Despite political tensions between Ankara and Tel Aviv, the two countries never broke diplomatic relations or ceased a vigorous bilateral trade, including in weaponry.

Metin Akpinar at Donanim Haber [Hardware News] reports that the two leaders’ desire for better relations has taken the unexpected form of a green energy partnership focusing on wave energy. The innovative Israeli company Eco Wave Power, founded by the amazing Inna Braverman, has signed an agreement to partner with Oren Ordu Energy, a local utility owned by the municipality of Ordu on the Black Sea. Ordu was known for its hazelnuts, but has recently seen rapid industrial growth.

The agreement stipulates that Oren Ordu Energy will turn over to Eco Wave Power five breakwaters, on which EWP will install its wave energy converters. Most wave technology, as Katie Brigham explains at MSNBC, works by placing installations on or below the ocean’s surface, and using the motion of the waves to turn turbines and make power. In-water installations, however, face a great deal of wear and tear, since waves batter them from all sides, and salt water is corrosive. Eco Wave Power’s technology focuses on capturing the energy of the waves as they land on breakwaters, which is somewhat more straightforward.

Akpinar quotes the CEO of Ordu’s power authority, Mustafa Kemal Macit, as saying “With the goal of building a self-sufficient grid in the region, Ordu sees EWP as an important asset to fully realize our 100% clean energy potential.” He added,

“The entire municipality of Ordu is excited to realize the full potential of the sea and to use the sea’s unlimited energy resource to power our electricity grid. This project demonstrates that Ordu Energy is committed to investing in innovative clean energy technologies (yenilikçi temiz enerji teknolojilerine).”

The project at Ordu will begin by trying to generate 4 megawatts, but will scale up to 77 megawatts, which would make it the largest wave energy power plant in the world. The project is estimated to cost $150 million.

Akpinar quotes Eco Wave Power CEO Braverman as saying, “This landmark agreement will allow us to deliver clean electricity from Turkish waves for the first time. With its ambitious sustainability goals and regional proximity to our headquarters, Turkey is an interesting place to further implement and develop our innovative wave energy technology.”

Eco Wave Power already runs grid-connected wave-powered plants at Jaffa and Gibraltar, and has plans for another in Los Angeles.

Eco wave Power Gibraltar

Inna Braverman, the visionary behind Eco Wave Power, was born in Ukraine. She came with her family to Israel at the age of 3. She founded the company at age 24.

Wave power is at the moment too expensive to be more than a demonstration project, at 60 cents per kilowatt hour to as much as a dollar. Its advantages, however, are that it is zero-carbon and continuous. Solar power does not work at night, and windmills don’t make power when the wind dies down. Waves constantly keep coming, in contrast. Places such as California have been filling in the gaps created by the intermittency of solar and wind by firing up fossil gas plants, which is both expensive and environmentally destructive.

Wave power will likely fall substantially in price if more research and development money is put into it. Some analysts believe it has the potential, Akpinar says, of generating 100 gigawatts by 2050, covering 10 percent of Europe’s electricity needs.

Global heating and a chaotic climate don’t care whether people are Turks or Israelis, and humanity must unite if we are to ameliorate the situation. If Eco Wave Power ends up playing a central role in these developments, Ms. Braverman and her team, and the forward-looking town of Ordu, will have helped save humanity from the climate crisis.

( Clean Energy Wire ) – Onshore wind power has become more popular than ever among people living in Germany as a result of the war in Ukraine, a poll has found.

One in three respondents said Russia’s war and Germany’s previous dependence on energy imports from Russia have made the expansion of onshore wind energy “more important than before,” while two-thirds have not changed their opinion, according to the survey by pollster Forsa, which was commissioned by onshore wind agency Fachagentur Windenergie an Land.

Fifty-one percent said the rollout of onshore wind power was “very important” and 31 percent said it was “important.” “The expansion of wind energy is more important to people than ever before. At the same time, the acceptance of existing plants on site has also risen to record levels,” the agency said.

Eighty-four percent of people who live very near wind turbines accept them, with 52 percent saying the “completely” accept them and 32 percent saying they are “somewhat” acceptable.

Among respondents without wind turbines nearby their homes, 38 percent would have “no objections at all” to erecting them, and another 38 percent would have “fewer objections.”

Wind turbines have become one of the most visible components of Germany’s energy transition and increasingly dominate the landscape in many parts of the country.

While most people support a roll-out of the technology, Germany’s most important renewable energy source also has ardent opponents – numerous citizen initiatives lament the turbines’ effects on people, wildlife and natural scenery. Acceptance of the technology tends to rise the more people are exposed to it.

“Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)”

Via Clean Energy Wire

In a recent paper, Ryo Fujiwara et al. note that energy from the sea is promising, saying, “the potential estimate for tidal energy was given as 3TW [3 terawatts]. Ocean energy plants have merits: the equipment space does not require land use, which can be expensive or scarce, and the energy density is higher than air.”

They add, “In Japan, there are developments to harness energy from the ocean. In the southern region of Japan, there is a 100 kW class prototype subsea floating type ocean current power generation system “Kairyu.” The demonstration test of Kairyu was conducted in the waters off the coast of Kuchinoshima, Toshima, Kagoshima Prefecture.”

Japan’s agency for promoting new technology, NEDO, which has been partnering with IHI on the project since 2011, explains of Kairyu, IHI’s undersea turbine, “By taking sea water in and out of the device balances buoyancy and controls the depth of the device autonomously. Maintains stabilized position by turning two sets of blades in the opposite direction.”

IHI carried out its tests with the Kuroshio Current, which flows northeast along Japan’s Pacific coast. It is one of the world’s fastest such currents, NEDO explains.

Kairyu Turbine, courtesy NEDO.

The results of the Kairyu experiment have been positive. Deep sea currents are so steady that you cannot really call them intermittent, and so they can provide baseline electricity and reduce the need for battery storage that solar and wind require.

Romain Mahet writes that the Kuroshio Current alone could generate 200 gigawatts of electricity for Japan.

Fujiwara et al. point out that the Kuroshio current is not the only promising one in Japan for these purposes. They write, “The Tsugaru strait, in the northern region of Japan, is an area that has attracted attention for the utilization of tidal/ocean energy. Unidirectional tidal and ocean flow with high energy density drifts between the main island and Hokkaido Island. Energy harvesting, equipping multiple tidal/ocean power generators in The Tsugaru strait, has shown to be effective.”

Erica Yokoyama at Bloomberg notes that exploiting deep ocean currents doesn’t interfere with shipping, unlike tidal power arrays on the surface, and IHI is doing environmental impact studies. The big question is whether IHI’s turbines can compete cost-wise with wind and solar as the latter fall in price. At the moment she estimates that it is only slightly more expensive than those two. That extra expense may be offset, though, by the lack of need for battery storage.

The report says that $755 billion was spent to implement low-carbon technologies, with $366 billion going into renewable energy and $273 billion into electrifying transportation.

That $273 billion put into electric transport represented a gigantic 77 percent increase year over year.

At the same time, climate technology firms raised $165 billion from selling public shares and from private investors, and, again, the biggest sectors were green energy and transportation. This money will gradually be spent on implementation, as well. The increase in green energy investment was a healthy 27 percent .

BloombergNEF says that investment in green tech grew in all world regions, but most of all in the Asia Pacific region, where investors poured in $368 billion and achieved the greatest growth over the previous year, of 38 percent.

The United States had better get its behind in gear on this issue, because all that investment turns into proprietary technology that will be adopted around the world, with money flowing into China. At the rate we are going, the US could be left in the dust on the most lucrative new technologies of the twenty-first century.

The world needs to triple these figures to $3 trillion a year quickly to meet our climate goal of keeping new heating above pre-industrial times to 3.6 percent. Beyond that increase, which is much more massive than it sounds since it pertains to the average surface temperature of the whole earth, our climate could go chaotic in ways that will be challenging for human civilization.

In contrast to the $165 billion invested in low-carbon tech and transport, $628 billion flowed into petroleum and natural gas, a merely 4% increase. And that is the difference. The big new money is going into renewables, because petroleum and gas are not long-term prospects, however bright their short-term future seems this year.

My own guess is that we are starting to see the kind of large-scale climate disasters that will cause governments to tighten the screws on fossil fuels. Germany’s resolve was stiffened by climate-related flooding last summer, e.g. If a couple mega-icebergs plop into the ocean from Antarctica, they could raise sea levels so much that people in coastal cities will be demanding that coal, petroleum and natural gas be banned entirely, since burning them is rapidly cooking the earth. If we have a choice between investing in green tech with a glorious future and Big Oil, with its assured and rapid demise, I know which one I’m betting my retirement on.

The good news is that it seems obvious that enormous amounts of money are flowing into the cleantech sector, and that governments, whether the European Union, China or the Biden administration, are goosing that investment with policy-making, regulation and incentives.

The future is green.

And this is only the beginning. Pattern is going to put another $6 billion into New Mexico wind projects.

Uteig, one of the subcontractors on the project, writes at their site, “The annual wind energy potential of New Mexico has been estimated to be 435 billion kWh. New Mexico has the potential to produce many times its own electrical consumption, which puts it in a position to export wind electric power.” Central New Mexico has the potential to be a wind powerhouse, and the state is ranked 12th out of 50 for wind power potential. The state only uses 23 billion kilowatt hours annually, so if its full wind potential were to be reached, it would have a lot left over to export.

All this is important because New Mexico now uses a lot of dirty coal as well as natural gas, which are dangerous heat-trapping gases that are boiling our earth. The state wants its electricity to be green by 2045, but obviously can and should get there sooner, and it has the potential to help other states do so, as well.

Although wind is intermittent as a source of energy, this wind farm is in a sweet spot for power generation and is expected to work 80% to 90% of the time in an average year, with the greatest production taking place in the morning and the evening and in winter months. Even at 80% of nameplate capacity, the gargantuan set of four wind farms, the largest renewables project in the United States, will put out as much electricity as a small nuclear reactor. Only, these facilities only took 15 months to build. They use giant GE wind turbines.

The New Mexico energy establishment already has experience with using batteries to offset renewables, having put in 300 megawatt hours of battery power for a 650-megawatt solar facility.

The four wind farms are in the center of New Mexico, in Guadalupe, Lincoln and Torrance Counties, and local people will benefit. The company writes, “Torrance, Guadalupe and Lincoln counties will be issuing Industrial Revenue Bonds, a unique financing mechanism in the State of New Mexico, for the Western Spirit Wind Projects. Although the counties are issuing the bonds, Pattern and its affiliates will pay 100% of the cost of these bonds resulting in approximately $3 million to local governments and schools over the next 25 years.”

The locals still own their land, and have full use of it. If they find mineral wealth on it, it is theirs, as long as digging it up doesn’t damage a turbine. Likewise, Pattern says, “the land will still belong to the landowners and can be used for activities such as grazing and other activities that do not interfere with the operation of the facility. Ranching and grazing are totally compatible and will not be restricted. Less than 1% of the total easement area for the project will be occupied by structure footprints.”

I was born in New Mexico, though I did not grow up there– I always love going back. It is so beautiful, with a rich tapestry of cultures. I read that Guadalupe, for instance, is thinly populated with something over 4,000 people. They are mostly Hispanic or Latino. Some of them are Hispanos, tracing their heritage to colonial Spain. That is, for them Americans of northern European heritage are newcomers and immigrants, the opposite of the narrative about Latinos being immigrants. Many Hispanics in New Mexico consider themselves “white.”

Despite its beauty, New Mexico is one of the poorer states in the union, with a mean household income about $14,000 a year lower than the U.S. in general. That these counties and schools will get that kind of income from this project is wonderful news.

New Mexicans pay on average 13 cents a kilowatt hour for their electricity. Onshore wind farms nowadays typically generate electricity for 3.9 cents a kilowatt hour in the US. So these wind projects will over time lower electricity costs and be the equivalent of a pay raise for the state’s residents.

New Mexicans are now not only making power for themselves, they are selling electricity to Los Angeles and San Jose, the way Saudi Arabia sells California petroleum. Only, California is gradually dumping Saudi and other oil for electric cars, and New Mexico will help ensure that the electricity that powers those vehicles is green.

In 2020, however, Greg Russell of The National reports, 97% of Scotland’s electricity came from renewables, accounting for just over a third of the country’s energy use. Russell also notes that the Scottish government plan has been to get 60% of electricity from onshore wind, about 11% from offshore wind, and 18% from hydro, with 8% coming from other sources, including solar.

Ominously, however, Russell quotes SNP’s Natalie Don as saying,

“investment in Scotland’s world-leading renewables sector is being held back from its full potential as the Tories at Westminster continue to charge extortionate transmission rates in Scotland, making it more expensive for firms to have access to the grid to export electricity. “We cannot trust the Tories with Scotland’s renewables sector and to get the best out of it for the people of Scotland.The only way we can harness the full potential of the sector in Scotland is by becoming an independent country.”

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Both the ruling Scottish National Party and its ally, the Green Party, are agreed on the importance of moving to net carbon zero quickly, and on the desirability of doing so without the albatross of the UK Conservative Party of Boris Johnson around their necks.

Scotland has with great efficiency and deliberation accomplished its goal of getting its electricity from renewables. In the US, only 20% of electricity is generated by renewables. This is important, because if this small country of 5.4 million can accomplish this feat, so can other countries.

Still, electricity is only one kind of energy. Transportation and home heating have to be decarbonized as well, along with agriculture.

Scottish Renewables writes,

“Despite the heating of buildings making up 42% of Scotland’s energy use, only 11% of our heat comes from renewable sources or electricity. With the technologies needed to decarbonise heat readily available, government must raise ambitions on fulfilling our national transition to low-carbon heat.”

Sturgeon’s government intends to get 50% of Scotland’s over-all energy from renewables by 2030, though Scottish environmentalists complain that this goal is not bold enough.

“Scottish Renewables” reports that there are plans to get an additional 11 gigwatts from onshore wind and a 12 gigawatts from offshore wind by 2030, Scotland isn’t great for solar much of the year, but there are plans for an additional gigawatt of solar, which will mainly be used in the long summer days. The country is seeking another gigawatt from wave and tidal energy.

Regarding offshore wind, a new 10 megawatt fixed bottom wind tower has just been installed off the coast of Scotland at the 1 gigawatt Seagrass facility.

Source: SSE Renewables.

Scotland is interested in green manufacturing, too. The BBC reports that a new factory is being built to produce enormous wind turbines and that “£110m facility has been proposed for Port of Nigg on the Cromarty Firth.”

But if UK electricity transmission tariffs are a centrifugal force, helping drive Scottish separatism, things like UK investment in wind turbine factories are centripetal, tying Scotland to the UK.

Likewise, Scotland exports a good deal of its extra wind-generated electricity to England, and is responsible for 25% of UK wind energy. If I were them, I’d be nervous about losing access to that enormous market for green energy. So in some ways the UK constraints on electricity transmission do impel nationalist politicians to dream of being shut of London. But in other ways the renewables energy industry is binding Scotland more closely to the UK.

The increase in green energy came mainly from new offshore wind.

New offshore wind also allowed the UK to get 33% of its electricity from renewables in 2018. Although the UK is far behind Scotland in the green energy transition, it is nearly 12 times more populous, at 66 million, and so for it to get fully a third of its electricity from green sources is in real numbers a much bigger deal. British carbon emissions fell 3% last year.

Scotland and the UK have further big plans for new floating offshore wind turbines a technology pioneered off the coast of Scotland by Shell.

Britain as a whole wants to get 30% of its electricity from wind alone by 2030.

Scotland is also doing groundbreaking research and development on wave and tidal energy, which has the advantage of being steady (unlike wind and solar). A small demonstration project is already powering 2600 homes in Scotland, and there are near-term pans to expand it.

People who talk about our finding future solutions to the climate emergency are just out of date. The solutions exist, it is just a matter of implementing them, of political will.

Scotland has that political will. (Truth in advertising, my maternal grandfather was a McIlwee, which I take it makes me an honorary Glaswegian).

Scotland also has plans for car parks that charge electric vehicles, having called for the end of gasoline-driven cars by 2032. The Scotsman says, “Revolutionary vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology will also be employed at the hubs, allowing charged cars to feed electricity back to the smart grid where it can be used to power homes and businesses.”

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Bonus video:

Financial Times: “Power ahead: Scotland’s pioneering renewables role”

Solar power is poised to grow 6-fold by 2030 and could constitute between 9% and 13% of world electricity production by then. Price per kilowatt hour for solar is plummeting, so that it is on the verge of being the cheapest form of energy, outstripping coal in that regard.

In fact, the United Arab Emirates has just accepted a bid from Masdar to build a solar electricity generating farm for 2.99¢/kWh. Coal is typically 5 cents a kilowatt hour, and this is less. Coal, game over.

China now plans to get between 1/4 and 1/3 of it electricity from wind turbines by 2030. Although 2030 sounds far away, it is as near to us as 2002– the year that Nelly complained ‘It’s getting hot in her’ [that’s not a typo) and Pink wanted to ‘Get this Party Started,’ and Condi Rice warned on Iraq that we didn’t want the smoking gun on its alleged WMD to be a mushroom cloud. China currently gets 70% of its electricity from coal, which is very, very bad for the earth and for our children and grandchildren. But this goal shows the PolitBuro is extremely serious about abandoning coal. Last year China reached 145 gigawatts of wind energy capacity. Coal is dead man walking.

The world’s largest wind turbine is being built for an offshore facility in Europe. This single tower can provide electricity to 10,000 homes.

Solar is now the fastest-growing new energy business in India. India now has 7.5 gigawatts of solar power and put in 2.2 gigawatts so far just this year. The World Bank is lending India $1 bn. for solar projects.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

DD: “World Bank inks pact on solar energy with India”

SANTIAGO, May 4 2016 (IPS) – Chile, a country with 6,435 km of Pacific Ocean coast line, could find in wave and tidal power a solution to its need to diversify its energy mix.

According to a study commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), this South American country has 164 [GW] in wave energy potential, which makes it unique in the world.

A calm afternoon in the resort town of Algarrobo, on the central coast of Chile, a country with 6,435 km of coastline along the Pacific Ocean. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

The study stated that even if only 10 percent of the country’s tidal and wave energy were harnessed, it would surpass the existing installed capacity of Chile’s central power grid, SIC, which totals 15,500 MW.

“Energy from the sea, in both coastal areas and around the island of Chiloé (in the south), has been studied extensively, and the potential is enormous,” ecologist Sara Larraín, director of the local environmental organisation Sustainable Chile, told IPS.

Studies explain that the Pacific Ocean gets deeper the closer one gets to the South Pole, which generates greater wave and tidal power potential and puts Chile in a privileged position to harness this kind of energy.

Larraín added that these technologies are still at the level of prototypes, from countries like Italy and Scotland, and the progress made depends on international research centres, “because Chile has neither the scientific, technological nor financial capacity to make this technological leap on its own.”

“The pilot projects have gone well, but we’re still a long way from making the leap to industrial-level production,” the environmentalist said.

This South American nation of 17.6 million people has a total installed capacity of 20,203 MW of electricity. The interconnected Central and Norte Grande power grids account for 78.38 percent and 20.98 percent of total electric power, respectively.

Of the country’s total energy supply, 58.4 percent is generated by diesel fuel, coal and natural gas, while the rest comes from renewable energy sources – mainly large hydropower dams.

Only 13.5 percent comes from unconventional renewable sources like wind power (4.57 percent), solar (3.79 percent), mini-dams (2.8 percent) and biomass (2.34 percent).

A map of Chile, a long narrow country between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean, where deep waters off the coast offer a unique potential for wave and tidal energy, which the country is preparing to harness. Credit: Imágenes de Chile

Thanks to wind and solar power plants, the price of electricity in Chile, for years the highest in Latin America, went down to 104 dollars per megawatt-hour – a 34 percent drop since 2013.

According to official projections, the country’s electric power needs will rise by 54 percent over the next decade. In December 2015 the government launched the 2050 Energy Plan, which set a goal for 70 percent of the country’s energy to come from clean sources by that year, seven times today’s proportion.

By 2035, 40 percent of Chile’s electric power should come from unconventional renewable sources.

As part of the plan to achieve these ambitious goals, Chile and France signed a cooperation agreement in June 2015 to set up a Marine Energy Research and Innovation Center (MERIC).

The centre, unique in Latin America, will cost approximately 20 million dollars to build, with the Chilean energy ministry covering 58 percent of the cost, through the Chilean Economic Development Agency (CORFO) over the course of eight years.

MERIC could make this South American country a regional and global leader in tidal and wave power.

According to the government, the aim of the new centre is to develop know-how for Chilean industry, in order to foment integration and promotion of marine energy technologies and, in the near future, contribute to the diversification of the local energy mix and put this country at the forefront in the development of wave and tidal energy technology at an international level.

After studying the regional infrastructure and the national supply chain for the marine research industry, MERIC is studying the specific conditions in the Chilean sea along with a network of researchers including allies like the French engineering company DCNS and the Italian company Enel Green Power, along with two local universities and the Inria Chile foundation.

“The assessment of resources and ecosystems is in the initial stage, with the gathering of information on the behavior of marine mammals, specific Chilean characteristics in marine corrosion and biofouling (the fouling of pipes and underwater surfaces by organisms such as barnacles and algae), numerical wave modeling and the influence of turbines on floaters,” MERIC executive director Luc Martin told IPS.

He added that several potential sites for the studies are being assessed.

Seeking to pool expertise in marine energy, MERIC has signed confidentiality agreements with research institutions from Chile, France and the United States, and is preparing to do so with institutions from Brazil, Finland and Scotland.

“We hope to put together a multidisciplinary platform for applied research in Chile, to boost the development of marine energy in this country and around the world,” said Martin.

To precisely gauge Chile’s marine energy potential and identify sites of interest for the sustainable development of wave and tidal power, the physical, chemical and biological conditions are being studied that would make it possible to establish models of behavior and maintenance of marine energy systems.

From Chiloé to the Strait of Magellan in the extreme south, “there are very significant differences in elevation, which could be used to that end,” said Carlos Finat, executive director of the Chilean Association of Renewable Energies, an industry group.

Finat told IPS that there is still a long way to go, because the development of the technologies that convert wave or tidal energy into electric power “has not yet reached the level of commercially exploitable applications, although significant progress has been made.”

He added that the channels, straits and fjords of southern Chile, where marine energy projects are most feasible, are far from the centres of high demand for electric power, which are mainly in the north of the country.

“The current power transmission system would not be capable of transporting large blocks of energy between those points, which means extensions that are not currently planned would have to be built.

“There is a long way to go before we have commercially viable prototypes, which will undoubtedly take several years to achieve,” he said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Via Inter Press Service

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Bloomberg: “This Device Could Turn Waves Into Cheap, Renewable Energy”