Coal mines selling like hotcakes among power hungry Indian and Chinese companies

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Australian, Indonesian, and African Coal Mines Selling like Hot Cakes amongst Power Hungry Indian,Chinese Companies...


 Africa, Australia, China, Coal, Energy, Indonesia:

Coal Mines in Indonesia,Australia,Africa and North America are selling like hot cakes as Indian,Chinese companies as well as mining conglomerates like Rio Tinto,Vale,BHP Billiton fight to secure raw materials.Note India and China are consuming huge amounts of coal to power their thermal plants.While China consumes a monstrous 3 billion tons,Indian demand is rising at more than 10% a year though on a smaller base.Coal is the cheapest form of power despite its polluting and health hazardous affect.Though Coal Plants in Developed countries are becoming much more expensive to build due to taxes and opposition by environmental groups,there is no stopping their furious growth in countries like China and India.Though India too faces some environmental opposition,massive ultra mega power plants with capacity of 4000 MW are getting built by new Indian private utilities.

Acknowledgements: Abkishek Shah

Green World  Investor

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Google close to getting renewable energy less than the cost of coal...

Google Close To Getting Renewable Energy For Less Than Coal...

Google's (GOOG) green energy czar tells Reuters it's closing in on paying the same price for energy from renewable sources as it would if that energy came from coal.

It's not guaranteed that the company can achieve 'grid parity' but, Bill Weihl, the Green Energy Czar tells the newswire "It is even odds, more or less, I would say...In, you know, three years, we could have multiple megawatts of plants out there."

This is all well and good, but keep in mind, with alternative energy, "grid parity in three years," is a popular refrain.

Google gets energy from all sorts of renewable sources, including wind, solar and geothermal. Its focus is on solar thermal energy, which uses concentrated mirrors to generate heat which turns turbines to generate energy (see here for further explanation.)

Reuters: "We are looking at ways of cheaply getting to much higher temperatures and also making the heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, reflect the sun, keep it focused on the target we are trying to heat up -- make those much, much cheaper. And I think we've made some really interesting progress in the last six to nine months," he said.

Weihl cautioned that the odds of missing the goal were still large, and he said that once the new ideas had been tried, it would cost substantial amounts to deploy them at utility scale.

Once the test project is done, "We'll see whether we or us in combination with other people are prepared to fund much much bigger facilities, or if we want to get a few more years experience before we really start to scale it up," he said.

Of course, there's no word on how the goats figure into the whole picture.


Acknowledgements: Reuters