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Bolivia:
“Lighting
Up the Andes” Spectrum, 2004. A Canadian couple is lighting up remote,
rural villages not connected to the electric grid. Their ingredients: solar panels,
high efficiency LEDs, and an innovative combination of development and
ecotourism. My story documents a May 2004 trip to rural Bolivia, but
Luxtreks’ grass-roots system has brought light to over a thousand homes from Peru to Pakistan.
China:
“China’s Coal Future”
Technology Review, January-February 2007.
Northern China is fast becoming the epicenter
of China's
energy industry thanks to the Shenfu Dongsheng coalfield. With an estimated reserve
of 223 billion tons of coal it is one the world's seventh largest coalfields;
efforts to convert much of that coal to transportation fuels could make it
the world's most profitable while helping to stem China’s growing dependence on
imported oil. But the as-yet-unproven coal liquefaction technology employed
represents an environmental gamble. Liquefaction plants consume tens of
millions of cubic meters of water annually—water that China’s arid north can
hardly spare.
“China’s
Cyclists Take Charge” Spectrum,
June 2005. For all the talk of a growing infatuation with automobiles, China
continues to roll primarily on two wheels—increasingly driven by an electric
motor. In fact, over 1 million
clean, quiet electric bikes and scooters ply Shanghai's streets. Nationwide,
manufacturers sold about 10 million electric vehicles in 2005. (The Spectrum special issue featuring this
investigative piece picked up a Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism
Award.)
Libya:
“Closing
the Circuit” Spectrum,
November 2008. Engineers working in the teeming cities and lonely deserts of
North Africa are creating the last links in a power grid that will ring the Mediterranean
Sea. Sharing electricity over this ‘Mediterranean Ring’ could secure Europe’s
power supply with clean renewable energy, accelerating North Africa’s
development and knitting together two worlds that seem to be racing apart —
those of Muslim North Africa and an increasingly xenophobic Europe.
Japan:
“Hybrids’
Rising Sun” Technology Review,
2004. At Toyota Motor’s sprawling factory in Tsutsumi, Japan,
assemblers turn out 400 Prius hybrid sedans every day. It
looks much like any other automotive factory floor—and that’s what’s
remarkable. Within a decade Toyota
could offer the gas-electric combo in every category of vehicle it sells. Detroit is scrambling
to catch up.
France:
”Nuclear Wasteland”
Spectrum, 2007: Nuclear reactors deliver 77% of France’s electricity and Paris-based technology giant
Areva is leading the global renaissance in reactor construction. Given such
leadership it is thus unsurprising that nuclear boosters in the U.S. want to
emulate its method for handling nuclear waste: spent fuel reprocessing,
whereby plutonium and uranium recycling shrinks the volume of high-level
waste requiring long-term storage. But follow the radioactivity and one finds
that France’s
system never quite delivers on this promise.
“Life in
the Fast Lane”
TechReview.com, 2006: The
moving walkway that shuttles commuters across the sprawling Montparnasse
Metro station was nicknamed "TRGV," (trottoir roulant grande
vitesse), after France's
TGV intercity trains, which average 300 kph. The nickname endures -- with
more than a tinge of irony. Designed to be the world’s fastest walkway at 12
kilometers per hour, the TRGV’s overall speed has plummeted to a pokey 4.5
kph -- roughly the stride of a vigorous commuter.
Canada:
“Digging
a Carbon Hole for Canada.” AlbertaViews,
2003. Melt the billions of barrels of hard tarry petroleum trapped in Alberta's oil sands
and you have an oil reserve rivaling the Saudi oil fields--plus a heavy
environmental price tag. Demand for oil is strong, promising billions of
dollars in profits to oil sands developers, and the Kyoto Protocol is simply
too weak to stop the party.
"On a road to nowhere." Canadian Business, 2000. Visionaries in the Canadian government set the fuel cell revolution in
motion. Twenty years later Canadian firms with world-leading technology,
including fuel-cell producer Ballard Power Systems, are poised to cash in.
Anemic support from Ottawa
may squander that opportunity.
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