Environmental Friendly Celebrities

Environmental Friendly Celebrities who support green building, conservation and various aspects of sustainability and alternative energy. Being “green conscious” has become a deeply held cause embraced by many of Hollywood’s elite. A wide array of stars have made it an avocation to champion their favorite environmental and green causes.  Many are advocates for every aspect of saving the environment while some lend their names and influence to specific areas. While domestic environmental issues draw continued attention, many environmentalists are now placing international issues at the top of their list of priorities. Issues like global warming, population growth, deforestation, and the continued loss of many species of plants and animals have reached increasing prominence on the environmental agenda. Dave Mattews offsets CO2 emissions produced by their multi-city tours by funding projects such as tree plantings and wind turbine construction.  Cate Blanchett plans to equip Sydney Theatre Company building with solar panels, rainwater collection systems to make it completely eco-friendly. Sydney home is fully powered by solar energy, donates to Forest Guardians. Richard Branson  Virgin Group chairman, a former global warming skeptic, who in Sept. 2006 pledged to spend all profits from his airline and rail businesses (estimated $3 billion over 10 years) on investments in biofuel research and projects to tackle emissions. Brad Pitt Co-Creator of design competition to build 20 affordable, reduced energy, environmentally friendly homes in New Orleans.

Wind Energy Insurance

Posted: 03 Jun 2011 02:28 PM PDT

Tom Konrad CFA 

Owning a wind farm is about to become a lot less risky.

Wind power is cheap, clean, uses no water, and emits no pollutants.  Yet wind is far from a perfect source of electricity, since the wind blows when and where it will.  

While wind power will never be as constant as baseload power, geographic diversification and better dispatch procedures can go a long way to mitigate the problems to utilities caused by wind's variability.  Yet wind farm developers and financiers are at the mercy of the weather in their particular location.  Not only does wind output swing significantly from day to day and season to season, wind output can also vary greatly from year to year.  Farm owners also have to worry that some of their turbines might need maintenance just when the winds are at their best.  This can lead to unpredictability of wind farm revenues, which in turn makes wind farms more expensive to finance.
Two recent announcements go a long way to solving these problems for wind farm developers and owners.
First, on May 19th, energy risk analysis leader 3TIER and weather risk management firm Galileo announced that they would be offering financial products to hedge the risk of wind variability.  With cash payouts based on 3TIER's leading wind resource data, Galileo can offer to mitigate the cost to wind farm developers for a premium which can be expected to be much less than the risk premium charged by project financiers who do not have the expertise to assess wind resource risk as well as Galileo and 3TIER, and who also seldom have large and geographically diverse enough portfolios of wind investments to accept such risks at a price that is affordable for many wind farm developers.
Second, General Electric (GE) announced on May 23rd that they will be offering production based availability (PBA) guarantees as an option for new and existing operations and maintenance contracts on all GE 1.5 and 2.5 megawatt series wind turbines.  Not only will this remove a level of risk and make wind farms cheaper to finance, but it is also likely to be a competitive advantage for GE Wind, which recently slipped into third place by market share behind Chinese manufacturer Sinovel Wind Group (601558.SS).  While first place Vestas Wind Systems (VWDRY.PK) might be able to offer comparable guarantees, I can't see bankers putting much faith in the strength of a production guarantee from the Chinese firm, especially after their recent dust-up with American Superconductor (AMSC).
Together, these two financial innovations could do as much to reduce the cost of wind power and increase the pace of wind farm development as years' worth of technical innovation developing better wind turbines.

This article was first published on the Green Stocks blog at Forbes.com.

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DISCLAIMER: Past performance is not a guarantee or a reliable indicator of future results.  This article contains the current opinions of the author and such opinions are subject to change without notice.  This article has been distributed for informational purposes only. Forecasts, estimates, and certain information contained herein should not be considered as investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, strategy or investment product.  Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but not guaranteed.

King Khan goes Green

King Khan goes Green : SRK Shah rukh Khan on NDTV Greenathon 

Priyanka Chopra  on Greenathon

NDTV Greenathon: Stars adopt villages, light up a million lives

Green Bebo : Karina Kapoor Greenathon

Japanese Companies Free to Swap Emission Credits, Official Says

Source - Bloomberg News

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Japanese emitters are free to swap Certified Emission Reduction credits for cheaper Assigned Amount Units as the earthquake-stricken country meets mounting costs for complying with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an official said.

CER credits traded for 12.75 euros ($18.47) a metric ton today on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London, having gained 12 percent in the year to date. Orbeo, the Paris emissions venture of Rhodia SA and Societe Generale SA, assumed a price of 5 euros a ton for AAUs in March.

There’s nothing to stop Japanese companies selling CERs they’ve already bought and buying AAUs, said Toshiaki Nagata, a deputy director in the Kyoto Protocol office of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. “It could be a viable thing to do in terms of cost efficiency,” he said in an interview yesterday at Carbon Expo in Barcelona.

Japan needs 300 million tons of credits in the five years to 2012, including 200 million being bought by its private sector, according to a World Bank report published June 1. The quake may add 74 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent as the country is forced to replace power from atomic reactors with thermal generation, Orbeo estimated in March.

There are 10 billion tons of spare AAUs, with half owned by Russia and a quarter by Ukraine. That’s much more than total demand of about 1.4 billion tons in the five years to 2012, when Kyoto targets expire, the World Bank said. It’s unclear what value AAUs will have in future because nations can’t agree to a successor to Kyoto.

Weaker Market

Sales of the spare units could hurt the European Union carbon price because emitters in that program can also use CERs for compliance, a senior European climate official said yesterday. The EU program is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas market.

Peter Zapfel, head of policy co-ordination in the European Commission’s climate unit, told delegates at the conference the price may be hurt should a nation with spare AAUs sell, for example, 500 million tons. “There’s a very clear channel, relationship, between how many AAUs are put on the market and how in the end at some stage it could affect the European carbon price and it definitely won’t strengthen it.”

Zapfel said he wasn’t implying that a nation or nations with surplus units would make such large sales. Nagata said the Japanese government isn’t preparing to swap its own supply of CERs for the cheaper allowances. “It’s not our plan,” he said.

It would cost Japan 370 million euros to buy AAUs to cover emissions created as a consequence of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, assuming the country has to pay 5 euros for every AAU, Emmanuel Fages, an analyst at Orbeo, said in March.

Under the Kyoto treaty, developed nations agreed to limits on emissions and received so-called AAUs up to that amount. The extra costs for Japan would be “a significant drain on a budget already strained,” Fages said.

World Bank Learns From Oil, Tries to Jumpstart CO2 Market

Source - Bloomberg News

The World Bank, helped by its AAA credit rating, is considering guaranteeing sales of greenhouse- gas credits, taking cues from the crude-oil market to jumpstart the United Nations-overseen carbon markets.

The Washington-based bank might stand behind some sellers of emission credits in the developing world to attract immediate funding to fight climate change, said Philippe Benoit, a Latin America manager for the bank.

Even though energy-efficiency projects have high returns, they are “not getting financed” because they involve up-front investments and profits that can be several years in the future, Benoit said yesterday in an interview at Carbon Expo in Barcelona. Like oil companies choosing the most-profitable wells, the World Bank is seeking to help direct funds into the most viable climate-protection projects, he said.

Factories and utilities in the European Union carbon market that know they will need carbon credits a few years in the future would potentially agree to pay up-front in part because of the guarantee, he said.

“Up-front payment is possible in exceptional cases,” said Ludwig Kons, vice president of climate protection for RWE AG. “It depends on the rating of the counterparty,” he said yesterday in an interview in Barcelona. “The World Bank’s rating might be good enough.”

Shrinking Market

The value of new-project transactions under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism tumbled 44 percent to $1.5 billion last year from $2.7 billion in 2009 as global climate talks stalled and the European Union set restrictions for some UN emission- reduction credits, according to World Bank estimates. The program, which generates offsets for projects that cut greenhouse gases in developing nations, needs bigger demand that would come from stricter climate targets, UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres said yesterday.

The World Bank, seeking ways to boost the use of carbon finance for climate protection, would cut its risks by choosing project developers with ability to deliver, Benoit said.

Installers of energy-efficient lighting in Mexico, for instance, might be able to recover 70 percent of their costs within three years with the revenue from carbon credits alone, said Chandra Shekhar Sinha, a carbon-finance co-ordinator at the bank. And that’s before electricity-cost savings, Shekhar Sinha said in an interview.

“This makes much more sense for energy efficiency, where the sum total of the carbon revenue is a high proportion of the total investment costs,” he said. In renewable-energy projects, carbon revenues might be 10 percent of the investment, Shekhar Sinha said.

Dramatic Fallout

The UN emissions market shrank last year, even as nations began preparing for dramatic fallout from climate change, according to the World Bank’s special envoy on global warming.

“There’s much to be gloomy about,” the World Bank’s Andrew Steer told delegates at the Carbon Expo in Barcelona, citing a spate of thefts of emissions allowances in the European Union emissions market. “We’re not going to stay in the business if it stays at $1.5 billion.”

The world may need to prepare for temperature increases of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit), and the U.S. Navy is preparing for a 1.3-meter (5-foot) rise in sea levels, he said.