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  reprint Russia possesses the potential to produce significant gas from its Eastern Regions, with total proved reserves  in  East  Siberia  and  the  Far  East  of  Russia  standing  at  5  trillion  cubic  metres  (Tcm)  while prospective  resources  could  be  as  large  as  65Tcm. This  would  appear  to  give  Russia  a  huge opportunity for export sales into the Asia Pacific region , which contains the world’s largest LNG importing  nations  and  two  of  the  world’s  fastest  growing  gas  markets   in  China  and  India   (also importers  of  LNG). It  is  surprising,  therefore,  that  despite  the  obvious  commercial  logic  of  linking enormous gas resources to expandin...

  reprint New analysis from Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) and the Indian School of Business shows that, with the appropriate policies, the Budget 2015 target of 60 GW of wind power by 2022 can easily be met with minimal government financial support. In the report, Reaching India’s Renewable Energy Targets Cost-Effectively, CPI found that, in absence of any subsidies, wind power is already cheaper than the total cost of power from a new build imported coal plant, at INR 5.87/kWh for electricity from wind power and INR 6.81/kWh for electricity from imported coal. The comparison with imported coal is key because this is the fuel that additional renewable energy will likely replace, rather than domestic coal or natural gas , which are limited in supply. The analysis also finds that wind power will continue to remain competitive beyond 2022. Because the government has a constrained budget, a cost-effective policy path to achieving its renewable energy targets is crucial. Th...

-- a _kt75 | reprint Download: Quarterly Notes on Sustainable Water Management - Q01/2014 The energy economics of the world is now at a crossroads, giving rise to a fiery debate among experts whether it will bring about a momentous change in the world’s strategic balance. The Ukraine crisis has given an impetus to it by threatening a cut in the supply of Russian oil and gas to Europe; the West is now on the lookout for an alternative source of energy. With the United States making rapid progress in the area of shale oil and gas technology, and several large-scale shale reserves being discovered in Western Europe and Latin America, dependence on hydrocarbon supplies from the Middle East and the Persian Gulf will decrease, which will ultimately lead to a lapse in big power involvement in the region. This has all come as a boon to American companies involved in the exploitation of shale resources, and they are leaving no stone unturned in sweeping away the impediment...

-- a _kt75 | reprint India added just over 1 gigawatt of solar energy to its electrical grid last year, a major milestone that nearly doubles the country’s cumulative solar energy capacity to 2.18 gigawatts. After a slow start to the year, solar installation picked up rapidly — a good sign that India will be able to meet its ambitious solar targets going forward. India hopes to install 10 GW of solar by 2017 and 20 GW by 2022. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, launched in 2010 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, aims to help the country achieve success with solar energy deployment. India is currently in the planning stages of building the world’s largest solar plant, which would generate 4 gigawatts in the northwestern state of Rajasthan. “This is the first project of this scale anywhere in the world and is expected to set a trend for large-scale solar power developments,” Ashvini Kumar, director of Solar Energy Corp, one of five public utilities that will run the plant,...

-- a note from _kt75 Hydro power is considered one of the promising sustainable (because renewable) ener g y sources able to fa cilitate and guarantee a safe energy turnaround away from fossil energy carriers. Accordingly, hydro power industry is on the rise a nd a multitude of construction projects are either in the planning stage , in progress or already finished. However, as in any other case in ad dition to the te chnical dimension al so hydr o power has a n e nvironmental , an economic and a geo-p olitical d imen sion which are cl osely interlinked [ 1 ]. Due to the ongoing pronounced and rather uni -directional prom otion of al ternative/renewable en ergy car riers (like hydro power ) critical tra de-offs and ass oci ated conflicts (whatever kind of) can create rat her drastic situations and the actually sustainable nature of renewable energy carr iers gets lost. In particular politically unstable, mainly developing regions are concerned [ 2 ] - [ 5 ] . Here, bu...