convince me to buy no ramping please, page-29

No, sorry, I thought you got my message last week regarding the meeting. I won't be making the Cougar AGM, a little busy at the moment, don't have the time to be jetting off to AGMs...!

In fact, I'm missing the entire AGM season (and a chat with tight-lipped GDY was long overdue).

Enjoy the meeting, ignore the ferals, and prosper!

I have included a couple of articles that may be of interest, none directly related to the topic at hand, but useful in outlining the benefits of investing in processes such as the one being developed by CXY.

Cheers

Tawny




From the Economist:

"NO UTILITY with any respect for its shareholders' money, says Michael Morris, the boss of the biggest one in America, AEP, would build a heavily polluting coal-burning power station in America these days, for fear that it would become a liability if the government moved to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. Europe already has a cap on emissions, which is designed precisely to discourage dirty fuels such
as coal. So why is it that utilities in both places are running their coal-fired plants at full throttle, have several new ones under construction and would like to build even more?

Using coal to generate electricity produces more greenhouse gases per resulting watt than using oil or natural gas, but coal is cheap. In countries where there are no limits on emissions and where demand for power is growing rapidly, such as India and China, coal is booming. Energy lore has it that in China a new coal-burning plant is fired up every week. What is certain is that China has become a net importer of coal for the first time this year. India's imports have been growing steadily for the past 20 years.

The International Energy Agency, an energy watchdog for rich countries, projects that demand for coal will grow by 2.2% a year until 2030-faster than demand for oil or natural gas. Coal-mining firms in Indonesia and Australia, the biggest exporters, are digging as fast as they can but are still struggling to cope with the surge in orders. Freighters are literally queuing up off Newcastle, Australia, the world's busiest coal port.

In theory, the carbon price (in Europe) and the threat of one (in America) should dent this enthusiasm for coal. But in practice many utilities are betting that the disparity in fuel prices will outweigh the cost of extra permits to pollute. At the moment such permits cost pennies in Europe, because governments handed out too many of them. Politicians in both Europe and America talk of carbon prices eventually being so high that coal-fired plants will be viable only if they capture their emissions and store them underground. But no such plants yet exist. Most of those under construction are not even "capture-ready", as the industry jargon has it, since utilities do not consider the extra expense worthwhile."





From the Canberra Times


"THERE is a painfully inconvenient truth for many Australian
politicians and climate change activists facing the 2007 federal election. It is that international scientific opinion and technical experience clearly indicate that the pivotal solution to both energy security and climate change is the increasing use of nuclear power technology.
*This view has been strongly endorsed at recent scientific conferences both by Australia's chief scientist, Jim Peacock, and the chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Ziggy Switkowski. Their informed views are supported by overseas experience. Overseas, Members of the European Parliament have voted overwhelmingly in favour of a report stating that nuclear energy is indispensable if the European Union is to meet its basic energy needs in the medium term. It is the Parliament's first explicit endorsement of nuclear power as Europe's largest carbon-free energy source, providing
one-third of its electricity.

According to the European Commission's Transport and Energy
Directorate, renewable energy use alone would struggle to help reduce carbon emissions, while carbon capture and storage would not be viable in time to help meet emission reduction targets and would be very expensive. The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme for carbon dioxide is now trading December 2008 allowances at about 22 euros per
tonne. This translates into a cost burden on coal fired plant in excess of $20/MWh.

In Australia, the Labor Party's proposal to have a mandatory
renewable energy target of 20 per cent of electrical energy to be provided from wind, solar and geothermal sources by the year 2020 is far more impractical and ambitious than the targets of the European model. It could become a huge financial burden on energy users unless massively subsidised by an incumbent government. Typically, wind power with an average capacity factor of say 25 per cent will need back-up
generators prior to grid connection. The cost of energy generated will be about five times greater per MWh than from a nuclear plant."


Will Australia choose cleaner coal and renewables, or a combination of the two plus Nuclear? A tough call, but we can easily say Australia is not ready to wean itself off coal anytime soon.