Tioga provides project financing through its SurePath^SM Solar(PPAs), and maintains and operates solar systems on behalf of its customers.  Tioga’s offering deliver spredictably priced power and enables organisations to to both ‘green’ their operations and reduce energy costs.  In order to illustrate the benefits of solar, Tioga needs to estimate future electricity prices and make comparisons by showing the savings from a new solar system.

To forecast possible price increases, Tioga Energy inputs California’s historical electricity rate data into a model developed using Palisade’s risk analysis software, @RISK.  This generates a probability distribution for electricity rate rises over the 20-year PPA period, which shows that there is a 25 percent likelihood that price increase swill be less than 4.8 percent, and a 25 percent chance that rate rises would be more than 8.7 percent.

The @RISK model therefore helps Tioga Energy evaluate the likelihood that acustomer will save money for a variety of PPA scenarios (i.e. the rate at which electricity would initially be charged and the amount by which it would then increase each year).  It also calculates the magnitude of savings for the different combinations of first year costs and subsequent rises.  Consumers are therefore able to better understand the pricing and make an informed decision about whether to sign up for a PPA.

“Using historical data and @RISK’s modelling capacity, we can offer consumers a robust view of the potential benefits of a solar PPA.  This enables them to hedge against rising electricity rates, as well as feel confident that they are playing a part in tackling global warming,”explains Kristian Hanelt, VP Project Finance for Tioga Energy.

Hanelt confirms:  “@RISK is a flexible and technically adept tool that, in addition to enabling in-depth analysis, makes it easy for us to present relatively complex ideas in an easy-to-understand graphical format.  As a result, it plays a key role in helping Tioga Energy to differentiate itself from its competitors.”

Tioga Energy’s full report on its study, ‘Hedging Against Utility Rate Fluctuations with a Solar PPA’ is available to download here: http://www.tiogaenergy.com/tioga-energy-reports.php

Converting corn to ethanol in Iowa not only leads to clearing more of the Amazonian rainforest, researchers report in a pair of new studies in Science, but also would do little to slow global warming—and often make it worse.

“Prior analyses made an accounting error,” says one study’s lead author, Tim Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University. “There is a huge imbalance between the carbon lost by plowing up a hectare [2.47 acres] of forest or grassland from the benefit you get from biofuels.”

Growing plants store carbon in their roots, shoots and leaves. As a result, the world’s plants and the soil in which they grow contain nearly three times as much carbon as the entire atmosphere. “I know when I look at a tree that half the dry weight of it is carbon,” says ecologist David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, coauthor of the other study which examined the “carbon debt” embedded in any biofuel. “That’s going to end up as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when you cut it down.”[...]

Full article – Via : ©sciam.com

Global warming ranks far down the concerns of the world’s biggest companies, despite world leaders’ hopes that they will pioneer solutions to the impending climate crisis, a startling survey will reveal this week.

Nearly nine in 10 of them do not rate it as a priority, says the study, which canvassed more than 500 big businesses in Britain, the US, Germany, Japan, India and China. Nearly twice as many see climate change as imposing costs on their business as those who believe it presents an opportunity to make money. And the report’s publishers believe that big business will concentrate even less on climate change as the world economy deteriorates.

The survey demolishes George Bush’s insistence that global warming is best addressed through voluntary measures undertaken by business – and does so at the most embarrassing juncture for the embattled President. For this week he is convening a meeting of the world’s largest economies to try to persuade them to agree with him.[...]

Read article – Via : ©independent.co.uk

Its task is elegantly direct. The 9-foot-tall device, encased in see-through plastic, scrapes the chief global warming gas — carbon dioxide — right out of the atmosphere. As air wafts through, CO₂ sticks to large chemically coated panels while oxygen and other innocuous gases breeze by. The carbon inhaler’s developer, Global Research Technologies, is among hundreds of U.S. companies scouring for ways to reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and cash in on federal requirements anticipated by 2010 to combat global warming.[...]

Full article – Via : ©usatoday.com

From the top of the Greenergy refinery in Immingham you can see across the Humber estuary to Hull. A hum of equipment fills the air, along with a curious smell. Popcorn.

Greenergy processes vegetable oil. It takes the gloopy juice squeezed from inside rape seeds harvested on surrounding Lincolnshire fields, strips out the waste and chemically tweaks the leftovers to make it easier to burn. Greenergy pipes almost 100,000 tonnes a year of its veggie option to ConocoPhillips and Texaco, just across the road, which mix it with their diesel fuel.

Until recently, the operation was viewed as a good thing. Because the oilseed rape plants absorb carbon dioxide, the company says the carbon emissions of the mixed fuel are lower, which helps the fight against global warming. And because oil companies that supply the blend pay less tax, everybody wins. Greenergy is expanding and similar facilities are going up elsewhere.[...]

Full article – Via : ©guardian.co.uk