(*The Climate Framework for Uncertainty, Negotiation and Distribution – an Integrated Economic Assessment Model)
Contributed by Ian Cameron © 2017
Introduction
Government agencies, such as Environment and … Continue reading
via Friends of Science Calgary
September 29, 2017 at 07:58PM
Public Release: 28-Sep-2017
Case Western Reserve University
IMAGE: This is Anurag Gupta. view more
Credit: CWRU
With a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), researchers at Case Western Reserve University will develop a new financial product to attract a broader pool of long-term private investors to new technologies offered by energy startup companies.
The goal is to help bridge the so-called “valley of death”–the gap between a startup’s initial seed investment and later rounds of financing when the new company has already scaled up and is profitable. That gap can leave a promising startup struggling with cash-flow, as additional private investment can be difficult to secure until a new technology advances from an idea to proven success.
“There is an immense challenge in the new energy sector, with venture capitalists drifting away from clean technology investments in recent years, making it tougher for startups in this sector to prove their viability,” said Anurag Gupta, the H. Clark Ford Professor of Banking and Finance at the Weatherhead School of Management and principal investigator on the grant.
Joonki Noh, an assistant professor of banking and finance at the Weatherhead School, will serve as co-investigator.
A new financial product, tailored for a specific risk-return appetite
With the two-year, $600,000 DOE grant, the two researchers will design the new financial product with unique risk reduction strategies to pool investments from large capital providers–pension funds, insurance companies, and foundations, for instance; these investors currently shy away from this sector due to lack of suitable investment products tailored to their risk-return-payout preferences.
“We hope this facilitates billions of dollars to flow to new energy projects at the critical scale-up stage,” said Gupta. “This could help address a global problem by advancing efforts to finance sustainable energy.”
Most of these new technologies targeted for private investment aim to generate renewable energy and lower emissions of carbon and other gases that contribute to climate change, as well as reduce levels of particulate matters emitted from burning fossil fuels associated with a host of health issues–while at a lower unit cost.
“The participation of large capital providers like pension funds is critical to generating sufficient capital to finance widespread scale-up of these new technologies,” said Gupta, “since the traditional venture capital model has proved to be unsuitable for this sector.”
Commercializing a new energy technology often requires investing tens of millions of dollars–a significant risk to venture capitalists intrigued by an idea, but wary of its uncertain market performance. Energy investments also often takes much longer than the seven- to ten-year “exit” timeline that venture capitalists are known to prefer.
Grouping together steady and significant sources of long-term funds can allow for the investment in multiple energy projects at once, spreading out the inherent risk that can scare away support for individual companies.
“Right now, there is not much incentive for venture capitalists to experiment with investments in energy companies that may take 10 to 20 years to turn a profit, if ever,” said Gupta. “We are outside the venture capital world, which allows us to try out innovative new ideas.”
At the end of the two-year project, the goal is to obtain actual investments using the financing mechanism developed in this study to fund new technologies in energy.
“This is about as real as research can get,” Gupta said.
The project is one of 11 supported by $7.8 million in new DOE grants; Gupta will lead the only team from a university awarded one of the grants; the rest are investor and industry groups.
“What we’re trying to create could potentially be replicated in other sectors–such as biotech and pharmaceuticals–that share high investment risks and long periods of gestation before potential payoff,” said Gupta.
###
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
via Watts Up With That?
September 29, 2017 at 07:04PM
While looking for more information on the fossil-fuel free in nine steps campaign (see previous post), I encountered a similar looking campaign: ten measures to ban fossil energy to the past. It was similar because nine of the ten measures/steps were identical in both campaign, though they were placed in a different order. Unlike the webpage of the nine steps campaign, this page was actually dated. The ten-measures list was published on November 17, 2016. A week after the US elections.
This made me curious about the relationship between the nine- and the ten-steps campaign. Did the nine-steps campaign came first and was one step added in order to come to the ten-steps campaign? Or did the ten-measures campaign come first and did it morph it into the nine-steps campaign by one measure being tossed out? I needed to find the date of this nine-steps campaign.
Then I got the idea to look into the source of the page. Some webpage generators write the publish date into the meta data of the header, maybe this was also the case here. Looking into the page source, it became clear that they use the WordPress Wunder theme and, yes, the creation date was in there.
The creation date of the page is November 16, 2016 at 12:28.
November 16?!?!
So this nine-steps campaign is published only ONE day before the ten-measures news page (November 17, 2016 at 10:59). Until then, I was expecting that it was the other around.
They probably realized that they forgot something in their first campaign and quickly added it the next day. But at that time they already had a campaign running with a petition and a video in it.
They managed to include two grammatical errors in the description of that newly added measure, so not only the initial nine-steps campaign seems to be a rush job, but also this ten-measures list.
This was the newly added measure (translated from Dutch, grammatical errors corrected):
Belgian houses are among the worst insulated, most energy consuming in Europe. Our homes consume more energy than those in the cold Sweden. Annually, sufficient renovation investments must be made to provide the necessary momentum to realize the energy-saving advantage of our houses. To make this possible, we set up a large-scale and extensive renovation program.
Everyone must get to work in order to make their house as energy efficient as possible. Starting from at the latest 2018, the nearly zero-energy standard applies for all new houses in Flanders. Our buildings are no longer heated with fossil fuels, but by a combination of heat pumps, solar water heaters, heat networks, geothermal and other environmentally friendly heating systems. From 2018, no new heating systems on fuel oil will be installed, by 2025 also no boilers on natural gas will be installed. The Brussels region showed us the way.
This is overlapping point five of the previous campaign (no heating with oil or gas), but adding better insulation of houses and that our government should give the good example. In both cases they claim that Brussels is the example how to do it.
Having better insulation is in fact not a bad proposition. Better isolation of houses in our climate is a no-brainer, even if one doesn’t believe that CO2 is the control knob of the climate.
I am not sure whether the Brussels region is actually comparable with Flanders. The Brussels region is much smaller, more urbanized, less inhabitants actually living there and vast amounts of commuters working in offices from all kind of (international) organizations, governments and so on. In that sense, Brussels is a rich city. But also, some of the poorest communities are located in the Brussels region. So, it is not a big surprise to me that the Brussels government is “giving the good example”, it is one of the few ways it can do something in this situation.
Flanders doesn’t have the same dynamics that Brussels has, so I don’t think that Brussels is a good example for Flanders. Stating that Brussels “showed us the way” therefor seems a rather hollow claim to me. It is the special situation of Brussels that is the reason for Brussels taking the lead over its inhabitants and that is not working in the same way in Flanders.
This newly added measure is in line with the other examples from that list. Just as the example of Brussels, the other examples in the list were chosen for their (sometimes even the expected) achievements. For example, Denmark has a large share of renewable energy and France is heating primary with electricity. What they didn’t take into account is that:
This shows that they didn’t think their propositions through. However, this is not how the newspapers reported on it, for example this and this. Both articles from different newspapers are completely identical, so these journalist probably didn’t write it themselves, but got it from a common source. Since the source was not given, my guess is that it was the Green party itself.
Those two articles called the items of this list “concrete propositions” and they also claimed that:
Examples from abroad
For the ten measures that Groen came up with, there are examples from abroad.
This would have been correct if they referred to the nine-steps list. All the examples on the nine-steps list were from abroad. But they referred to the ten-measures list for which this is not true (last time I visited Brussels, it was still located in Belgium). To me, it looked like this article was originally written for the nine-steps campaign and later adapted to the ten-measures list. This again shows me that it was a hurry job.
That these nine or ten-step lists are concrete propositions is utterly ridiculous: these are just a bunch of loose ideas/dreams that were lumped together in a hurry. Probably motivated by the presidential election result of the USA that took them by surprise.
That is an indication that these newspaper journalists didn’t read the campaign page of the Flemish greens. Otherwise they would have seen that these were NOT concrete propositions and the examples didn’t prove their case. There wasn’t even a link to the campaign page in the newspaper articles.
It does sound nice of course: ten concrete propositions. As if they figured it all out. Yet when looking somewhat closer, it is not the thoughtfully constructed plan that it is presented as and it really shows how weak the arguments are. They are very lucky that they have the mainstream media, eager to report uncritically on their campaigns.
via Trust, yet verify
September 29, 2017 at 03:11PM
Energy
FILE PHOTO: People line up to buy gasoline at a gas station after the area was hit by Hurricane Maria, in San Juan, Puerto Rico September 22, 2017. Picture taken September 22, 2017. REUTERS/Alvin Baez/File Photo
Media outlets are already suggesting the thousands of people predicted to leave Puerto Rico over the next year could be America’s first massive wave of “climate refugees.”
Experts say hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans could flee their devastated island in the next 12 months. Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rossello warned “thousands if not millions” could leave the island without massive federal assistance.
The media was quick to suggest Puerto Ricans could be classified as “climate refugees” in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which left most of the island’s residents without power or clean water.
E&E News reported the potential migrants “might be among the nation’s newest ‘climate refugees,’ a demographic that includes former residents of southernmost Louisiana and the shrinking islands of Alaska’s Bering Strait.”
Bloomberg warned Wednesday a mass migration from Puerto Rico could “offer a preview for Americans of one of the most jarring potential consequences of global warming: the movement of large numbers of people pushed out of their homes by the effects of climate change.”
Even meteorologist Marshall Shepherd asked if Puerto Ricans could be called “climate refugees.” He said he didn’t know the answer, but then wrote a lengthy post opening on the meaning of the word “climate refugee.”
The idea isn’t new. The United Nations has been predicting a huge increase in the number of “climate refugees” do to human emissions of carbon dioxide. These are people forced from their homes by natural disasters, like hurricanes, floods or droughts.
Scientists predict global warming will exacerbate extreme weather events in the coming decades, though there’s little evidence to support claims today’s natural disasters have gotten measurably worse.
The UN Environment Programme predicted there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010, but quietly removed a web page once that prediction didn’t come true. The UN pushed its prediction to 2020.
Bloomberg reported “climate change forced an estimated 1 million people to leave their homes in 2015” in Africa, and that “the World Bank has urged Australia and New Zealand to open their doors to residents forced off small island nations such as Tuvalu and Kiribati.”
“Even in Syria, internal migration sparked by a historic drought contributed to the civil war, which has added to the wave of people trying to enter Europe in recent years,” Bloomberg reported.
Follow Michael on Facebook and Twitter
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
via Watts Up With That?
September 29, 2017 at 03:03PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 