Seat 75E is not the seat you want on a flight from Cape Town to London. Middle seat, last row, strangers on both sides, for nearly 12 hours.
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In an online debate run by The Economist, Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute and Steve Sawyer of the Global Wind Energy Council have been debating the effectiveness of natural gas vs. renewables in limiting the world’s carbon emissions.
It’s an understatement to say we’re living in a time of uncertainty. Wind resource assessment is not unlike prospecting for oil and gas. It uses sophisticated technology to gather large volumes of data; estimates and projections are made from complex models; and risk is managed by quantifying the uncertainties at each step. In the wind industry, developers gather data on the wind at prospective sites, analyze the data, and model the performance of a future wind farm.
If you want to get a good ROI then you need a good PPA for which you will need a low LCOE, which will require a low CPKw, a high NCF and low O&M. Got it?
As the mother of one young child and another on the way, I’ve been following the debate about childhood vaccination and autism quite closely. Earlier this month we learned that the work of Andrew Wakefield, the British researcher who posited a link between autism and childhood vaccination, was fraudulent.
As 2010 ends and a new year begins, most organizations (and individuals) are focused on their goals for 2011. At my company, we’ve finished our strategic and department planning and employees are tuned in to our direction for 2011.
I believe it was Winston Churchill who, when complimented on one of his witty, apparently spontaneous ripostes, said that people would be surprised by how much time it took to prepare his comments. I can relate. In my world control is the goal. We financial people use historical information to forecast what we believe is going to happen over the short, medium, and long term. We do not like surprises and, often to our children's annoyance, avoid unplanned action. Whilst this controlled environment has its advantages, it can hamper creativity — and creativity is what leads to new products, which leads to growth and profitability.
A recent trip to Beijing for the China Wind Power 2010 conference offered me the rare opportunity to reflect back on the future of the wind energy industry. You may have had that sensation of deja vu, the sudden realization you have seen a specific scene before, but the strength of the sensation on this trip was rare for me, and humbling.
When the idea of doing a company blog was initially raised, I remember my immediate reaction, “How am I going to make time for this?” Time I now realize that just about a year ago I stood in front of a Women of Wind Energy group in San Francisco telling them the importance of talking and writing about what you do. Let me set the scene…
I guess I don’t really get it. Nimby, or nimbyism that is. I mean I get that the pristine mountain ridge, the amber waves of grain and the wine dark sea are most lovely when unadulterated -- no houses, factories, power lines or wind turbines. What I don’t get is that the visual price of wind turbines on the top of our ridge, across the expanse of our prairie or on the horizon of our sea is seen as greater than the price of their West Virginian ridges with their tops removed for coal production or those rolling lawns dotted with white crosses from defending access to oil reserves or their beaches fouled and their seas slick with oil spilled from depths.