STUFF

OPEC: Venezuela's proven reserves world's largest.

Australian coal sector has put up $70B for new projects.

Nissan Leaf overtaking Chevy Volt. I guess in sales. Same old story. Japan beats Detroit. Because Americans buy Japanese instead of American. Go figure. OK, America a little more expensive. A little? But what does it take for Americans to buy American? I guess the truth that we aren't being taken for being patriotic.

Brazil eth prices bottoming out.

Zimbabwe turning back to biofuels because of oil prices.

Study: 60% of Texans suspended, expelled or other punishment before HS graduation. Probably not that much out of the US norm? Hell, I was suspended for speeding down the hill with guys sitting on top of my back seat with the top down. What was wrong about that? THEY were the ones sitting on the dam top!

China Development Bank signed $2B credit with Ecuador to support irrigation, hydro power projects. $680M for 4 hydro plants. 8-yr loan @ 6.9%, 2-yr grace period. Where the heck is Ecuador?

Euro Investment Bank helping Rwanda with $530M hydro project. Hotel Rwanda. I remember that.

Greece paying out more interest on its debt - 50B Euros - than tax revenues of 46B. Ireland is 30B to 34. Portugal 24 to 38. What if interest rates go up?

ALEX (Alexander&Baldwin) and Kauai Island Utility Coop plan 6MW solar PV farm with batt storage system. Completion by end of  '12. ALEX already providing 5MW of hydro power on the island.

GE to supply 45MW of wind turbines for Estonia wind farm. Completion in '12. At end of '10, Estonia had 149MW windcap installed, now ~570MW in devel. GE also partnered up with Lowe's to provide EV chargers for home/commercial installs.

WFR and FLEX announced 400 new jobs to ramp up solar panel prod at FLEX's Ontario plant. Ontario's feed-in-tariff (FIT) program requires 60% domestic content.

Georgia - the country - will be getting 8 new hydro power plants this year. Turk, Korean developers investing $1.5B.

Gamesa to supply 70MW of wind turbines for 2 wind projects in Spain. Online by end of yr.

Renewable E (clean E plus biomass) accounted for ~1/2 of 194GW of world's newly installed capac in '10. Delivered close to 20% of total elgen, capac ~ 1/4 of total. At least 119 countries had some kind of policy target or direct support for renewables. FITs most common. Total renewable investment $211B in '10 v. $160B in '09. Global solar prod/market uberdoubled in '10 from '09. Germany added more PV in '10 than entire world did in '09.

Japan may have exported radioactive beef. Well, why admit it if not asked, huh? I don't eat beef lately. But I'm just trying to get my blood pressure down. I miss the taste, though, to be true. And why the hell should I be denying myself anything I can have at this point in my life? Well, that seems to be something between me and myself. Sorry to bother ye.

Cloud computing has potential to save large US comps up to $12.3B/y by '20, let alone the GHG savings of est. 86M met tons of C. Primary driver, though, is time to market: several minutes v. up to 45 days for servers. And under 1-yr paybacks from transferring human resources.

China's CNOOC agreed to take over Canadian oil sands developer OPTI for ~ $2.1B. Deal may be finished in Q4. OPTI's main asset a 35% working interest in project designed to produce 58kb/d.

India started construction on their 25th nuclear plant. US possibly in on it.

If you want to build a utility-scale PV solar project in the US, you'd be lucky to get money at 9-11%. Add in novel tech - CIGS, concentrating solar, etc - and add 2%. Germany maybe 7% or less. They've been at it a little longer. Senate recently passed a Clean E Financing Act. But haven't seen that come out of the mire.

Well, there was more to garner and glean, but I am again done out of juice. So. Happy trails, pards.