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John Rowe, Exelon CEO, said yesterday that climate change legislation is an urgent issue. At the same time, he announced that the nation’s largest utility would not be renewing its membership with the US Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to climate legislation.

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At the Eco-Aviation Conference in Washington, Air New Zealand’s Chief Pilot Captain David Morgan announced the company’s findings on a test flight from last December. Powered by a combination of biofuel and jet fuel, the test resulted in a fuel savings of 1.2%. It also cut CO2 emissions by over 60%!

While a 1.2% fuel savings doesn’t seem like much, that is over 1 ton of fuel!

The test was conducted using a commercial 747-400 fitted with Rolls Royce engines. Rolls Royce had certified the fuel — a 50:50 blend of standard Jet A1 fuel and synthetic paraffinic kerosene derived from jatropha oil.

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That’s because a climate bill, once passed, will act like the starting gun in a business innovation race. To illustrate how capping carbon pollution will stimulate the economy and create jobs, EDF designed this graphic (see below the jump).

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The Kremlin’s order to ramp up renewable energy has set targets of 2.5% by 2015 and 4.5% by 2020. That translates into 45.2 billion kiloWatt hours of renewable energy production by 2020, based on the country’s current electricity production.

To reach these goals, the government will fund small hydro, tidal, geothermal, wind, solar and biomass energy facilities. Wind energy, for instance, is slated to expand from 12 MW (2005) to some 7000 MW by 2020.

Developing Russia’s economically recoverable renewable energy could cut some 990 million tons of CO2 emissions a year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (PDF) To put that number in perspective, it would be the equivalent of preventing two-thirds of the CO2 emissions of the United States from entering the atmosphere. This estimate, as well as Russia’s renewable energy statistics, doesn’t take into account large hydroelectric projects, which already account for 21% of Russia’s total energy.

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After congressional leaders reached compromise on a 789 billion dollar economic stimulus package that includes investment for smart grid and broadband infrastructure, there were lots of smiling faces around Mountain View, Cali., the headquarters of Google Inc.

President Obama’s stated desire to invest in smart grid and broadband infrastructures syncs quite nicely with Google’s obvious desire to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure but it also will benefit the company’s recent incursion into smart metering.

While the specifics of Wednesday’s compromise have yet to be released, the Senate version of the stimulus slated $7 billion for broadband and $20 billion for smart grid investment, with final figures likely to be smaller. [update: CNET reports that smart grid investment was pared down in the final package to $11 billion]

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The flight lasted two hours and ran one of the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines on the jatropha biodiesel blend. Air New Zealand has previously stated that they want to become the world’s most sustainable airline and hopes that by 2013, 10% of its flights will be powered by biofuel blends such as the jatropha biodiesel blend used in this test flight.

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In November 2008, consumer prices fell to their lowest in 76 years. Will the Bush Depression be worse than the Great Depression?

1932 is considered the bottom point of the Great Depression:

Though the U.S. economy had gone into depression six months earlier, the Great Depression may be said to have begun with a catastrophic collapse of stock-market prices on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. During the next three years stock prices in the United States continued to fall, until by late 1932 they had dropped to only about 20 percent of their value in 1929…The failure of so many banks, combined with a general and nationwide loss of confidence in the economy, led to much-reduced levels of spending and demand and hence of production, thus aggravating the downward spiral. The result was drastically falling output and drastically rising unemployment; by 1932, U.S. manufacturing output had fallen to 54 percent of its 1929 level, and unemployment had risen to between 12 and 15 million workers, or 25-30 percent of the work force.

Have we reached the bottom of this economic depression or is the worse still to come?  Mike Schenk, an economist for Credit Union National Association, expressed his economic concerns, “This is scary stuff.  We are teetering on the brink of a massive downward spiral. Deflation is a threat.”

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FedEx has ordered 10 purpose-built zero tailpipe emissions cargo vans from UK-based electric vehicle manufacturer Modec. The new electric trucks are specifically built for the duty cycles required in stop-start city driving, can go 70 miles on one charge, and can haul up to 2 tonnes (2.2 US tons) of cargo.

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In a forthcoming paper, an Oxford physicist argues that class action lawsuits against oil companies for damages brought on by severe weather events caused by global warming may soon be possible.

Oxford Professor Myles Allen believes that people adversely affected by climate change today are now in a position to document and quantify their losses. And that the results of his upcoming paper show a way to compute those damages and correlate them to global warming.

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In a new study, researchers have shown that growing perennial grasses to make celluline rather than using corn stover or sugar cane is better for the environment because it increases soil health and stores much more carbon in the soil, thereby reducing greenhouse gases.

Current first generation ethanol is produced by fermenting the starch in corn kernels. This has become a controversial source of biofuel due to food vs. fuel concerns and the relatively low energy gain from the whole process.

But celluline represents a true departure from these concerns in that significantly more liquid fuel energy can be harvested from non-food portions of the plant — the stems and leaves. Celluline is still in the research and development stage, but many people have hung their hats on it as the holy grail that will replace corn ethanol and bypass concerns over food vs. fuel and energy gains (PDF).

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In this next one, NBC’s Anne Thompson talks to Lars Stromberg, CEO of Vattenfall Group, as they walk around the world’s only clean coal power plant, where an East German energy research team has devised a $100 million pilot project that burns coal with pure oxygen—a cleaner process than using air—and stores the fly ash in concrete.

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Coal, like it or not, is cheap and abundant. Yet, so-called clean coal technology is nowhere near ready for prime time. China alone is building two coal-burning power plants each week, with no let-up in sight. What proportion of our available resources should be spent on looking for ways to burn coal cleanly versus developing other clean technologies like solar, wind, geothermal, that we have available to us right now?

After years of debate and planning, the St. Paul, MN city council has voted unanimously to move forward with a unique plan to produce biogas from manure and ethanol waste in rural farms and pump it miles to power an enormous paper recycling plant.

The energy-efficiency of recycling paper is not the best, so this plan is a welcome alternative-fuel twist to the standard process.

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For the first time in America, a company has developed an efficient battery solution to storing wind power, a clear answer to critics who claim turbines are unreliable.

Xcel Energy’s “Wind-to-Battery” project is currently being tested on a Minnesota wind farm. The company believes that the 80-ton battery will power 500 homes for 7 hours when fully charged. The battery’s 20 50-kilowatt modules together are roughly the size of two semi- trailers and can store 7.2 megawatt-hours of electricity.

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On December 3rd, Air New Zealand will be the first commercial airline to power one of its jets with a second generation non-food biofuel made from the Jatropha plant. Jatropha is viewed as having a huge potential as a major source of oil for sustainable biofuel production.

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A modern team of Italian researchers has uncovered a device invented by fellow Italian G.D. Botto in 1833 that can be used to generate hydrogen with inexpensive, everyday parts. By reflecting sunlight from two parabolic mirrors onto a hollow tube wrapped in metal and filled with water, the device generates enough electricity to produce hydrogen through electrolysis. Theoretically, the device is so simple that anybody could build it in their garage.

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A Dutch researcher has developed a magnesium, titanium and nickel alloy that has huge potential as a hydrogen storage tank for cars of the future. On a relative basis, the weight of a storage tank made from this alloy would be 60% lighter than a lithium ion battery that could take a car the same distance.

One of the major stumbling blocks of hydrogen cars (fuel cell or otherwise) involves the storage of hydrogen on board. Hydrogen is very combustible and poses an extreme fire/explosion danger, especially when stored as a highly compressed gas.

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A London manager for an energy saving company has found himself the recipient of some incredible luck after walking away from his converted Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) Peugeot that had, moments before, exploded. The incident occurred while he was driving at 30 miles per hour after lighting a cigarette.

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The process works by chopping the complex raw wood molecules into smaller and simpler bits — the end product being single sugar molecules. The method can also be used on other second generation ethanol feedstocks such as grass straw. Once you’ve made the sugar, the rest of the process of making ethanol is as simple as making beer — literally.

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UPS will field two hydraulic hybrids in Minneapolis, MN, in early 2009 and an additional five hydraulic hybrid trucks will be deployed later in 2009 and early 2010. Although this sounds like a tiny fleet, keep in mind that this is the largest scale commercial test of hydraulic hybrids ever conducted.

The UPS hybrid hydraulic truck is a standard-looking 24,000 pound package car, with an EPA-patented diesel series hydraulic hybrid drive attached to the rear axle.

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