerges.
“We’re going to figure out how we go from two million electric vehicles to 30 million,” said Ryan, noting he’ll be speaking with the auto industry. “I want those made in the United States, I want the charging stations made in the United States.”
The congressman also discussed his foreign policy experience, noting that he has been a member of the House Armed Services Committee and currently sits on the House Appropriations Committee’s Defense Subcommittee.
“The most patriotic thing we could do was start listening to each other and respecting each other, and then we can project force into the world,” said Ryan. “We have to outcompete China.”
Source: NewsMax Politics
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump talks with Energy Secretary Rick Perry after delivering remarks during an “Unleashing American Energy” event at the Department of Energy in Washington, U.S., June 29, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
April 4, 2019
By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The flagship of the Trump administration’s advanced nuclear power research program could cost about 40 percent more than a government official estimated earlier this year, a U.S. Department of Energy document shows.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry has tried to breathe life into the country’s nuclear power industry, which is suffering in the face of competition from plants burning cheap natural gas as well as falling costs for wind and solar power.
Perry announced the versatile test reactor, or VTR, in late February, saying it was a “key step to implementing President (Donald) Trump’s direction to revitalize and expand the U.S. nuclear industry,” and critical for national security.
The VTR would allow U.S. companies to conduct advanced technology and fuels tests without having to go to competitors in Russia and China, Perry said. Meant to be built by late 2025, it would be the first new nuclear test reactor built by the Energy Department, or DOE, in many decades.
Perry did not put a price on the reactor, which would be led by the department’s Idaho National Laboratory. But an internal DOE document dated Jan. 22, obtained by public policy group the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) through a freedom of information request, puts the estimated cost for construction and starting the VTR at $3.9 billion to $6 billion. The document, seen by Reuters on Thursday, had not been reported previously.
The high end of that range is nearly 42 percent more than an estimate by Kemal Pasamehmetoglu, the head of the Idaho National Laboratory’s VTR program, who was quoted in the Morning Consult news outlet in February saying it would cost up to $3.5 billion in today’s dollars.
The UCS estimated that VTR’s cost for the next seven years would be about $550 million to $850 million annually, compared to the $740 million appropriated in the fiscal year 2019 budget for the department’s entire advanced nuclear technology development, which contained just $65 million for VTR.
If successful, the VTR is meant to lead to a new wave of so-called fast reactors, reviving nuclear power companies. Fast reactors breed their own fuel, unlike today’s fleet of light water reactors. They also have a safety benefit of allowing a plant to operate under low pressure conditions.
But critics worry that the fuel cycle of fast reactors will likely depend on the reprocessing or recycling of plutonium or uranium, both of which can be used as fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
“Fast reactors are less safe, less secure, and more proliferation-prone than light-water reactors,” said Ed Lyman, a senior scientist at UCS. “The DOE should not be asking taxpayers to spend billions on this dangerous reactor.”
Lyman also said cheaper approaches to advanced nuclear power could be developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the DOE-sponsored research and development center in Tennessee.
The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
VTR has already led to business for nuclear companies. In November, the Idaho lab said it had contracted GE Hitachi Nuclear, a venture between General Electric Co and Hitachi Ltd, to support the conceptual design and safety activities for an unspecified amount.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Tom Brown)
Source: OANN
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