There is yet more headline news on the renewable energy front. On offshore wind, I’ve been noting some of the positive developments in several of the last posts. Go-ahead for wind to generate 70,000 jobs in Britain is the word from the FT. General Electric, Gamesa and Siemens all announced plans to build big new operations. GE is building a manufacturing plant. Gamesa is going to base its worldwide offshore wind energy business there. Siemens is going to build a turbine factory too. The PM, David Cameron, made an announcement, along with worthies from these corporations, signaling the investments and that the government was going to fund necessary port upgrades, as I noted here last week. Cameron cited the Carbon Trust as saying that 70,000 jobs were to be created by 2020 from a robust UK offshore wind program.
On solar, back across the pond in the US, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced approval for the sixth and largest solar project ever on public lands. The Blythe Solar Power Project will be four separate 250-MW arrays of parabolic trough power plants. All the approvals and financing are in place and construction, according to the developer, Germany’s Solar Millennium, is scheduled to begin before the end of this year.
Not least of the news this week is the announcement by South Africa that they’re going to build a massive solar park capable, eventually, of generating 5 GW. As the Guardian reports here, the project aims to have 1 GW on line by the end of 2012, with the rest of the juice available by the end of the decade.
The article notes the controversy that South Africa created by seeking to build the seventh-largest coal-fired power plant in the world. The World Bank earned a good bit of scorn for itself with its $3 billion loan for the project. What is extraordinary to me at this late date in our joyful and relentless progress toward a global technology-driven economy is that people are still thinking at all about massive new coal. Yes, yes, I know – I’m not as dumb as I look – that there is abundant coal in South Africa, India and China and it’s there for the digging. But there are also oceans of renewable resources that these countries and others are fast learning to harness. So why waste money, time and resources on the old, dangerous, expensive and increasingly obsolescent coal and nuclear?
