A new report from global research house Bloomberg new Energy Finance has punctured the rhetoric from incumbent fossil fuel generators, saying that cutting the renewable energy target would lead to an increase in electricity bills for consumers, not a reduction.
Two of the biggest utilities in Australia – Origin Energy and EnergyAustralia – have led a chorus of opposition to the current fixed 41,000GWh renewable energy target.
They and other state-owned power generators have argued that the renewable target will force up costs to consumers, a tack that has apparently won the support of state-based conservative governments, and the federal Coalition, which has agreed to force another review of the RET to investigate those claims.
However, renewable energy groups, and the CCA, have pointed out that the biggest danger from the RET is to the revenues of coal and gas-fired generators.
This has been supported by BNEF’s analysis, which says that reducing the RET may cut the headline costs of the scheme – i.e. the amount and price of renewable energy certificates – but it would lead to an increase in electricity prices because wholesale electricity prices would rebound because of reduced competition.
“Our analysis indicates that a reduction of the Renewable Energy Target is unlikely to result in a cost reduction to the end consumer,” BNEF Australia head Kobad Bhavnagri, said in emailed comments to RenewEconomy.
“By contrast, it could actually put upward pressure on retail electricity prices. This is because the savings from reducing the target are outweighed by the costs.
“Having less renewables in the generating mix is likely to lead to higher wholesale electricity prices, because there will be less competition and fossil fuel generators can sell the power they produce for more. The total cost of higher wholesale electricity prices are likely to outweigh the savings from building less renewables.”
The BNEF analysis (see table at bottom of story), suggests that reducing the RET to a target of around 27,000GWh, as Origin and EnergyAustralia are pushing for, would mean that investment in renewables in Australia would be cut in half – from around $23.8 billion to $12.2 billion.
This would mean around 2,800MW less wind energy, and around 2,700MW less solar PV built out to 2020.
It says the headline costs of the scheme would fall, because the price of renewable energy certificates (RECs) would decline by around 9 per cent. However, this was likely to be offset by increased cost of financing caused by yet another change in government policy.
And because the wholesale price would rise, the overall cost of electricity bills to consumers would increase by $1.3 billion, even though the “headline” cost of the scheme (the RECs) would fall by $1.9 billion.
“Reducing the Renewable Energy Target will, in isolation, bring down the headline cost of the policy,” BNEF writes in its report.
“But having less renewables in the generating mix is likely to lead to higher wholesale electricity prices, because there will be less competition and fossil fuel generators can sell the power they produce for more.
“The total cost of higher wholesale electricity prices are likely to outweigh the savings from building less renewables.”
It notes that renewables like wind and solar power place downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices because once they are built they produce power at practically zero cost.
“This is changing the dynamics of energy markets around the world and cutting the revenue and profits of coal- and gas-fired power stations,” it notes.
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2013年8月12日 星期一
California Wildfire Season Likely To Get Worse
California truly is the Golden State this summer – golden brown – and that has fire officials worried heading into the peak of the wildfire season.
It's still weeks before the fire-fanning Santa Ana winds usually arrive and already it's been a brutal fire season, with nearly twice as many acres burned statewide from a year ago, including 19,000 scorched this week in a blaze still raging in the mountains 90 miles east of Los Angeles. That fire, burning nearly 30 square miles, was almost half contained Saturday morning.
So far this year, California fire officials have battled 4,300 wildfires, a stark increase from the yearly average of nearly 3,000 they faced from 2008 to 2012, said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Until last week, those fires had already burned more than 71,000 acres, about 111 square miles. The totals were up from 40,000, about 63 square miles, during the same period last year.
The annual average for charred land in the last five years was 113,000 acres, roughly 177 square miles, he said.
"We have seen a significant increase in our fire activity and much earlier than normal," said Berlant, adding that fire season began in mid-April, about a month ahead of schedule after an especially dry winter. "We're not even yet into the time period where we see the largest number of damaging fires."
U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who lives in Riverside County, said more than 165,000 acres or 258 square miles have burned in California this year, and climate change is setting conditions for more disastrous blazes, while budget cuts are limiting resources to fight them. Boxer's data comes from both California officials and federal agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service.
This year, state fire officials have called up more firefighters and reserve engines on days with hot, dry conditions, Berlant said.
And while state officials encouraged residents to rid their properties of dry brush before fire season starts, he said authorities are now urging the public not to use lawnmowers or weed eaters during the heat of the day because a spark off the metal blades can trigger a blaze.
On Friday, firefighters launched a fleet of seven retardant-dropping airplanes against Southern California's latest destructive wildfire, which has destroyed 26 homes and threatened more than 500 others in the San Jacinto Mountains.
The so-called Silver Fire injured six firefighters and seriously burned one civilian and had grown to nearly 30 square miles early Saturday.
At its peak, it forced the evacuation of 1,800 people, including 800 campers, but orders were lifted for many areas Friday and only a few hundred evacuees remained.
Gov. Jerry Brown declared an emergency for the area Friday, freeing up additional funds and resources for the firefight and recovery.
In the Twin Pines neighborhood outside Banning, Andy Schrader said he couldn't get out in time. The wildfire crept up suddenly and blew over his house, burning his motor home and singeing his hair as he sprayed water from a hose to try to keep the house wet.
"I could feel my face burning," the 74-year-old carpenter said. "And I thought I was going to die."
Most of Southern California's severe wildfires are associated with Santa Ana winds, caused by high pressure over the West that sends a clockwise flow of air rushing down into the region.
This week's fire, however, was being fanned by a counter-clockwise flow around a low pressure area over northwest California. The National Weather Service said conditions could change in the second half of next week, with weaker winds in the mountains and deserts.
Wildfire experts say the traditional fire season has grown longer in California as rainfall has been lower than usual over the last two years and tapered off sooner.
Los Angeles, for example, received only 5.85 inches of rain from July 2012 through June 2013, compared with 8.71 inches a year before and a 30-year average of 14.93 inches, said Eric Boldt, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Read the full story at aulaundry.com web! Shanghai Xunduo Electric & Machinery Co., Ltd. is one of the leading industrial laundry equipment manufacturers of washer extractor, tumble dryer,flat work ironer, laundry dryer, folding machine, dry cleaning machine ect., which is integrating designing,researching, manufacturing, sales and service all within the company to ensure the highest level of quality and service.
It's still weeks before the fire-fanning Santa Ana winds usually arrive and already it's been a brutal fire season, with nearly twice as many acres burned statewide from a year ago, including 19,000 scorched this week in a blaze still raging in the mountains 90 miles east of Los Angeles. That fire, burning nearly 30 square miles, was almost half contained Saturday morning.
So far this year, California fire officials have battled 4,300 wildfires, a stark increase from the yearly average of nearly 3,000 they faced from 2008 to 2012, said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Until last week, those fires had already burned more than 71,000 acres, about 111 square miles. The totals were up from 40,000, about 63 square miles, during the same period last year.
The annual average for charred land in the last five years was 113,000 acres, roughly 177 square miles, he said.
"We have seen a significant increase in our fire activity and much earlier than normal," said Berlant, adding that fire season began in mid-April, about a month ahead of schedule after an especially dry winter. "We're not even yet into the time period where we see the largest number of damaging fires."
U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who lives in Riverside County, said more than 165,000 acres or 258 square miles have burned in California this year, and climate change is setting conditions for more disastrous blazes, while budget cuts are limiting resources to fight them. Boxer's data comes from both California officials and federal agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service.
This year, state fire officials have called up more firefighters and reserve engines on days with hot, dry conditions, Berlant said.
And while state officials encouraged residents to rid their properties of dry brush before fire season starts, he said authorities are now urging the public not to use lawnmowers or weed eaters during the heat of the day because a spark off the metal blades can trigger a blaze.
On Friday, firefighters launched a fleet of seven retardant-dropping airplanes against Southern California's latest destructive wildfire, which has destroyed 26 homes and threatened more than 500 others in the San Jacinto Mountains.
The so-called Silver Fire injured six firefighters and seriously burned one civilian and had grown to nearly 30 square miles early Saturday.
At its peak, it forced the evacuation of 1,800 people, including 800 campers, but orders were lifted for many areas Friday and only a few hundred evacuees remained.
Gov. Jerry Brown declared an emergency for the area Friday, freeing up additional funds and resources for the firefight and recovery.
In the Twin Pines neighborhood outside Banning, Andy Schrader said he couldn't get out in time. The wildfire crept up suddenly and blew over his house, burning his motor home and singeing his hair as he sprayed water from a hose to try to keep the house wet.
"I could feel my face burning," the 74-year-old carpenter said. "And I thought I was going to die."
Most of Southern California's severe wildfires are associated with Santa Ana winds, caused by high pressure over the West that sends a clockwise flow of air rushing down into the region.
This week's fire, however, was being fanned by a counter-clockwise flow around a low pressure area over northwest California. The National Weather Service said conditions could change in the second half of next week, with weaker winds in the mountains and deserts.
Wildfire experts say the traditional fire season has grown longer in California as rainfall has been lower than usual over the last two years and tapered off sooner.
Los Angeles, for example, received only 5.85 inches of rain from July 2012 through June 2013, compared with 8.71 inches a year before and a 30-year average of 14.93 inches, said Eric Boldt, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Read the full story at aulaundry.com web! Shanghai Xunduo Electric & Machinery Co., Ltd. is one of the leading industrial laundry equipment manufacturers of washer extractor, tumble dryer,flat work ironer, laundry dryer, folding machine, dry cleaning machine ect., which is integrating designing,researching, manufacturing, sales and service all within the company to ensure the highest level of quality and service.
2013年4月1日 星期一
For world's makers, production tools at fingertips
In the popular press and the populace's collective imagination, entrepreneurship these days is all about social media, mobile apps, online games and the like. Anyone with a good idea, a credit card and a high-speed Internet connection can become the next Mark Zuckerberg, or so it seems.
What's exciting about the current world of "stuff," though, is how it's coming to be made and sold. Today, creative people are taking the tools and lessons of the Information Age and applying them to the realm of product development and manufacturing of real goods. Chris Anderson, the longtime editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, details this fundamental shift in his recent book, "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution."
America has always been a nation of tinkerers. Just think of Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison and the phrase "Yankee ingenuity." In fact, our heritage of continuous mechanical improvement is discussed in another recent work, "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers and Inventors Who Make America Great," by Alec Foege.
In "Makers," though, Anderson describes how newly available technologies and new ways of working collaboratively combine to drastically decrease the barriers to entry so as to allow nearly anyone to make the move from inventor to entrepreneur in a short period of time and at low cost. Tools such as 3-D printers, laser cutters and CNC (computer numerical control) machines, which have been used in large-scale industries for decades, are now accessible from the consumer's desktop.
All around the country, too, communal workspaces, known as "hackerspaces" or "makerspaces," are being organized, allowing members to share in the costs of tools and materials, and, most importantly, the necessary physical space for building individual or collaborative items. Examples in Indiana include Bloomington's BloomingLabs and Club Cyberia in Indianapolis.
Granted, digitally fabricating a prototype on a 3-D printer is not exactly mass production. But desktop production is only now where desktop publishing was in the late 1980s. The tools will only get better, and the Web, as it has everything else, will only speed up the process of product development and creation. Time to market will be measured in weeks, days or even hours, rather than years or months.
When Karl Marx wrote about power inherent in those who control the means of production, he had no way of knowing that would eventually mean and include most of us. "Makers of the world, Unite!" might be Marx's rallying cry if he were around today.
The machine also has the option of either a 12 or 16 position tool carousel. One particular feature that has surpassed expectation is the performance of the live tooling facility, which has proved highly beneficial in improving productivity as milling operations that would have required transferring of parts to other machines has been completed in a single set-up on the Tongtai.
"The milling capability is much better than we anticipated," says Gordon Burnett. "Our initial intention was just to use the live tooling to perform drilling operations on PCs and to produce lifting holes for the heavier components. However, we have been using it for much more than this and have been pleasantly surprised by the machines performance in this area. The overall performance of the machine has been outstanding and our initial concerns about stepping up to this type and size of machine were quickly put to one side as the machine is achieving all of the tolerances and repeatability targets that we had set for it and it has not let us down once. Our productivity and throughput is improving thanks to the capabilities of the Tongtai machine and we are eliminating many additional operations."
What's exciting about the current world of "stuff," though, is how it's coming to be made and sold. Today, creative people are taking the tools and lessons of the Information Age and applying them to the realm of product development and manufacturing of real goods. Chris Anderson, the longtime editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, details this fundamental shift in his recent book, "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution."
America has always been a nation of tinkerers. Just think of Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison and the phrase "Yankee ingenuity." In fact, our heritage of continuous mechanical improvement is discussed in another recent work, "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers and Inventors Who Make America Great," by Alec Foege.
In "Makers," though, Anderson describes how newly available technologies and new ways of working collaboratively combine to drastically decrease the barriers to entry so as to allow nearly anyone to make the move from inventor to entrepreneur in a short period of time and at low cost. Tools such as 3-D printers, laser cutters and CNC (computer numerical control) machines, which have been used in large-scale industries for decades, are now accessible from the consumer's desktop.
All around the country, too, communal workspaces, known as "hackerspaces" or "makerspaces," are being organized, allowing members to share in the costs of tools and materials, and, most importantly, the necessary physical space for building individual or collaborative items. Examples in Indiana include Bloomington's BloomingLabs and Club Cyberia in Indianapolis.
Granted, digitally fabricating a prototype on a 3-D printer is not exactly mass production. But desktop production is only now where desktop publishing was in the late 1980s. The tools will only get better, and the Web, as it has everything else, will only speed up the process of product development and creation. Time to market will be measured in weeks, days or even hours, rather than years or months.
When Karl Marx wrote about power inherent in those who control the means of production, he had no way of knowing that would eventually mean and include most of us. "Makers of the world, Unite!" might be Marx's rallying cry if he were around today.
The machine also has the option of either a 12 or 16 position tool carousel. One particular feature that has surpassed expectation is the performance of the live tooling facility, which has proved highly beneficial in improving productivity as milling operations that would have required transferring of parts to other machines has been completed in a single set-up on the Tongtai.
"The milling capability is much better than we anticipated," says Gordon Burnett. "Our initial intention was just to use the live tooling to perform drilling operations on PCs and to produce lifting holes for the heavier components. However, we have been using it for much more than this and have been pleasantly surprised by the machines performance in this area. The overall performance of the machine has been outstanding and our initial concerns about stepping up to this type and size of machine were quickly put to one side as the machine is achieving all of the tolerances and repeatability targets that we had set for it and it has not let us down once. Our productivity and throughput is improving thanks to the capabilities of the Tongtai machine and we are eliminating many additional operations."
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