Cern operations group leader Mike Lamont (foreground) and LHC engineer in charge Alick Macpherson in the Cern control centre 19 March
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Two 3.5 TeV proton beams successfully circulated in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at Cern for the first time Friday morning 19 March, shortly after 05:20, a key step in ramping up the LHC for 7 TeV collisions, whose data will be fed to a series of physics research projects around the world.
Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) says this is the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator.
Hydroelectric station, canton Valais, Switzerland
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Electricity price increases announced in 2009 by several suppliers were provisionally rejected in July 2009 by Bern as unnecessarily high, and Monday 8 March the federal electricity commission confirmed this. The commission’s report says that the increases were based on costs that were over-estimated in some cases and unacceptable inefficiency in other cases. The energy companies have the right to appeal, but if they do not the rate hikes will have to be abandoned.
The companies concerned are: Alpiq, BKW, Axpo (Axpo AG, CKW, EGL), EWZ and Rätia Energie, along with a number of smaller firms.
Wind turbine, Switzerland
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Canton Vaud will have 10 additional wind turbines on a third site, by 2014, Romande Energie announced Friday 5 March. The communes of Longirod and Marchissy, at the foot of the Jura, have agreed to their construction, as have the landowners. The wind energy produced by the mills will supply electricity to some 10,000 households. The cost to build them: CHF60 million.
Romande Energie has set a target to have 10 percent of its energy coming from renewable sources by 2020-2025, the company notes.
Links to other sites: Longirod, Romande Energy, Swiss federal department of energy on wind energy
Wind turbine, Saint Brais, Jura, Switzerland (photo: ©2010, Suisse Eole)
Geneva, Switzerland (Geneva Lunch) - New wind turbines at Saint-Brais, canton Jura, will raise Switzerland’s total annual renewable energy power production to 17.5 MW, according to Suisse Eole, the Swiss wind energy promotion association. Switzerland has a limited number of wind turbines, but the Jura wind park is the first in the country to be financed by a broad citizen base: some 600 private investors are behind the two 2 MW turbines. Suisse Eole predicts an increase of 200 MW of power by 2015.
By 2030 wind farming in Switzerland could provide 2.5 percent of the national electricity supply, and by 2050 that figure will jump to 7 percent, the group says.
The figures show the promise of wind production in Switzerland, although newly published international figures indicate that Switzerland is unlikely to match some other European countries’ adoption of wind power.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Seven top executives of Foster Wheeler, a major producer of power plants and refineries, are to move from Perryville, New Jersey to Geneva, Switzerland in order to be closer to the company’s markets. The company is domiciled in Zug, Switzerland, and employs 14,000 people worldwide.
The AltaRock Energy project in California, north of San Francisco, to drill deep into the Earth’s bedrock and use the heat released as a renewable energy source, was abandoned Friday 11 December. The project has been seen as a key part of the Obama administration’s efforts to find alternative energy supplies. The move comes just a day after Switzerland’s geothermal project in Basel was shut down permanently, following earthquakes at the site in 2006 and early 2007.
Links to other sites: Alta Rock, New York Times
Discreet Swiss hotel windows are sometimes a good minibar substitute
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The 55,000 mini-bars in Swiss hotels consume far more energy than the average home refrigerator for a family of four, some 24 million kW hours in a year. The heart of the problem is the sad news for hotel clients who love drinks in their rooms that a 40-litre minibar consumes 0.9 kW/h versus the 0.24 that a 150-litre refrigerator uses.
Title: Global Challenges at the Intersection of Trade, Energy and the Environment — Graduate Institute and WTO
Location: World Trade Organisation, Room CR1, 154, rue de Lausanne, Geneva, Switzerland
Link out: Click here
Description: Series of conferences organized by the Graduate Institute and WTO on the intersection between trade, energy and the environment
Start Date: 22 Oct 2009
Start Time: 9:15
End Date: 23 Oct 2009
Obligatory registration by Monday, 19 October. Please send an email to souda.tandara@wto.org.
Conference is free.
State and local governments that want to divest themselves of investments in companies which do business in Iran will be allowed to do so with a proposed law that the US House of Representatives approved Wednesday 14 October. No new sanctions on Iran are envisaged, but companies that invest more than $20 million in Iran’s energy sector can be targeted and their shares sold by state and municipal investment agencies. The federal government has the exclusive right to conduct foreign policy, but would waive its right in this case, if the Senate passes the law as well.
The move comes as the US is trying to line up international support for a united response to Iran’s continuing nuclear program. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council cannot agree on sanctions on Iran to force it to comply with international rules concerning nuclear research programmes. AP, The Hill
Swiss food and drink cost you a little more in September 2009.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland’s inflation rate fell slightly in September, down 0.9 percent, to an annual rate of 2.9 percent. The Consumer Price Index remained stable but the overall CPI is the result of a balance between imports,which have gone down in price and Swiss-made goods and services, which have risen slightly. It also hides differences that include falling prices for housing, energy and transport but rising prices for teaching, communications, food and drink, healthcare.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The question marks hanging over Iran’s nuclear activities, peaceful or warlike or possibly both, are bringing together in Geneva today 1 October top officials from Iran and the group known as 5+1: Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany. It follows an earlier meeting of the group in July 2008, which ended on a sour note, and where the head of the US delegation, William Burns, reportedly left the room to avoid shaking hands with his Iranian counterpart, Saeed Jalili. Early in 2009 US President Barack Obama’s administration said it intended to take a fresh approach, and Obama has since said that he wants to allow time to reassess the US relationship with Iran.
This session is described by Iran as an opportunity to discuss security in the region, and by some of the others as a chance for Iran to clarify its nuclear activities. It is also being seen in the West as a chance for China and Russia, whose attitudes towards Iran may have shifted in the past year, to provide their reaction to the announcement that Iran has a uranium enrichment plant at Qom.
Lake Geneva
Complete coverage of the WCC-3 by GenevaLunch
Conference is 31 August – 4 September 2009
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Geneva is home this week to a key global conference on how the world can adapt to climate change – disasters such as floods and hurricanes, but also the more subtle changes that affect agriculture, tourism and daily life.
The conference agenda is wide-ranging and includes improvements to early warning systems for disasters and how to provide more precise and more localized weather forecasting, needed by developing countries as well as industries in the developed world.
The meeting is hosted by Switzerland and organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and a group of partners.
Swiss windmill, Valais
Morges, Vaud and Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Romande Energie, which serves electricity to much of French-speaking Switzerland and ewz, the energy company of the city of Zurich, are joining force to create a consortium that will build the country’s largest wind generating station if the project is approved. The two groups presented their plans Wednesday morning 17 June, for a project to build windmills in three Vaud villages in the Jura, Provence, Romairon, Fantanezier and the village of Val-de-Travers in canton Neuchatel.
Swiss windmill
Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The three communes of St Cergue, Trélex and Givrins will be home to a new windmill park with three of the aeolian structures to go up by 2013. The three are scheduled to sign an agreement Friday afternoon 29 May to work with sol-E Suisse and la Société Electrique des Forces de l’Aubonne (SEFA). Sol-E Suisse is a subsidiary of Forces motrices bernoises (FMB).
Title: Energy film festival
Location: Lausanne, Vaud
Link out: Click here
Description: Mexican film star Gael Garcia Bernal and other famous film mavericks will show their work based in energy, resources and mobility. Free entrance.
In French only.
Start Date: 31 Mar 2009
End Date: 03 Apr 2009
US President Barack Obama Monday pushed to make the US energy-independent (BBC), to rapidly get state emission standards in place and give states greater freedom (IHT) in setting their own emissions standards for cars, part of energy directives that will reassure Europeans, who saw George W Bush’s energy policies as a stumbling block, writes Reuters.
Title: The energy challenges of the 21st century
Location: Geneva, Hotel Intercontinental
Link out: Click here
Description: Hans Bjorn Puettgen, EPFL professor and energy centre director, on life sciences, agriculture and energy as 3 R&D themes for the future; AIC presentation
Start Time: 11:45
Date: 14 Nov 2008
End Time: 14:00
EDF, France’s energy company, has made a €15.6 offer for British Energy, which the UK energy group has accepted. An earlier offer, valuing the British company at €15.45, was refused in July. Times, UK and TSR, Fre
Back to school Monday at EPFL, with construction on the new Rolex Learning Center advancing. Photo taken in June.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – EPFL, the federal polytechnic institute in Lausanne, opens its doors to students Monday with three new master’s degree options and a 15% increase in first-year and preparatory year students, who will number 1,400. The number of women, who are 26.5% of the students, has risen by 0.9%. Read more…
Lausanne, Switzerland (24 Heures, Fre) – Lausanne’s mayor, Green party member Daniel Brélaz, says the city will be turning off its public lighting Saturday for five minutes as a “symbolic gesture.” The reminder that we all need to conserve energy comes, ironically, at a time in the year when Lausanne is ablaze in Christmas light, with the Rumine Palace and public squares lit up. But the mayor points out that public lighting accounts for only 1% of all lighting in Switzerland. With so many lights on, Saturday, turning them off briefly is certain to attract attention.
Ed. note: Journalist Chris Blaser of 24 Heures draws some interesting responses from the mayor about the energy that might be saved by the gesture versus the energy used to light up the city over the holidays.
