The BMW Group has today announced an additional £500 million investment in its UK production network over the next three years and confirmed that the UK will be a production location for its next generation MINI models.
The BMW Group chairman outlined his company’s plans for further investment at a meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron at Downing Street this morning.
The investment, the majority of which will be will be used to create new production facilities and equipment at MINI Plant Oxford, will help to safeguard over 5,000 jobs in the MINI vehicle assembly plant in Oxford, the pressings plant in Swindon and the company’s engine plant at Hams Hall near Birmingham.
Mr Cameron welcomed the investment as a “tremendous vote of confidence”:
“I welcome this major investment by BMW Group in UK manufacturing. The production and export of iconic British cars like the MINI is making a real contribution to the rebalancing of the economy that this government is determined to achieve.
“It’s a tremendous vote of confidence in the skills and capabilities of the company’s British workforce and in the future of UK manufacturing.
“The MINI plant in Oxford has been one of our great manufacturing success stories, they should be hugely proud of their achievements. They have shown once again that the UK is a major player in the global automotive industry.”
Mr Cameron also hosted a breakfast meeting with the board of directors of the European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association (ACEA) to discuss the growing confidence in the UK automotive industry. ACEA represents some of the biggest car, truck and bus manufacturers at European and this is the first time the board of directors has come to the UK.
The BMW Group announcement and ACEA meeting today follow news yesterday that Japanese car manufacturer Nissan plans to invest £192 million to build the next version of its Qashqai model in Britain.
The design for a hybrid electric plant that makes steam from natural gas and from solar power, supplemented by wind machines.General ElectricA hybrid electric plant designed by General Electric. Mirrors focus sunlight on power towers, top right, that make steam that is injected through pipes into a turbine,center, to make electricity. Wind turbines, rear, make electricity to either help run the plant or to feed the grid.
General ElectricA hybrid electric plant designed by General Electric. Mirrors focus sunlight on power towers, top right, that make steam that is injected through pipes into a turbine,center, to make electricity. Wind turbines, rear, make electricity to either help run the plant or to feed the grid.
Green: Business
How can the electric system take intermittent energy sources like wind and sun and integrate them with conventional fuels for electricity, like natural gas?
General Electric and a small California company called eSolar announced a new strategy on Tuesday: use the solar power to make steam that will supplement the steam from the natural gas. And tack on some wind machines nearby, in an arrangement that lets the natural gas compensate for variations in the wind and sun.
The technology turns a natural gas plant and a solar plant into conjoined twins; wind is more like a half-sibling.
The two companies said they would break ground this year on a hybrid electric plant in Karaman, Turkey, to be owned by a Turkish project developer called MetCap Energy Investments. Part of it will look like a conventional combined-cycle gas plant, in which the natural gas is burned in a jet engine that drives a generator, and the exhaust gases are used to make steam to turn a steam turbine that also drives a generator.
But standing nearby is a 250-foot tower surrounded by about 25,000 mirrors, each about the size of a big flat-screen television. Computers keep the mirrors focused on the tower, and inside the tower, water is boiled into steam. The steam flows into the turbine along with steam from the natural gas plant.
In broad outline, using the sun to boil water into steam and supplementing that with natural gas is not new. But most such projects use parabolic troughs with black pipes running down the center. The tower design allows steam to be heated to temperatures 200 degrees higher than the troughs, which means that the system will produce far more electricity per acre.
The design is rather modest on the renewables side; the plan is for 450 megawatts of natural gas, 50 megawatts of solar power and 22 megawatts of wind power. But Turkey grants a subsidy equal to 10 euro cents a kilowatt-hour for renewable power, said Paul Browning, president and chief executive of the thermal products division of GE Energy.
“There are some savings from the control system, the switch yard, some of the interconnections,”’ Mr. Browning added. G.E. is boasting that the plant will be 69 percent efficient, a phenomenally high number. Most natural gas plants have an efficiency ranging from 30 to 50 percent.
GE calculates the figure by counting the sun and wind at zero, as a kind of hamburger helper for the natural gas. The calculation ignores the wind and sun that does not get converted to electricity, but on the other hand, the wind and sun are inexhaustible.
The design is based on a new model of G.E. natural gas plant called FlexEfficiency that is able to vary its output rapidly to make it a good dance partner for variable sources like wind and sun.
Mr. Browning said a customer that was considering supplementing natural gas with solar power would have to weigh the cost of gas, the cost of capital and the available incentives. “Gas in the U.S. is very cheap right now, and the renewable incentives in the U.S. are — let’s call them inconsistent and difficult to project into future,” he said. The price of natural gas in Turkey is more than double the price in the United Sates, he said.
The Turkish plant will be in commercial operation by 2015, he said. Future plants could have a higher proportion of solar energy, depending on market conditions, he said.
The California company eSolar operates two power towers on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Last year it received an $11 million grant from the Energy Department to work on the design of a system that would heat molten salt rather than water. The salt stores heat that can be turned into electricity during periods of clouds or darkness, said John Van Scoter, the company’s chief executive and president.
At the Turkish plant, there is no need for storage; the solar part will run when there is sunshine, and be replaced by gas when there is no sun.
via A Hybrid Power Plant Takes Shape in Turkey – NYTimes.com.
Tayfun Acarer complains about the lack of civil-society support for Internet restrictions. AA photo.
A recent plan to force Internet users in Turkey to choose one of four content-filtering packages should be supported by all nongovernmental organizations, a top official said during a meeting Monday.
“All the NGOs should unite and have one voice, especially on the Internet issues discussed a lot recently,” Tayfun Acarer, the head of the Prime Ministry’s Information Technologies Board, or BTK, said at a conference in Istanbul.
“Many NGOs voice their difficulties from time to time, but when it comes to highly important issues such as the Internet, they remain quiet,” Acarer said, calling the situation “unacceptable.” He added that all other countries like Turkey care about the ability to control the Internet.
The ongoing debate on the filtering application is “inaccurate” and politically motivated, Acarer said previously.
“Bringing this topic to the agenda these days is political,” the BTK chief said, according to an Anatolia news agency report last month.
Under the decision on “Rules and Procedures of the Safety of Internet Use,” approved by the BTK in February, Internet users in Turkey will have to choose one of four Internet packages: family, children, domestic or standard. The list of websites filtered by each package will be decided by the BTK but will not be made public.
The change will be implemented starting Aug. 22. “Unfortunately we did not receive the support we expected from NGOs for the Internet measures,” Acarer said, adding that a unified body of Turkish NGOs active in information technologies could help overcome the long-lasting problems of the sector.
“In order to do that, we should all trust in the new system and defend it with complete solidarity,” he said, adding the IT sector also requires standardization.
via Turkish official backs Internet filter, lashes out at NGOs – Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review.
Having long had problems with harnessing its huge solar energy potential at a desired level, Turkey can become one of the leading countries in solar power in the world if new investments are put in place, observers argued at a symposium on renewable energy in Antalya on Sunday.
Representatives of Turkish renewable energy firms gathered on Sunday in Antalya at a symposium to discuss future projects. Speaking at the meeting, Ahmet Lokurlu, the inventor of a solar cooling system and also CEO of SOLITEM GmbH, said improvement in solar energy production facilities would make Turkey one of the prominent players in this field. Underlining that Turkey is home to an ideal climate for solar energy investments, Lokurlu said new research and development (R&D) investments should be encouraged to this end.
Making mention of an average of more than seven hours of sunshine a day and bordering the Aegean, Black and Mediterranean seas, Lokurlu said hotels should intensify efforts to switch to renewable energy. “Around 15 percent of hotels’ expenditures go to energy consumption … they could ease this burden with renewable energy, particularly solar power,” he explained.
Lokurlu also introduced a new Güneş Park (Solar Park) project — Turkey’s first solar energy power techno-park — to be established in Antalya. While its demand for electricity is increasing steadily, Turkey obtains more than half of all its electricity needs from natural gas plants. The government has plans to diversify energy supply options with investment in the field of renewable energy.
via Turkey to become one of world’s leading solar energy hubs.
Here’s a linguistic can of worms for you: a U.S. intelligence agency is training computers to analyze metaphors used in foreigners’ conversations to determine if they are a threat to national security.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a spy version of DARPA under the director of National Intelligence, is working on something called The Metaphor Program. It’s no 1960s quiz show.
The program is meant to “exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture.”
Researchers will apparently identify and define metaphors from English, Farsi, Spanish, and Russian texts and compile them into a database. But computers will do most of the work.
The first phase of the five-year program will “develop automated tools and techniques for recognizing, defining, and categorizing linguistic metaphors.” Analysts would later compare subjects’ statements to the database to try to determine their intentions. There’s more info in a presentation here (PDF).
Project manager Heather McCallum-Bayliss has suggested that words used by Israelis and Palestinians or China and Taiwan to describe world events could be analyzed as an example. Statements by extremist leaders could also be studied for the effect of metaphors on followers.
One of the goals of the Metaphor Program is to deliver “a functional prototype that demonstrates the automated handling of data, discovery, and semantic definition of metaphors.”
It’s very difficult for natural language processing software to comprehend figurative language, so that will be one tough row to hoe.
‘Man-made’ earthquake strikes Blackpool… and consequences could be severe for UK’s gas drilling industry
By Daily Mail Reporter
Controversial: Gas drilling by Cuadrilla near Blackpool, Lancashire, has been suspended following an earthquake on Friday
Shale gas drilling – known as ‘fracking’ – is the process of fracturing rock deep underground using high-pressure water to extract gas.
The company behind the scheme, Cuadrilla, confirmed that it had been doing this just 1.2 miles from the epicentre of the tremor and has downed tools to investigate.
Experts believe the process could be behind the earthquake, which could have severe repercussions for drilling in the UK.
It follows a 2.3 magnitude earthquake at the beginning of last month, which also occurred near to the site at Preese Hall, near Blackpool.
Today, the British Geological Survey’s head of seismology, Brian Baptie, said the survey recorded the magnitude 1.5 earthquake shortly after midnight on Friday.
He said: ‘Data from two temporary instruments close to the drill site, installed after the magnitude 2.3 earthquake on April 1, indicate that the event occurred at a depth of approximately 2km or 1.2 miles.
‘The recorded waveforms are very similar to those from the magnitude 2.3 event last month, which suggests that the two events share a similar location and mechanism.’
The organisation said it could not say conclusively if the first earthquake, on April 1, was linked to the ‘fracking’ for shale gas but the its website said: ‘Any process that injects pressurised water into rocks at depth will cause the rock to fracture and possibly produce earthquakes.
‘It is well known that injection of water or other fluids during the oil extraction and geothermal engineering, such as shale gas, processes can result in earthquake activity.’
The shale gas exploration scheme near Blackpool has involved drilling a well 1.7 miles down into the earth, and then using ‘fracking’ to stimulate the rock around the well – a process which began in March.
The peace of Blackpool promenade, but beneath the seaside town the search for gas is feared to be causing earthquakes
WHAT IS ‘FRACKING’?
It is a mining technique commonly used to get gas or oil from under land rather than under the sea.
To get the gas out, companies drill down into shale and form a well. They then inject wells with water, small amounts of chemicals and sand to create tiny cracks in the rock, allowing natural gas and sometimes oil to flow upwards into the well.
The technique could add about 40 per cent to previous estimates of global recoverable gas resources, with the largest known reserves are in China, the United States, Argentina and Mexico.
However, It is now feared the process could be the cause of small earthquakes.
Critics such as the Green party say that it is environmentally unsafe because the chemicals could contaminate soil and get into drinking water.
Cuadrilla Resources, the shale gas exploration company, confirmed it had postponed ‘fracking’ operations.
In a statement the company said it had decided to halt the work while it interprets seismic information received from monitoring around the site, following the small quake last Friday.
Mark Miller, chief executive of Cuadrilla Resources, said: ‘We take our responsibilities very seriously and that is why we have stopped fracking operations to share information and consult with the relevant authorities and other experts.
‘We expect that this analysis and subsequent consultation will take a number of weeks to conclude and we will decide on appropriate actions after that.’
Shale gas extraction has been controversial in the US because of claims that cancer-causing compounds used in the process have polluted water supplies – and that the gas can pollute drinking water, with footage of people able to set fire to the water coming out of their taps.
But earlier this month the Commons’ Energy and Climate Change Committee said a ban on shale gas drilling was not necessary in the UK, as there was no evidence that it posed a risk to water supplies from underground aquifers.
Following the news that ‘fracking’ had been suspended at the Lancashire site, WWF Scotland reiterated its call for the process to be banned.
It comes after it was revealed at the weekend that a company was seeking permission for Scotland’s first shale gas exploration at Aith, near Falkirk.
WWF Scotland Director, Dr Richard Dixon, said: ‘Whether the shale gas drilling and the earthquake are linked certainly needs investigated.
‘However, we already know enough about the environmental problems associated with fracking to know that it should be banned in Scotland.
‘Shale gas would be a disaster for the climate and its production could contaminate groundwater. Scotland should follow France’s example and ban it before it even gets going.
‘Scotland should become the home of clean energy not another dirty fossil-fuel. Shale gas projects in Scotland would quickly tarnish our global claim to green credentials.’
The BMW Group has today announced an additional £500 million investment in its UK production network over the next three years and confirmed that the UK will be a production location for its next generation MINI models.
