Monday, 07 May 2001

Royal, Copenhagen

Officials in Copenhagen, Denmark, helped to inaugurate the world's largest offshore windmill park this month. The park has a capacity of 40 megawatts of electricity -- four times more than the second-largest offshore windmill park in Sweden -- and will supply about 3 percent of the city's energy, powering the equivalent of 32,000 homes. In total, more than 5,600 windmills produce about 10 percent of Denmark's electricity, selling at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour. Soeren Krohn of the windmill manufacturers association said wind power production in the country was expected to double by 2005.

Riding Alone in My Automobile

The average American is spending about 36 hours a year in traffic, up from 11 hours in 1982, according to a study released today by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. Based on 1999 data, the most recent year for which such figures were available, the report found that the average Los Angeles resident spent 56 hours a year in traffic; Seattle and Atlanta tied at 53 hours; Houston came in at 50 hours; Dallas and Washington, 46 hours; Denver and Austin, 45 hours; St. Louis, 44 hours; and Miami, 42 hours. Trips in the car during rush-hour traffic took fully twice as long in Los Angeles as those during non-rush-hour traffic. The study said that 6.8 billion gallons of gasoline were wasted in traffic in 1999.

Saving Grace

A government-led program to encourage energy efficiency could reduce growth in electricity demand by 20 to 47 percent in the U.S., according to three-year report by the Energy Department's five laboratories. The amount of energy savings would depend on the price of new energy technologies and how aggressively the feds promoted efficiency in buildings, factories, and appliances. The savings would be the equivalent of 265 to 610 300-megawatt power plants, taking a big chunk out of the 1,300 new plants (more than one a week for the next 20 years) that Vice President Dick Cheney says are necessary. The Bush administration has not publicized the report, which was completed just before President Bush took office, instead drawing attention to the work of economists who are skeptical of conservation at the Energy Department's Energy Information Agency.

Smithsonian and Lesson

After U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle and scientists across the world raised the roof about a plan to close a wildlife conservation center in Virginia, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, Lawrence Small, said yesterday that he was withdrawing the proposal. Small had proposed to save the Smithsonian $2.8 million a year and shift some of the Conservation and Research Center's work on endangered species and habitat to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. But opponents to the plan said science would suffer if the center closed, and they succeeded in making the brouhaha a national story.

Full Metalclad Racket

A judge in British Columbia ruled last week that a NAFTA tribunal was right to award millions of dollars to a U.S. company that was prevented from opening a hazardous waste treatment plant in Mexico. Justice David Tysoe of the Supreme Court of B.C. found that the move by the state government of San Luis Potosi to declare an area an ecological preserve to prevent the Metalclad plant from opening amounted to an expropriation of the company's investment. The case was heard in Canada because the NAFTA tribunal designated B.C. as a neutral legal venue.