Good news! Carbon sequestration to come online in Germany. Good news, except to the greens:

BERLIN (AFP) – One of Europe’s biggest power companies inaugurates on Tuesday a pilot project using a technology that it is presenting as a huge potential breakthrough in the fight against climate change. But green campaigners have denounced the project as a cosmetic operation that does not really address the problem of global warming.

I thought the real problem of global warming is the CO2? So, we need to eliminate the carbon entirely? OK. How about solar and wind? Problem is, however, we would need new power lines to get the power from the desert to the towns. Here’s what’s going on in California, for example:

The 150-mile transmission line would run through the park for more than 20 miles, replacing wooden poles that carry lower-voltage lines with industrial-style towers up to 160 feet tall.
San Diego Gas & Electric and its parent corporation, Sempra Energy, promise that the proposed line, known as Sunrise Powerlink, would carry renewable power from the sun, wind and ground, mostly via yet-undeveloped plants in the bright, hot Imperial Valley.
State law requires utilities to supply 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2010 – a benchmark SDG&E has said it cannot meet. The San Diego utility supplies 6% today.
“The project’s significance lies not only in its supplying additional power for a thriving and growing region but in doing so in a way that truly moves California into the future,” Schwarzenegger wrote to Dian Grueneich, the California public utility commissioner overseeing the project’s application, in a letter last December that came to light last month.
But the project would mar sweeping vistas of mountains, desert and scenic roads on 90,000 of Anza-Borrego’s 600,000 acres, spoil the solitude of campgrounds with loud buzzing and jeopardize species such as the endangered bighorn sheep, according to parks officials and a draft state and federal environmental review completed in January. That report found five preferable alternatives, including a route south of the park along Interstate 8 through the Cleveland National Forest.
“The idea that we’re going to sacrifice critical pieces of our environment to protect other pieces of our environment seems a little ironic,” said Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the nonprofit California Parks Foundation. “That’s an irony I cannot accept. We have to find a way to do both.”

What’s the point of solar or wind if you can’t get the electricity to those who need it? Again, it’s the greens who are in the way.

And here’s an interesting article that is sure to anger the greens. The idea of using waste heat, or gray energy, from manufacturing facilities to generate electricity. It could be that the whole focus on carbon could be the wrong take if you’re trying to save the environment:

Tom Casten has the money and the know-how to generate huge amounts of clean power without bothering with costly solar and wind energy.
West Virginia’s Kanawha River Valley is a gritty collection of slag piles, coal mounds and sooty mine shafts. It is also a showcase for clean energy. In the unincorporated town of Alloy, a 72-year-old silicon smelter owned by West Virginia Alloys is getting a $75 million heat recycling system. If it delivers what it promises, it will produce as much electricity as $300 million worth of giant windmills or $2.8 billion in solar panels–exclusive of energy credits.
Is it possible that in their hunt for low-carbon energy, environmentalists are barking up the wrong trees? Sun and wind power are indeed clean but expensive, in part because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. For its modest capital outlay the Alloy project is supposed to produce 357 million kilowatt-hours of juice per year. Solar cells (at least if installed in West Virginia) would pay a much lower dividend per dollar invested.
The Alloy project is the brainchild of Thomas and Sean Casten, the father and son duo who run Recycled Energy Development in Westmont, Ill. In early 2010 RED hopes to fire up a turbine that will capture the 1,500-Fahrenheit-degree heat coming off the silicon plant’s five arc furnaces and feed that electricity in a roundabout way back into the factory. West Virginia Alloys makes more silicon, 72,000 tons annually, than any other single site in the world, selling the glinty metal to manufacturers of everything from cosmetics to computer chips. This plant is already the lowest-cost producer of silicon in the world and, with the Castens’ technology, will save an additional 37% on its energy bills, which account for one-third of its operating costs.
The idea that you can wring value out of waste heat has a long history. Thomas Edison sold heat from the exhaust of the world’s first power plant on Pearl Street in Manhattan, using it to warm nearby buildings. You do the same sort of thing when you turn on a car heater. Space heating is the easy application for industrial waste heat. But with some engineering finesse the discarded Btu can also be used to turn turbines that produce high-quality electric energy.
Why isn’t more of this country’s industrial waste heat put to use? The space heating application is geographically limited; customers have to be within several miles of the heat source. As for dynamos running on scrap heat: Cheap energy and grid regulations have discouraged such projects. But now the “gray power” concept is back on the table. “We’re at the start of something that should have been done long ago,” says Tom Casten, 65, RED’s chairman. Sean, 37, is chief executive.
The Castens are armed with Department of Energy studies that suggest the U.S. could reduce its CO2 emissions by 20%, the equivalent of taking all the cars and light trucks off the road, by recycling industrial waste heat and building smaller fossil-fuel “cogeneration” plants sized to provide enough by-product heat for each factory or office park. Tom Casten goes even further, envisioning small power plants spread out across America for homes and businesses. By capturing waste heat, these power plants would operate at above 90% efficiency, Casten says, compared with the current U.S. power grid that operates at 33%, the same as it did 50 years ago.

What say you greens? Any complaints about this one?