The depth of their feeling was revealed in the draft energy white paper released earlier this week. The Investor Reference Group, which includes some of the major generators, market regulators, bankers and bureaucrats, said it is concerned about the “suppressing” impact on wholesale energy prices caused by the deployment of renewables, which are supported by the LRET.

via Obama Gets Efficient: $4 Billion For Energy Efficient Building Upgrades.

“The best opportunity to preserve and rebuild this economy is through energy efficiency… I believe as strongly as I can say that this is good business, creates jobs, makes us more energy independent and helps to fight climate change.”

This is what is known as the merit order effect: the effect technologies with a short-run marginal cost – i.e. with fuel that costs next to nothing, such as solar, wind – have on the market when they deliver electrons en masse to the grid. The overwhelming evidence from Australia and overseas is that they bring the wholesale cost of energy down, sometimes so much that the reduction in prices is greater than the cost of the subsidies that got them built in the first place. And established utilities with higher-cost fuel, such as coal and gas, don’t like it one bit, and are suddenly realising the extent of the threat to their business.

Foreign Policy magazine dubbed South Africa a “cowardly lion”. Critics said the ruling African National Congress has compromised ideals it embraced when it fought to end apartheid. “Principles have fallen to such an extent that nobody expects them to do the right thing,” said a diplomat in Pretoria.

While cosy South African-Chinese ties may not cause many waves in the international economy, they could undermine the climate talks with China being the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

via Cosatu lauds accord on green jobs.

“This [the accord] is part and parcel of turning that economy around and moving it away from the capital-intensive and shifting it to the labour intensive sectors of the economy,” Vavi said.
“This is about building a new economy based on meeting the basic needs of our people.”

David Crane is the CEO of NRG Energy, which has more than 24,000MW of power plant in its portfolio, equivalent to nearly half the size of Australia’s entire grid, and which is one of the largest utilities in the US. In this fascinating interview with Yale Environment 360, he says the energy industry is moving rapidly from the “take what I deliver” approach to customers to “we’ll do what you want”. The massive centralised networks and operations like his own will be gradually broken into a decentralised system, and the consumer choice will be driven by two key technologies: solar PV and electric vehicles; and will be enabled by the rollout of another, smart meters. 

Similarly, Apple talks a lot about its great people. But make no mistake — they are there only in service of the mission. A headhunter describes it thus: “It is a happy place in that it has true believers. People join and stay because they believe in the mission of the company.” It didn’t matter how great you were, if you couldn’t deliver to that mission — you were out. Jobs’s famous meltdowns upon his return were symptomatic of this. They might have become less frequent in recent years, but if a team couldn’t deliver a great product, they got the treatment. The exec in charge of MobileMe was replaced on the spot, in front of his entire team, after a botched launch. A former Apple product manager described Apple’s attitude like this: “You have the privilege of working for the company that’s making the coolest products in the world. Shut up and do your job, and you might get to stay.”

These guys have something going here…

via Pretoria gets SA’s first ‘green city’.

The country’s corporate sector has welcomed green building principles with open arms. Nedbank already has three green-rated buildings to its credit, with the latest to be built in Menlyn Maine, the Nedbank Falcon building, which is designed to save 4.5 million litres of water a year.

via World’s Engineers: “The Technology Needed to Cut the World’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 85% by 2050 Already Exists”.

In 2050, global average macro-economic costs for mitigation towards stabilisation between 710 and 445ppm CO2-eq are between a 1% gain and 5.5% decrease of global GDP. This corresponds to slowing average annual global GDP growth by less than 0.12 percentage points.