Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy honours Ghana project

The Ashden Awards showcase practical solutions to combat climate change and meet the energy needs of the poor, rewarding outstanding and innovative clean energy schemes across the developing world and in the United Kingdom.

Toyola Energy Limited, Ghana, was awarded the coveted Gold Award worth $340,000 in recognition of its success in making over 150,000 efficient charcoal stoves and marketing them to low-income families at very affordable prices.

Ms Sarah Butler-Sloss, Founder/Director of the Ashden Awards and Chair of the judging panel said: 93Toyola Energy Limited has taken a simple stove technology, adapted it to make it more robust and efficient and then focused it's efforts on making the stoves accessible to the poor so that they can save money and have cleaner, healthier environments to cook in.

"In the meantime Ghana's forests are protected and greenhouse emissions reduced. This is a perfect example of how much can be achieved through the use of simple, clean energy technologies and clever, pro-poor marketing strategies."

By cutting the use of charcoal by around a third, Toyola's stoves save trees, reduce carbon emissions and allow families to make considerable savings.

They are also easy to cook with and are far less smoky than the traditional charcoal stoves that can cause breathing difficulties and, often, severe eye irritation over time.

There is also 90 per cent less chance of accidental burns when using a Toyola stove as compared to traditional stoves.

By allowing the customers to buy the stoves on credit and use the money saved on charcoal to make repayments, Toyola ensures that the stoves are accessible to the poor.

"When I got the stove I was given this money box and every day I would put money in. When I eventually removed the money I had enough for the stove," Josephine Adjololo, a user said.

In a country where most urban households spend a significant proportion of their household income cooking on inefficient and polluting charcoal stoves, Toyola's success is significant.

Toyola's stoves are currently saving around 26,000 tonnes of charcoal a year, a tangible success given that charcoal comes largely from unsustainable sources.

The levels of CO2 reductions achieved - around 150,000 tonnes a year has attracted the attention of Goldman Sachs who now buys Toyola's carbon offsets and sells them on the global market.

Toyola has just opened a production centre in Togo and plans to open more centres in Benin and Sierra Leone in the next two years, stepping up sales to a further 140,000 stoves by 2013.

With facts on Ghana Energy, nearly three quarters of charcoal production in Ghana comes from unsustainable wood-charcoal, which contributes to deforestation.

Charcoal is used by approximately 1.3 million households or 31 per cent of families in Ghana.

In Accra, about 70 per cent of households use charcoal for cooking.


Winners from Pakistan, India and Africa were also announced at a VIP ceremony in London addressed by Greg Barker, UK Government Minister for Climate Change.

A statement issued and copied to Ghana News Agency in Accra on Friday said the Prince of Wales, Patron of the Ashden Awards, who personally congratulated the international winners in a meeting, said: 93The Ashden Awards show what it is possible to do now in saving resources and cutting emissions.

"They remind us how, as individuals, we can make a huge difference to the world in which we live. In a nutshell, they remind us that acting locally is, in fact, acting globally."

Source: GhanaWeb.com

Clean Nuclear a "big lie", says Alec Baldwin

I've always thought people who count nuclear as "green energy" are idiots who wouldn't know a red paint theory if it fell on them. Just because you can't see, hear, smell or taste (usually) radioactive poisons doesn't make them less deadly. Ralph Nader once opined (red paint theory) that if a town or city woke up one day and overnight everything had been painted red by a non-toxic colouring that fell from the sky, people would spend millions to billions to clean it up, even though it represented no threat to human health.

Conversely, as most modern pollution is invisible to human sense and there is no red paint / burning fire / smelly smoke to run from, people are unaware of the toxins in their food, water and air, and thus paralyzed when it comes time to take action. It is time for Toronto to start announcing radiation levels in Toronto and GTA tap water, as these levels rise and fall based on radioactive tritium releases from Pickering and Darlington nuclear power plants just east of the city.

I had figured that the Fukushima disaster would wake up a few more humans, and seeing a Hollywood icon like Alec Baldwin take up the baton is encouraging. Here's an excerpt from Baldwin's Huffington Post article on why nuclear energy is NOT green.


The Big Lie of "Clean" Nuclear

by Alec Bladwin, Actor

Fascinating and heartbreaking how the Japanese civilian population, once again, has been called upon to teach us a harsh lesson about nuclear energy.

In the past few decades, more details have emerged about the development and deployment of the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan during World War II. Best-selling books report about how some government officials and scientists involved with the project urged Leslie Groves and the military to drop the bomb over the ocean, just off the coast of Japan, as perhaps this measure would scare the enemy into surrendering.

Groves and other military leaders asserted that there were only three finished weapons and that if the "demonstration blast" did not produce the desired effect, the US would have squandered a rare (at that time) and expensive opportunity. Also, some believed that the dropping of the two bombs served some grim purpose as a medical experiment. What would the bomb actually do to a city, its infrastructure and its population?

Who would argue that the results of those two bombs have kept that option at bay since 1945?

In the wake of the recent Japanese nuclear disaster, Kenzaburo Oe writes in The New Yorker about Hiroshima:

What did Japan learn from the tragedy of Hiroshima? One of the great figures of contemporary Japanese thought, Shuichi Kato, who died in 2008, speaking of atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, recalled a line from "The Pillow Book," written a thousand years ago by a woman, Sei Shonagon, in which the author evokes "something that seems very far away but is, in fact, very close." Nuclear disaster seems a distant hypothesis, improbable; the prospect of it is, however, always with us. The Japanese should not be thinking of nuclear energy in terms of industrial productivity; they should not draw from the tragedy of Hiroshima a "recipe" for growth. Like earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural calamities, the experience of Hiroshima should be etched into human memory: it was even more dramatic a catastrophe than those natural disasters precisely because it was man-made. To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima's victims.

I had written two pieces deconstructing the bizarre claims of the nuclear power industry. The incessant lie that nuclear is clean power, forever discounting the filthy and contaminating processes that mine, refine and enrich fissionable material for utility reactors. Although we must never set aside other factors such as vulnerability to terrorism and the lingering and unsolved issue of waste disposal, the Big Lie regarding "clean nuke" hype seems to trouble me most. You can't get many Americans to view a wind farm as a sign of our investment in a clean, safe energy future, but they seem to roll over and let the nuke industry do as they please, even in the wake of Fukushima.

If I told you that the chances that you would get AIDS from one act of unprotected sex with an infected partner were one in a million, would you do it? (Actually, according to a report by researchers Norman Hearst and Stephen Hulley in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the odds of a heterosexual becoming infected with AIDS after one episode of penile-vaginal intercourse with someone in a non-high-risk group without a condom are one in 5 million.) The answer is no. Because, if you took that bet and lost, you'd get AIDS.

Nukes are a similar bet. And there is no "protection" you can put on to save you. Fukushima shows us that utility companies reap all of the benefits, while we assume all of the risks.


Full online article on nuclear energy by Alec Baldwin, Huffington Post

Green Stock Watch: High energy prices are wind in cleantech sails

The double-edged events in Libya have caused a spike in global oil prices that will slow growth at home and abroad, however renewed high energy prices also invigorate renewable clean power companies.

The more you look into it, the more you will realize that oil is the most replaceable of all commodities, via natural gas, methanol, ethanol, new biogas / biofuel technologies and even solar, wind, geothermal, conservation and energy storage, directly and via equivalent energy displacement.

This is good news for green power stocks, however any with weak coffers should move quickly to raise cash now, for peace is just as likely to break out as war, if not more so. Money may soon be more expensive, so CFOs and CEOs, start working overtime to have sufficient money raised in the next two to three months, to last two to three years if possible.

A few years back I called the 2008 top in oil prices, predicted it coming and announced its arrival after oil crossed the $140 mark. We're getting into frothy territory again, and a new prediction is likely coming very soon. Not sure how high this one's gonna go, but we're climbing the peak now:

5 year chart Brent Crude oil price


Events and human psychology will determine this coming top, yet it already looks probable that support after the next oil price downturn will be around $56, up from $42 during the most recent bottom. THIS is a third higher, so when oil is next near a bottom and everyone is barking "disinflation", just compare the current bottom to the bottom in the previous cycle, and make your calculations from there.

If the oil price goes through 140 and makes a new high above 160, then 56 would be likely support for the next recession. If the oil price falters around or below the 140 mark, we have the dreaded double top and the downside may be even more severe, possibly to 24 at the nadir.

The bulls will tell you that $140 will become the new support level, converting former resistance, but don't believe them. At that price the global economy would crash, which is good for neither sellers nor buyers. Traders will take the market down about four or five times faster than they take it up, so don't be shy about starting to take long oil profits soon.

It also seems rather early to short, with Libya onstage, Iran in the wings, Bahrain and Yemen on side stages. As the ancient Chinese proverb says, "May you live in interesting times!"


Perhaps 2011 is another Sell in May and Stay Away year, or maybe things are moving even faster. Stay tuned.


Middle East democracy uprisings related links:

Middle East Revolutions 2.0; Egypt and Tunisia Timelines Dec 2010 to Feb 2011

Heroes and Martyrs of 2011 Tunisia and Egypt Revolutions

Canada urges Libya to show restraint with democracy protesters

Top Green Stocks $1 or less; Alternative Energy Penny Stocks Tips

Green Energy Investing; Renewable Power Penny Stocks

Here are some alternative energy companies trading at $1 or less as of the close of market, Tuesday, September 7th, 2010:

(Investing in penny stocks is for high risk investors, as there is a reasonable possibility that any single investment can go to zero. Prudent investors should allocate less than 5% of their total portfolio to speculative issues.)

Lithium One Inc. - LI - $1

Zongshen PEM Power - ZPP - $1

EMCORE Corp - EMKR - 0.94

Valence Technology - VLNC - 0.93

US Geothermal - HTM - 0.76

Clipper Windpower - CWP - 45p

Nevada Geothermal Power - NGP - 0.53

Suzlon Energy - 532667 - 51.70r

Hy-Drive Tech - HGS.V - 0.195 (Disclaimer: I own shares in this one)

Cleanfield Energy - AIR - 0.19

Shear Wind Inc - SWX - 0.18

It's probably best to own a few different green energy stocks, and not fall in love with them. Competition for sales will be fierce, so when you have a solid profit at a strong sales multiple, keep the exits in mind. Of course, some of these may go on to be the next Vesta or First Solar, but most won't; Happy hunting!!!

More Green Energy Investing links:

Geothermal Power Stocks Companies

Solar Electric Stocks

Green Mutual Funds

11 Green Stocks $1 or less; Alternative Energy Investing Tips

Green Energy Investing; Renewable Power Penny Stocks

Here are some alternative energy companies trading at $1 or less as of the close of market, Tuesday, September 7th, 2010:

(Investing in penny stocks is for high risk investors, as there is a reasonable possibility that any single investment can go to zero. Prudent investors should allocate less than 5% of their total portfolio to speculative issues.)

Lithium One Inc. - LI - $1

Zongshen PEM Power - ZPP - $1

EMCORE Corp - EMKR - 0.94

Valence Technology - VLNC - 0.93

US Geothermal - HTM - 0.76

Clipper Windpower - CWP - 45p

Nevada Geothermal Power - NGP - 0.53

Suzlon Energy - 532667 - 51.70r

Hy-Drive Tech - HGS.V - 0.195 (Disclaimer: I own shares in this one)

Cleanfield Energy - AIR - 0.19

Shear Wind Inc - SWX - 0.18

It's probably best to own a few different green energy stocks, and not fall in love with them. Competition for sales will be fierce, so when you have a solid profit at a strong sales multiple, keep the exits in mind. Of course, some of these may go on to be the next Vesta or First Solar, but most won't; Happy hunting!!!

More Green Energy Investing links:

Geothermal Power Stocks Companies

Solar Electric Stocks

Green Mutual Funds

July 2010; Are Wind Energy Stocks in BUY Territory?

Small and large windpower companies have seen their share prices pull back along with the broader market decline of recent weeks. As the off-oil movement is likely to gain considerable momentum in coming months and years, perhaps it is time for investors to look at offshore wind energy rather than deepwater drilling.

Many of the top publicly-listed wind energy companies appear to be bottoming out and the coming weeks may be ideal for stink bids, for slow and steady accumulation.

Happy hunting!

Joe