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LONDON, UK -- A clear link between buildings boasting a high Energy Star rating and those commanding high rental premiums has been revealed by a new study of US commercial properties.

The study, commissioned by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and carried out by researchers from Maastricht University and the University of California, Berkeley, is thought to be the first to confirm the case for landlords making their properties more energy efficient.

The survey of almost 900 buildings found that buildings with an Energy Star certificate attracted rental premiums of three per cent per sq ft compared with "non-green buildings" of the same size, location and function.

When rental concessions were removed from the equation the premium was higher still with Energy Star buildings attracting a premium of over six per cent.

In addition, green buildings were even more attractive to buyers, securing a premium of around 16 per cent when sold. The researchers calculated that the sale premium meant that improving the energy efficiency of the average non-green building would increase its capital value by $5.5m (£3.8m).

Simon Rubinsohn, chief economist at the RICS, said that the research should help strengthen the case for green building upgrades.

"Previously with only anecdotal evidence available, it is understandable that the uptake of some measures has been frustratingly slow," he said. "With more comprehensive evidence-based research, such as this paper, the economic argument for having an energy efficient building will be strong."

The correlation between green buildings and higher rents is also likely to strengthen, according to John Alker of the U.K.'s Green Building Council. "As an industry we have not been providing energy efficiency ratings for that long, so it is understandable that evidence of rental premiums has been a bit patchy up to now," he said. "But that is changing and as more companies understand that they will be operating in a carbon constrained world with a price on emissions that will translate into low carbon buildings having higher valuations."

[You can download the report, "Doing Well by Doing Good? An analysis of the financial performance of green office buildings in the USA," from GreenerBuildings.com.]

NEW YORK, April 6 (Reuters) - The Empire State Building is going "green" in a model project that will save about $4.4 million a year on energy.

Completed in 1931, the Art Deco building immortalized in the film "King Kong" has been named by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. It is currently undergoing a $500 million renovation, including $100 million to go "green".

Anthony Malkin, president of W&M Properties, which owns the building, said the technology was devised as a model to retrofit other buildings.

The Clinton Climate Initiative is putting up $20 million for the first five stages of a $100 million project to make the skyscraper, once the tallest in the world, a model of energy efficiency and conservation. The Clinton Climate Initiative, founded by President Bill Clinton, works with cities on programs to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The entire plan will cut energy consumption in the 102-story building by 38 percent.

The first five stages are expected to take about 18 months to complete and will account for about 54 percent of Malkin's total energy-reduction goal.

Many new buildings, such as 1 Bryant Park in Manhattan, have built-in technology to make them energy efficient. But nearly 75 percent of the 4.64 million buildings in the United States are over 20 years old, according to U.S. Department of Energy, and were not built to conserve energy.

Commercial buildings are responsible for 79 percent of all carbon emissions in New York City.

The plan that will turn the Empire State Building "green" was devised by energy services company Johnson Controls Inc (JCI.N), project manager Jones Lang LaSalle Inc (JLL.N), the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Rocky Mountain Institute, which evaluates energy policy and initiatives.

The group avoided the parameters for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, a voluntary national rating system of sustainable buildings, so it would not be restrained, Malkin said. However, the finished project will qualify the building for a LEED gold rating.

Plans for the building include:

* On-site upgrades of its 6,500 windows.

* New air-conditioning and heating systems that adjust to demand and also generate cool water.

* Insulating the space between radiators and the outside of the building to trap heat and cold air.

* Installing energy-efficient lighting that can be set to light hallways and common areas only when they are occupied.

* Upgrading the existing building-control system to provide more details about demand and use of its systems.

* Introducing an Internet-based system for tenants to monitor their energy use and show them how to conserve. (Reporting by Ilaina Jonas; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- A new law on the books in the city of Los Angeles offers big hope for both the green building and green jobs movements.

The L.A. City Council yesterday unanimously passed a "Green Building Retrofit Ordinance" that will retrofit all city-owned buildings larger than 7,500 square feet or built before 1978 with a target of hitting LEED Silver-level certification.

The green jobs element of the project involves putting highest priority on retrofitting buildings that are located in low-income communities, as well as buildings that directly benefit those communities, like libraries and recreation centers.

Among the other goals of the ordinance as outlined by the Los Angeles Apollo Alliance [PDF], are to:

• Establish a pipeline to green careers by recruiting disadvantaged workers into the city training programs that can train and connect unemployed and underemployed workers from under-served communities to construction apprenticeship positions on green retrofits and to job placement elsewhere in the public and private sector;
• Foster inner city economic development by supporting local minority and women-owned green business development;
• To ensure quality green products are being used & purchased locally, encourage local green manufacturing, purchase locally produced green goods that prevent waste and prohibits toxic chemicals that are unhealthy for workers for retrofitting;
• Foster public sector career development within the city by hiring city workers from city training programs, and upgrade part time workers to full time.

The ordinance was developed by the L.A. Apollo Alliance, a broad coalition of community, labor and environmental groups. The green building retrofit ordinance is the group's first initiative.

"The 'Green Building Retrofit Ordinance' shows how environment and energy policies can stimulate California's economy. It will put people to work in green jobs, generate revenue for local businesses, save L.A. taxpayers up to $6 million in energy costs and cut global warming pollution," Derek Walker, director of the Environmental Defense Fund's California Climate Initiative, said in a statement supporting the ordinance. "Los Angeles is setting an example that cities nationwide can follow."

The retrofit ordinance is just the latest in Los Angeles' green plans: In addition to striving to be the country's greenest city, in February of this year the city launched a plan to replace all 140,000 of its streetlights with long-lasting, energy efficient LEDs, a move that will save $48 million in energy and maintenance costs and cut carbon emissions by 197,000 tons over a seven-year period.

In a report released about the same time as the LED lighting overhaul, the Rocky Mountain Institute highlighted the benefits of energy efficiency -- in buildings and elsewhere -- to the U.S.: By boosting energy efficiency, the country could cut electricity use by 30 percent, and reduce the need for coal-fired power plants by 60 percent.

Have you ever considered washing a single item of clothing in your washing machine?

Apparently, if you're the proud owner of an energy- or water-efficient washer, you're more likely to do just that.

This kind of behavior, as chronicled in a 2008 report from University of Michigan economist Lucas Davis, goes hand-in-glove with the findings of a study just out from The Shelton Group. It offers a new wrinkle on the "Snackwells Effect" -- what happens when dieters think they can get away with eating a whole box of Snackwells (for instance) low-calorie cookies. You know, because they're "healthy."

The news comes from the Shelton Group's Utility Pulse survey, which surveyed people around the country to find if they're taking steps to be more energy efficient. The findings are revealing, a bit concerning, but not entirely surprising.

Almost 33 percent of respondents to the survey said they have taken steps to be more energy efficient, but still say they're not seeing the savings in their energy bills.

It could be in part because of the Snackwells Effect. From an article in USA Today:

People who install efficient lights lose 5%-12% of the expected energy savings by leaving them on longer, said Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez of the non-profit American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. People who buy an efficient furnace lose 10%-30% of their savings, probably from raising the thermostat, she said.

"It doesn't mean energy efficiency is a waste of time," says Sussex University's Steve Sorrell, who wrote a 2007 report for the federally funded UK Energy Research Centre on the phenomenon, which economists call the takeback effect. It does mean that "standards on efficiency will not be sufficient by themselves."

On top of the finding the people aren't seeing the savings from their energy efficient purchases, the Utility Pulse survey found that most people don't believe they're using any more electricity than they used to.

According to a post on the Shelton Group's blog:

61% of the population told us in our Energy Pulse® study that they’re not using more electricity today than they were five years ago, yet, as a nation, our consumption increased 10%. In Utility Pulse, a little over 70% tell us that they think their homes are efficient…but about the same number also told us their homes are over 20 years old. So it’s unlikely those homes are, in fact, efficient.

This looks to me like the word is getting out about energy efficient products -- whether CFLs or Energy Star washing machines -- but that companies and others need to go beyond just messaging to actual education about conservation. And that's exactly the message from a great post we ran just yesterday from Suzanne Shelton, the president and namesake of the group that conducts the Utility Pulse survey:

Obviously, the missing link is education. But that piece is tricky. Most consumers don't want to hear a big list of things they're doing wrong or a list of things they need to change or a list of threats of what will happen if they don't change their ways. (It never worked when your mother used those tactics did it?) Yet most green marketing boils down to exactly that.

Bottom line: If you want to motivate a consumer to make a sustainable choice, you've got to tell him what's in it for him.

Like all big coal-fired power plants, the 1,600-megawatt-capacity Schwarze Pumpe plant in Spremberg, Germany, is undeniably dirty. Yet a small addition to the facility—a tiny boiler that pipes 30 MW worth of steam to local industrial customers—represents a hope for salvation from the global climate-changing consequences of burning fossil fuel.

OXYFUEL: In September 2007 the oxyfuel combustion chamber is lifted into place at the Schwarze Pumpe power plant in Germany--one of the first power plants in the world to capture carbon dioxide. Courtesy of Vattenfall

To heat that boiler, the damp, crumbly brown coal known as lignite—which is even more polluting than the harder black anthracite variety—burns in the presence of pure oxygen, a process known as oxyfuel, releasing as waste both water vapor and that more notorious greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO₂). By condensing the water in a simple pipe, Vattenfall, the Swedish utility that owns the power plant, captures and isolates nearly 95 percent of the CO₂ in a 99.7 percent pure form.

That CO₂ is then compressed into a liquid and given to another company, Linde, for sale; potential users range from the makers of carbonated beverages, such as Coca-Cola, to oil firms that use it to squeeze more petroleum out of declining deposits. In principle, however, the CO₂ could also be pumped deep underground and locked safely away in specific rock formations for millennia.

From the International Energy Agency to the United Nations–sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such carbon capture and storage (CCS), particularly for coal-fired power plants, has been identified as a technology critical to enabling deep, rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. After all, coal burning is responsible for 40 percent of the 30 billion metric tons of CO₂ emitted by human activity every year.

"There is the potential for the U.S. and other countries to continue to rely on coal as a source of energy while at the same time protecting the climate from the massive greenhouse gas emissions associated with coal," says Steve Caldwell, coordinator for regional climate change policy at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

Even President Barack Obama has labeled the technology as important for "energy independence" and included $3.4 billion in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for "clean coal" power.

Today three types of technology can capture CO2 at a power plant. One, as at Schwarze Pumpe, involves the oxyfuel process: burning coal in pure oxygen to produce a stream of CO₂-rich emissions. The second uses various forms of chemistry—in the form of amine scrubbers, special membranes or ionic liquids—to pull carbon dioxide out of a more mixed set of exhaust gases. The third is gasification, in which liquid or solid fuels are first turned into synthetic natural gas; CO₂ from the conversion of the gas can be siphoned off.

Some U.S. utilities have already built or upgraded plants to capture CO₂, which they either store or sell. The 180-MW Warrior Run coal-fired power plant in Cumberland, Md., already captures 96 percent of its CO₂ emissions to sell for use as a fire extinguisher or dry ice. The Kingsport power plant in Kingsport, Tenn., has been capturing CO₂ since 1984 to sell to carbonated beverage makers.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has invested more than $3 billion since 2001 to fund multiple CCS projects being conducted by seven regional partnerships, including demonstrations of ammonia capture technology at the massive coal-fired Pleasant Prairie power plant in Kenosha County, Wisc., and the R. E. Burger plant in Shadyside, Ohio. The Obama administration may even resurrect the FutureGen project—a 275-MW IGCC power plant that would capture 90 percent of its emissions; the Bush administration had canceled it because of spiraling costs (which may have been miscalculated). And the DoE has offered at least $8 billion in loan guarantees for coal-fired power plants with CCS.

Australia and China have demonstrated that postcombustion capture is possible in pilot plants. At Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria, a pilot plant run by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) will capture 1,000 metric tons of CO₂ a year; the Australian research organization has also collaborated with China's Huaneng Group to use an amine scrubber to capture CO₂ from a co-generation power plant in Beijing and then sell it.

But although multiple projects around the world examine or test aspects of CCS, few of them have been connected to a full-size power plant: one producing on average 500 MW and upward of 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a day—the core of the emissions problem. And the few that have been are either venting the CO₂ after capturing it or selling it, instead of taking the next step and storing the greenhouse gas underground.

"It makes nine metric tons of CO₂ per hour at full load," says Staffan Gortz, Vattenfall's CCS spokesman, of the $100-million CCS demonstration boiler at Schwarze Pumpe. But he acknowledges that "we don't have a storage site yet."

Carbon capture is regarded as a big step towards achieving CO2 emissions targets. Photograph: Joel W. Rogers/Corbis

The world's first retrofit of a power plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will begin operating this month in the south of France.

At a power plant at Lacq, energy company Total has upgraded an existing gas-fired boiler with CCS technology – a crucial step towards reducing carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants worldwide.

With renewable energy sources a long way from covering the world's increasing demand for energy, many experts believe that developing reliable technology to allow countries to burn fossil fuels without releasing dangerous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Experts welcomed Total's achievement but added that it highlighted how Britain was being left behind in the development of an important technology to head off climate change.

"CCS remains the most important initiative that needs to be implemented both here and around the world in reducing emissions from coal, gas and oil-fired power stations," said Environment Agency chairman Chris Smith.

"[But this project] re-emphasises the importance of making sure that Britain takes an early opportunity to put itself in the lead worldwide in taking the technology forward."

Stuart Haszeldine, professor of geology and an expert in CCS at the University of Edinburgh, was more scathing. "The UK has been first to stoke up interest in CCS, in the 1990s. But since then, CCS has not received any significant government support to make any real projects happen."

He said the technology was essential for the UK to meet its climate change targets. "We have to completely clean up CO2 emissions from gas as well as coal by 2030, if the UK is to meet the legally binding decreases set by the climate change committee," said Haszeldine. "Projects like Lacq will help to make cleanup cheaper and bring that reality closer."

The 60m euro Lacq project will transport and store 60,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year in the nearby depleted gas field at Rousse – once the biggest onshore natural gas field in Europe, but which is now almost empty. It is the first to link together all parts of the carbon capture chain from burning natural gas to isolating CO2 from flue gases and burying it underground.

Reusing an existing pipeline that has been transporting natural gas from Rousse to Lacq for 50 years, Total engineers plan to push the carbon dioxide from the power plant in the other direction, injecting the gas into the Rousse reservoir at a depth of around 4,500m. The Lacq project will run for two years, after which engineers will monitor the Rousse gas field to demonstrate that the carbon dioxide remains safely trapped inside.

Last year, the Schwarze Pumpe power station in north Germany became the first demonstration experiment to build a a 12MW fossil fuel-fired boiler from scratch with full CCS – it will bury 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year 3,000m below the surface of the depleted Altmark gas field.

CCS is seen as the technolology that could save the planet from the expected increased use of coal in power stations around the world. At its best, it could trap up to 90% of a power plant's carbon emissions and, though each element of the capture, transportation and storage process is already proven and in use, only the Schwarze Pumpe plant has put the chain together until now.

Despite agreement from almost all sides that CCS must be made commercial if the world can ever hope to meet its carbon-reduction targets, a full-scale system remains years away, largely because of the costs involved in its development. As a result, many leading power companies have been reluctant to fund CCS individually, arguing that governments should also shoulder some of the financial risks.

The UK government wants to fund a single demonstration plant using post-combustion capture technology and is running a competition to decide which new power station will get the go-ahead. Within the next few weeks, ministers are expected to announce proposals on how to fund further CCS projects in the UK beyond the competition.

But the British government's procrastination has forced many CCS projects planned in the past decade to be abandoned or moved abroad. These include BP's plans to build a carbon capture plant at Peterhead and Centrica's Eston Grange project.

Haszledine also criticised the lack of research effort in the UK, saying just over £6m has been spent on CCS research in the UK in the past decade compared with $2bn to date in Canada, and annual spends of around £40m in Norway and several hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia. New CCS demonstration projects are due to start operating later this year in the United States and Australia.

At Lacq, Total has fitted one of the plant's 30MW gas-fired boilers with oxyfuel technology, where the fossil fuel is burned in an atmosphere enriched with oxygen. The resulting exhaust gas is then composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide and water vapour, which can be easily separated and stored.

"Total needs to master this new technology," said Luc de Marliave, climate change coordinator at the energy company. "Oxycombustion had never been tested at this scale in such an integrated CCS scheme."

Philippe Paelinck of Alstom, the engineeering company that designed and built the CCS equipment at Lacq, said the experiment was an important milestone. "We first proved the feasibility of retrofitting an installation to carbon capture and storage, but also this will be the first demonstration in Europe of CCS with [existing] integrated CO2 pipeline transportation and storage."

De Marliave said Total chose to test oxyfuel because it could potentially save costs in future. "Our calculations showed that, with oxycombustion in that type of application, you could reduce the cost of capture – which is a large part of the cost of the CCS chain – around two-thirds of the cost roughly. For just capture, existing post combustion technologies would cost you something like 70 euros per tonne of CO2. Oxycombustion could reduce this to 35 euros per tonne."

Despite that, he said Total was still open to the investigating the other types of CCS technology, both pre- and post- combustion. "We are not set on one technology. We selected oxycombusiton for the pilot but it doesn't mean that we are not very much interested in post-combustion as well."

Plans for government-funded CCS demonstration plants across Europe have been moving slowly. The EU wants 12 demonstration plants in operation next decade and has reserved 300m carbon credits from the next stage of the European emissions trading scheme to help fund the technology.

In January, the European Commission proposed earmarking €1.25bn to kickstart carbon capture and storage (CCS) at 11 coal-fired plants across Europe, including four in Britain: the Kingsnorth plant in Kent, Longannet in Fife, Tilbury in Essex and Hatfield in Yorkshire would share €250m under the two-year scheme.

LaVerne McCoy weatherized her home near St. Louis in the hope of lowering her electricity bill.

ST. LOUIS — Chatting with a visitor about energy issues in the back of the Greater Mount Carmel Baptist Church here, a group of women exploded in laughter at the idea that their electric rates were among the lowest in the nation.

“We can barely afford what we have now,” said Renee Daniels-Hanner, 48, an office manager who lives with her husband, a postal employee, and their teenage daughter in a three-bedroom brick home in the city’s Baden neighborhood.

The house, built in 1953, has central air-conditioning to ward off the heat and humidity of Mississippi River summers, a double-door refrigerator, a washer and dryer, six televisions, three computers and an iron (“We iron all the time,” Ms. Daniels-Hanner said). The family’s monthly electric bill averages $160 in winter and $250 in summer.

From the wheat fields of the north-central region to Kansas City’s necklace of industrial parks to the brick street fronts of St. Louis, Missouri’s reliance on cheap electricity is deeply ingrained.

But few pay attention to the origin of their little-noticed savings: 21 coal-fired power plants that emit more than 75 million tons of carbon dioxide annually and generate 80 percent of Missouri’s electricity. Even residents who endorse wind and solar energy have grown accustomed to the benefits of state policies that favor coal by putting a premium on low-cost electricity. So the idea of federal climate legislation that could increase electricity bills by putting a price on emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide is unsettling.

For Missourians, said Robert Clayton, chairman of the state’s Public Service Commission, “the consequence of using more power hasn’t been great.”

Missouri is hardly alone. Nebraska, Indiana and Iowa are also states where coal turns on most of the lights.

That is why, even before Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats, proposed legislation that would put a price on carbon-dioxide emissions, Senate and House Democrats from coal-using states began to push back.

They are concerned that the new costs would get passed on to consumers, to Ms. Daniels-Hanner, to farmers from rural Missouri and to employers like the energy-hungry Noranda aluminum plant in New Madrid in the southeast of the state, which has 1,000 workers. And they worry that in an already wounded economy, increased costs could turn one of the relatively few economic blessings into a blight.

Here in Missouri, economic incentives built into the state’s laws, history and habits encourage burning as much coal as possible. Peabody Energy started as a local business a century ago and now promotes itself as the world’s leading coal merchant. Trainloads of Wyoming coal cross Missouri daily.

The cars arrive at places like Meramec, a 56-year-old, 850-megawatt power plant in south St. Louis County. The cost of building the sprawling plant has long since been paid off by its owner, AmerenUE, an investor-owned utility. Because Meramec generates electricity from cheap fuel, it produces cheap power. And because Meramec’s operational costs are low and most equipment-replacement costs have been recouped, AmerenUE often underbids competitors in selling excess electricity out of state. These profits give Missouri consumers an extra discount. From 1987 to 2007, AmerenUE and its predecessor, Union Electric, did not raise electric rates, while power production rose about 65 percent.

Estimates of the effects of the proposed federal climate legislation on electric rates vary. The central thrust of the Waxman-Markey bill is to make carbon-dioxide emissions expensive by capping them and creating allowances that utilities must acquire to function.

In Washington, the measure is seen as a starting point and has little Republican support, which would make the backing of coal-state Democrats like Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri critical.

Jaime Haro, AmerenUE’s director of asset management and trading, said his company paid $30 to produce a megawatt-hour of electricity. The coal burned emits roughly a ton of carbon dioxide. If federal legislation effectively prices emissions at $30 a ton — estimates have varied from $20 to $115 — “my costs could double,” Mr. Haro said.

Those costs probably would be passed on to customers.

For now, Missouri ranks among the lowest five states in retail electricity rates — about 6.3 cents per kilowatt hour, compared with a national average of 8.9 cents.

Ms. Daniels-Hanner and LaVerne McCoy find that surprising. Ms. McCoy, who works for a community-based group, ADE Consulting Services, has spent $4,000 weatherizing her split-level home in Richmond Heights, just west of St. Louis. Her bills still average $320 monthly.

About 130 miles to the northwest, Wendi Wood, a teacher, and her husband, Lee Wood, a fourth-generation farmer, live near the small town of Clarence with their three teenagers. Their six-bedroom house is four years old, and they, too, have many appliances, including seven televisions.

Electricity costs them about $280 in winter, $360 in summer. After the fall harvest, they dry grain in a silo; then the bills run $600 a month.

“Electricity is a major factor in what we can afford,” Ms. Wood said. She wants Washington to fight climate change, but said, “Don’t hurt the rural farmer and rural America to do it.”

The state is taking some steps to reduce its dependence on coal, like legislation pending in the General Assembly to give financial incentives for conservation. In November, voters approved expanding renewable-energy options.

State utilities have varied plans. AmerenUE talks of building a companion to its nuclear power plant. Kansas City Power & Light is buying more wind power to offset emissions from a coal plant under construction. Springfield’s municipal utility is experimenting with underground storage of carbon dioxide. Associated Electrical Cooperative Inc. offers energy-saving light bulbs to its 800,000 rural customers and subsidizes home energy audits.

“Ultimately, there’s going to have to be a re-evaluation of Missouri’s future,” Mr. Clayton said.

Like Ms. Wood, Ms. Daniels-Hanner and Ms. McCoy worry about the effects of climate change.

“We want to help our grandchildren,” Ms. McCoy said. “My problem is that the brunt of the improvement is going to be put on the backs of those who can’t afford it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 11, 2009
An article on Thursday about Missouri’s dependence on coal misstated the unit of measurement in giving the amount of money that the utility AmerenUE spends to produce electricity. The cost is $30 to produce a megawatt-hour of electricity, not a megawatt of electricity.

A new study out of North Carolina details the sticker shock electric customers could experience if the state's two big utility companies move forward with plans to build four new nuclear reactors -- but it also offers ways to avoid it. The findings come as the industry's boosters in Congress are pushing ahead with plans to offer up to $50 billion in new nuclear subsidies.

Written by the former chair of Duke University's Economics Department for utility watchdog group NC WARN, "North Carolina's Energy Future" shows that electricity from new nuclear plants -- with an estimated price tag of at least $8 billion each -- will cost three to five times as much as the power now being generated by Duke Energy and Progress Energy. It also points out that upcoming carbon regulation will drive up the price of coal power.

The report describes how the companies could reduce electricity demand by as much as 3,700 megawatts within 15 years, which would not only avoid the need for expensive new nuclear plants but also allow the companies to retire heavily polluting coal-fired units. That would entail doing four things:

* Stop impeding progress toward real energy efficiency. "Through proven programs growing at a modest pace, efficiency can be increase at least 1% per year through 2023," the report says.

* Bring on more renewable energy. "At least 7.5% of electricity from new renewable sources is well within reach," it says, "especially as prices for solar equipment continue declining and as North Carolina joins other mid-Atlantic states in developing its large wind energy potential."

* Make modest increases in load control programs to soften peak demands.

* Add some cogeneration, which uses the heat generated as a byproduct of electricity production for domestic or industrial heating. A proven resource, cogeneration is largely untapped in North Carolina.

The NC WARN report adds to a growing body of evidence documenting what a poor deal nuclear power represents for the public. One of the most detailed and devastating analyses is found in a 2008 report titled "The Nuclear Illusion" by Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh of the Rocky Mountain Institute. That study put the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant at 14 cents per kilowatt hour compared to 7 cents per kilowatt hour from a wind farm, concluding that nuclear power is "so hopelessly uneconomic" that it's not even necessary to debate its serious safety issues.

In his paper titled "The Flawed Economics of Nuclear Power," Lester R. Brown of the Worldwatch Institute points out that Lovins' and Sheikh's analysis includes the costs of fuel, capital, operations, maintenance, transmission and distribution -- but doesn't include nuclear power's considerable costs for waste disposal, insuring plants against an accident, and decommissioning plants when they wear out.

"Given this huge gap, the so-called nuclear revival can succeed only by unloading these costs onto taxpayers," Brown writes. "If all the costs of generating nuclear electricity are included in the price to consumers, nuclear power is dead in the water."

Unfortunately, Congress has proven all too willing to unload nuclear power's exorbitant costs onto taxpayers. It's already offered $18.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies to new nuclear plants, and last week pro-nuclear lawmakers slipped an extra $50 billion for nuclear loan guarantees -- which would go to companies that default on their loans -- into the Senate's budget plan, the Washington Times reports:

Without debate, explanation or a recorded vote, senators accepted an amendment by Sen. Michael D. Crapo, Idaho Republican, to boost the department's "low-carbon" energy loan construction guarantee program by $50 billion over five years. The program would make it easier for the nuclear power industry to secure financing for plants, including the more than two dozen that are now pending.

Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio) also included the nuclear loan program expansion in an energy proposal they unveiled last week. The proposal was drawn up with help from Securing America's Future Energy (SAFE),  a group led by business executives and retired military leaders that advocates for reduced reliance on foreign oil.

House leaders stripped the same loan-guarantee proposal from the earlier economic stimulus bill after environmental advocates denounced it as a "bailout" for the nuclear industry. Environmental groups say they will lobby against the plan again.

(Photo of Progress Energy's Shearon Harris nuclear power plant in Wake County, N.C. from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's website)

We all hate packaging, but the Kyoto box is that rare thing—a cardboard carton that’s part of the solution. It’s also the winner of Forum for the Future’s Climate Challenge competition with HP and the Financial Times to find the year’s best climate change-tackling innovation. After voting by FT readers and mulling over by an eminent panel including Eileen Claussen and Rajendra Pachauri, it’s the Kyoto box, a solar-powered cardboard cooker that will take away the $75,000 prize.

It’s aimed at the 3 billion people who use firewood to cook, and in the words of Kenya-based Jon Bøhmer, the entrepreneur behind the scheme, “We’re saving lives and saving trees. I doubt if there is any other technology that can make so much impact for so little money.”

The box costs about $6 to make, and ironically uses the greenhouse effect to boil and bake. It consists of two boxes, one inside the other, with an acrylic cover, which lets solar energy in and traps it. Black paint on the inner box and silver foil on the outer help concentrate the heat, while a layer of straw or newspaper between the two provides insulation. By making it possible to boil water cheaply, Bøhmer believes the box will save some of the millions of children who die each year from water-borne diseases. It should also halve the need for firewood, saving an estimated two tonnes of carbon per family per year.

Kyoto box was amongst 300 projects from around the world that entered the competition. The runners-up were:

• Mootral, developed by Neem Biotech in the UK—a feed additive, derived from garlic, which cuts the methane in cow, sheep and other ruminant burps and farts by at least 5%, and up to 25% with optimum dosage. Methane from ruminants is estimated to be responsible for 20% of global warming;
• Evaporating Tiles developed by Loughborough University, an indoor cooling system which works by using exhaust air to evaporate water within hollow tiles built into a false ceiling. It halves the energy use of air-conditioning systems and can be used as a standalone.

The other finalists were Carbonscape, a joint New Zealand/UK venture to fix biomass carbon by turning wood into biochar—a kind of charcoal that can be used as soil conditioner, buried as a carbon sink, or burnt as a highly-efficient fuel; and Deflecktor, created by ADEF in the USA, an inexpensive, lightweight aerodynamic cover for truck wheels reduces drag and can cut fuel consumption by 2% on an eight-wheel rig.

We’re very pleased with the way the Climate Challenge has shown how green innovation can tackle climate change, and hope all the finalists will now find a faster route to market. Bøhmer says publicity from the competition has already generated opportunities for his venture with a number of companies and academic institutions interested in the stove. He is planning to use the prize to conduct mass trials in ten countries and is also developing a more robust cooker in corrugated plastic, which he says can be mass-produced as cheaply as the cardboard version.

Carbon credits should help the project scale up: Bøhmer says they will cover the cost of the boxes as well as a package of other affordable low-carbon products including a solar torch. Distribution will be critical if the stove is to overcome cultural barriers to cooking without flames. Bøhmer plans to distribute the package free on condition that families use it, and aims to work with women’s groups in each community to build acceptability.

Fish swim along a coral reef near a water bottle label and a plastic bag off the coast of a Red Sea resort Photograph: Mike Nelson/EPA

Was I being unfair last week? A lot of people thought so. I wrote a blog post maintaining that the campaign against plastic carrier bags - by the government, newspapers, celebrities and green groups - militates against wider environmental action. Perhaps I should have explained my frustrations more clearly: I have lost count of the number of people who cheerfully tell me that though they still fly six or ten times a year, they see themselves as green because they do their recycling and bring their own bags to the shops. It's not that we shouldn't greatly reduce the number of plastic bags we use: we should. But this has become a substitute for the big and significant measures we should be taking; not an addition to them.

Anyway, the issue is back in the news now as David de Rothschild sets sail in a recycled plastic boat to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a plastic sea hundreds of miles across, which looks like something dreamt up by Margaret Atwood in her dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. No one should doubt that marine plastic pollution is an issue. But how much of it consists of carrier bags? And to what extent are countries like the UK responsible?

I've just had a chance to perform an unscientific survey. Much of the plastic that enters the sea gets there via our rivers. I spent the Easter break canoeing down the River Wye. It's stunning. But, like all British rivers, it carries a load of human detritus. Because it goes into spate in the winter, much of this is stuck in the trees and bushes several feet above the current water level, which means you can't help seeing it. So here is my plastic twitcher's guide to the River Wye.

Well over 90% of all the plastic waste along the river was agricultural: great festoons of black or transparent sheeting, ripped and shredded then hung from the trees like hideous bunting. This shouldn't be too surprising: the Wye passes through the horticultural zone of Herefordshire, where every farm must use the equivalent of a million carrier bags to mulch the soil and boost plant growth. Upstream, the dairy farms use almost as much to cover sileage bales and manure clamps. Because this feral plastic lives outdoors, it's more likely to migrate to the rivers during storms than the unadventurous domestic carrier bag.

This reminds me that while carrier bags are responsible for 3.2% of domestic waste, domestic waste is not the same as total waste. By far the greatest sources by weight are the mining and construction sectors, because of the spoil and rubble they produce. So we won't count those, as this isn't the kind of material we're talking about. Households, according to the Office for National Statistics, produce 30.9 million tonnes of waste. Industry and commerce, minus mining and construction, produces 81.5 million tonnes.

So carrier bags used by households account for 0.88% of total domestic, industrial and commercial waste. This is still important, of course, and still needs to be reduced, but by banging on about this issue to the exclusion of all else we leave 99% of the problem unaddressed.

Anyway, in a very poor second place on the banks of the River Wye came another familiar species: the plastic bottle; followed, at some distance, by the polystyrene burger box. Carrier bags were so poorly represented in my sample that I am considering reporting the matter to the Royal Society for the Protection of Plastic Waste. I made just five definite sightings (though there were a couple of shreds which could have gone either way) over 50 miles of river. I would rather they weren't there, but by comparison to almost any other environmental issue, this one just doesn't rate.

Yes of course we should wage war on the plastic bag. But it should be our 1000th environmental priority, not our first and - in some cases - only one.

Smarter is not always better--at least when it comes to utilities.

More than a decade after initial reports said critical infrastructure in the U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattack, the situation has only worsened as utilities move their control systems closer to the Internet and install smart-grid technology, according to security experts.

Questions about the security of infrastructure in the United States arose this week following a Wall Street Journal report that said the nation's electricity grid has been compromised by foreign hackers. And several experts said in interviews this week that some energy systems have, in fact, gotten less secure as they have modernized. The Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) control systems used by the energy industry used to be segregated from public networks. But they have increasingly become more dependent on Internet protocol-based systems, the experts said. At the same time, their security precautions are inefficient, they said.

"The end result is that, as part of our modernization, we've made ourselves more vulnerable," said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

"Plant control networks (and their programmable logic controllers) should be disconnected from the Internet," said Peter "Mudge" Zatko, technical director of the national intelligence research unit at BBN Technologies. "These are the things lifting and lowering the plutonium rods into the water to make steam...It's on the Internet. This is terrifying."

Myriad operational problems
For many utility workers, it's easier to log onto the Internet from home when they get called at night. But if those home computers are infected with spyware, they can be used by attackers to get into the control systems, which are supposed to be separated from the Internet.

And there are other problems that are more deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations of a utility's business. Network control software that utilities buy from outside vendors often includes the ability to run Web servers and enable remote access and wireless access. Then there are configuration problems, such as routers and other systems that use default passwords, or worse, don't use passwords at all, according to Zatko and others who have tested the systems.

"Energy management systems really can't be connected to the Internet. It's going to be painful for some companies, but they're going to have to change this."

--Frank Heidt
CEO, Leviathan Security

"It's out of ease-of-use and the fact that there weren't strong restrictions (the electric utilities were deregulated to a large extent) that the networks are a mess in a lot of places," Zatko said. Often, "the systems themselves aren't robust because they were designed to be on networks that weren't talking to the public Internet."

Many warnings have been sounded over the years. In 1999, Zatko compiled a list of about 30 utilities whose plant control networks could be accessed remotely, and he says many of them still have the same problems today. In 2004, Gartner did a report concluding that the use of IP networks for critical infrastructure could serve as bait for cyberattackers.

"It's painfully easy to exploit" the control systems, said Frank Heidt, chief executive of professional security services company Leviathan Security. "Energy management systems really can't be connected to the Internet. It's going to be painful for some companies, but they're going to have to change this."

Last year, a security expert at the RSA conference detailed how easy it is to break into power plants by downloading malware to employee computers through a socially engineered e-mail that directs them to a malicious server. Meanwhile, Core Security found a hole in the Suitelink software that is used to automate operations at power stations, oil refineries, and production lines.

Lewis of the CSIS acknowledged that using the Internet opens utilities up to cyberattack risks, but said there are "sound economic reasons" for them doing so.

"Most of the critical infrastructure on the Internet is there for legitimate business purposes," agreed John Bumgarner, a research director at the nonprofit U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit.

Security company Industrial Defender has done more than 100 threat assessments over the past seven years, primarily in utility infrastructure, and identified 34,000 vulnerabilities, said company CEO Brian Ahern.

For the most part, utilities--among the most conservative businesses in spending on technology--don't do basic security monitoring of their power generation and distribution equipment, he said.

"You can't protect when you don't know what's happening. I think that less than five percent of utilities have a good sense of critical threats," he said.

Utilities "are sacrificing security for convenience and cost savings," said Richard Forno, a principal at KRvW, an information security consulting firm in Washington, D.C. "We've allowed the situation to get worse, and it will be harder to get away from these networks touching the public Net now that we are 10 years, 15 years into the process."

Smart grids: Efficient but insecure
IP networks aren't the only problem. The use of smart-grid technology, which consists of networked meters designed for adjusting electricity flows and monitoring everything from power plants to individual appliances in homes, are also putting critical systems at risk, experts said.

Critical infrastructure insiders in the U.S. and Canada surveyed last year said the energy sector was the industry most vulnerable to cyberattack. The survey cited many contributing factors: an increase in the number of access points through the use of sensors, smart meters, and third-party contractors with remote access capability; use of more IP-based networks; integration between corporate and operational networks; reliance on standard or commodity IT platforms such as Microsoft Windows; and lack of attention to security by network automation and control system vendors. The biggest bottleneck to improving critical infrastructure security is cost, followed by apathy, they said.

In March, IOActive, which provides application and smart-grid security services, said it had verified "significant" and "inherent" security flaws with multiple smart-grid platforms" and found them susceptible to common security vulnerabilities such as protocol tampering, buffer overflows, persistent and non-persistent rootkits, and code propagation.

"These vulnerabilities could result in attacks to the smart-grid platform causing utilities to lose momentary system control of their advanced metering infrastructure smart meter devices to unauthorized third parties," the company said in a release (PDF). "This would expose utility companies to possible fraud, extortion attempts, lawsuits, or widespread system interruption."

More than 2 million smart meters are in use in the U.S. today, and an estimated 73 utilities have ordered 17 million additional smart meters, according to IOActive. The Obama administration's proposed 2010 budget has earmarked $4.5 billion for smart-grid technologies in the electricity infrastructure.

"The plan now would be to put in largely unsecured networks for smart grid," said Lewis of CSIS. "Hopefully they'll fix it."

The worst case scenario is that a person would access and control a smart meter and control other networked smart meters to disrupt the grid, said Ahern of Industrial Defender.

Standards for securing smart-grid technologies are still being finalized, but Ahern thinks that government-led efforts to modernize the grid should focus more on designing security in right at the beginning.

"We've got to take a step back from the hurry-up approach with the smart grid," he said. "There needs to be a balanced approach between investing in (smart grid) deployments and building security deeply into it."

The vulnerability of the critical infrastructure isn't news, so why the Wall Street Journal report, with its unnamed sources, now?

The story is likely linked to turf battles within the federal government over which agency will oversee the cybersecurity policies, and get the funding for it, several of the security experts suggested. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security has been criticized for not doing enough on cybersecurity, while the director of Homeland Security's National Cybersecurity Center resigned recently, accusing the NSA of trying to wrest control.

The Obama administration in December ordered officials to do a 60-day review on the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity efforts, and that report is due to be released next week.

Meanwhile, the administration's proposed 2010 budget includes $355 million to support the base operations of the National Cyber Security Division and the efforts of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative.

"We're right at the point where they're naming new cybersecurity czars and there's a grab for funding between the Air Force, Navy, NSA, and others that want the cybersecurity budget," said Zatko. "There are a lot of renewed efforts in this particular field, and it's a field that's in a fair amount of disarray."

While experts discuss cybersecurity threats, physical attacks on infrastructure are taking place. AT&T said on Thursday that vandals are to blame for the massive phone and Internet outage in Silicon Valley on Thursday.