Word: cheap
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...long powered Icelandic dreams. Pockets of underground water heated by the earth's core may not be particularly glamorous, but tiny Iceland has spent decades figuring out useful ways to harness its heat and power, employing it for everything from baking bread to turning turbines. Geothermal power now provides cheap, clean heat to more than 90% of Icelandic homes, and generates 30% of the nation's electricity, a slice worth roughly $120 million. In recent years, as Icelanders became smitten with the idea that their ambitious banks could create a global financial center in the far north Atlantic, geothermal power...
...that owns Krafla, has also been in talks to supply power to an aluminum smelter that Alcoa plans to build nearby. The financial downturn has put that project on hold for now, but Alcoa, which already has one smelter in Iceland, still sees the country as a site for cheap, power-intensive smelters. By going geothermal, which has less impact on the environment, Alcoa believes it can mitigate the hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide a smelter emits every year. "If you compare the offset, it's six to eight times cleaner to produce here" than...
...time to replenish its heat. While the ongoing costs of a geothermal power plant are low - Krafla, for example, has only 15 full-time employees - the start-up technology needed to extract heat from a few miles beneath the earth's surface and convert it to electricity is not cheap. By some estimates, conducting the necessary geologic surveys and exploratory drilling for one plant can take up to eight years and $20 million before the turbines start turning. "The high cost is a barrier to everybody," says Karl Gawell, executive director of the U.S.-based Geothermal Energy Association...
...Avoided deforestation seems like a no-brainer - so why wasn't it included in the Kyoto Protocol? Ironically, it was omitted in part due to the work of a number of prominent environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They feared that avoided deforestation schemes could flood the trading market with countless cheap carbon credits; after all, there are an estimated 638 billion tons of carbon locked in the world's forests. If even a fraction of those credits are put on the market, it could let developed countries off the hook when it comes to making the hard changes in industry...
...gets to the wheels—it is lost in the engine idling. And only the last six percent accelerates the car and hits the brake when you stop.” According to Lovins, combining low mass and drag in cars with advanced propulsion not only provides a cheap way to save two thirds of the fuel needed but also yields a better performance. Lovins argued that the problem is not a lack of energy-efficient technology in transportation, but rather a dearth of knowledge on the part of companies about newer alternatives. “The innovation tree...