Water shortage threatens two million people in southern Iraq

A water shortage described as the most critical since the earliest days of Iraq's civilisation is threatening to leave up to 2 million people in the south of the country without electricity and almost as many without drinking water.

An already meagre supply of electricity to Iraq's fourth-largest city of Nasiriyah has fallen by 50% during the last three weeks because of the rapidly falling levels of the Euphrates river, which has only two of four power-generating turbines left working.

If, as predicted, the river falls by a further 20cm during the next fortnight, engineers say the remaining two turbines will also close down, forcing a total blackout in the city.

Down river, where the Euphrates spills out into the Shatt al-Arab waterway at the north-eastern corner of the Persian Gulf, the lack of fresh water has raised salinity levels so high that two towns, of about 3,000 people, on the northern edge of Basra have this week evacuated. "We can no longer drink this water," said one local woman from the village of al-Fal. "Our animals are all dead and many people here are diseased."

Iraqi officials have been attempting to grapple with the magnitude of the crisis for months, which, like much else in this fractured society, has many causes, both man-made and natural.

Two winters of significantly lower than normal rainfalls – half the annual average last year and one-third the year before – have followed six years of crippling instability, in which industry barely functioned and agriculture struggled to meet half of subsistence needs.

"For thousands of years Iraq's agricultural lands were rich with planted wheat, rice and barley," said Salah Aziz, director of planning in Iraq's agricultural ministry, adding that land was "100% in use".

"This year less than 50% of the land is in use and most of the yields are marginal. This year we cannot begin to cover even 40% of Iraq's fruit and vegetable demand."

During the last five chaotic years, many new dams and reservoirs have been built in Turkey, Syria and Iran, which share the Euphrates and its small tributaries. The effect has been to starve the Euphrates of its lifeblood, which throughout the ages has guaranteed bountiful water, even during drought. At the same time, irrigators have tried tilling marginal land in an attempt for quick yields and in all cases the projects have been abandoned.

"Not even during Saddam's time did we face the prospect of something so grave," said Nasiriyah's governor, Qusey al-Ebadi. Just east of the city, the Marsh Arabs are also on the edge of a crisis – unprecedented even during the three decades of reprisals they faced under the former dictator.

"The current level of the Euphrates cannot feed the small tributaries that give water to the marshlands," he continued. "The people there have started to dig wells for their own survival. There is no water to use for washing, because it is stagnant and contaminated. Many of the animals have contracted disease and died and people with animals are leaving their areas."

Nowhere is Iraq's water shortage more stark than in what used to be the marshlands. Towards the Iranian border and south to the Gulf, rigid and yellowing reeds jut from a hard-baked landscape of cracked mud.

Skiffs that once plied the lowland waters lie dry and splintering and ducks wallow in fetid green ponds that pocket the maze of feeder streams. Steel cans of drinking water bought by desperate locals line dirt roads like over-sized letter boxes.

The Euphrates, once broad and endlessly green, is now narrow and drab. In parts it is a slick black ooze, fit only for scores of bathing water buffalo. Giant pumps lay metres out of reach. Some are rusting. "Not long ago, the level of the Euphrates was at this rust line," said Awda Khasaf, a local leader in the al-Akerya marshlands, as he pointed at the dwindling river.

"It has now dropped more than 1.5m. This river feeds all the agriculture lands and marsh lands in Nasiriyah. It smells like this because it is stagnant," he said. "We turned to agriculture in 1991 after Saddam's rampage, but now the government has ordered us to stop rice farming."

Further up the river Sheikh Amar Hameed, 44, from Abart village said: "We have lost the soul of our lives with the vanishing water. We have lost everything. We are buying drinking water now. The government must find a solution. The young will all become thieves. They have no prospects."

Iraq's water minister, Dr Abdul Latif Rashid, this week estimated that up to 300,000 marshland residents are on the move, many of them newly uprooted and heading for nearby towns and cities that can do little to support them.

The Marsh Arabs are semi-nomadic and large numbers have remained displaced since Saddam drained the marshes in 1991.

"In the last 20-30 years our neighbouring countries have built a number of structures for collecting water or diverting water for their agricultural lands," Dr Rashid said.

"In some cases, they have diverted the path of the river for their internal use. This has had a very damaging effect. We have a large number of branches of the Tigris that we share with Iran. In most their volumes are low, or completely dried up. In 2006/07 [the marshlands] almost reached 75% of original levels. Now the surface water is around 20%. Water resources have this year become not only serious, but critical. Iraq has not faced a water shortage like this."

Officials have tried to compensate by digging wells and bores, especially in the ravaged provinces of the south and in Anbar, west of Baghdad. Delegations have also travelled to Turkey and Syria, where they were warmly received, but have achieved few changes. "We were expecting much more of a release from Turkey," Dr Rashid said. "Iran has been less receptive. We have had no response from them at all."

River wars

Nile Nine Nile basin countries are in dispute over water-sharing. Countries including Uganda and Rwanda are attempting to overrule a 1959 treaty that restricted building on the river without Egypt's consent. Egypt is reliant on the volume of water it currently receives.

Euphrates Iraq and Syria oppose the building of dams on the river by Turkey. Iraq is reliant on the river for irrigation, and damming upriver seriously affects water flow.

Jordan Israel and Palestine share a water aquifer along the West Bank, but Palestinians only have access to one fifth of the water held there. They are also in dispute over the river Jordan, with Israel claiming 90% control.

Indus Pakistan is in dispute with India over the Indus river that supplies water to millions. Reservoirs and dams have caused water shortages in downstream areas, such as Karachi. A presidential decision to provide more water to the population in Sindh by closing the Tarbela Dam also caused outrage in neighbouring Punjab, whose water was being diverted.

Ceco Environmental gets $4.4M in orders

Air pollution control and industrial ventilation systems maker Ceco Environmental Corp. said Wednesday it received $4.4 million in new orders.

The orders were received by companies in its equipment and contracting groups, the company said. The largest purchase order came from the refining industry, and others came from the power, steel, glass, and pet food industries.

Company CEO Phillip DeZwirek said the company continues to pursue international business "vigorously," and two of the projects are in Indonesia and South America.

Shares rose a penny to $3.40 in afternoon trading.

Synthetic trees and algae can counter climate change, say engineers

Giant fly-swat shaped “synthetic trees” line the road into the office, where blooms of algae grow in tubes up the walls and the roof reflects heat back into the sky — all reducing the effects of global warming.

All this could be a familiar sight within the next two decades, under proposals devised by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers to alter the world’s climate with new technology.

A day after John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Environment Secretary, warned that negotiations for a global deal to cut carbon emissions were in danger of collapsing, the institution is recommending a series of technical fixes to “buy time” to avert dangerous levels of climate change.

It says that the most promising solution is offered by artificial trees, devices that collect CO2 through their “leaves” and convert it to a form that can easily be collected and stored.Tim Fox, head of environment and climate change at the institution, said that the devices were thousands of times more effective at removing carbon from the atmosphere than real trees.

In the first report on such geo-engineering by practising engineers, the institution calculates that 100,000 artificial trees — which could fit into 600ha (1,500 acres) — would be enough to capture all emissions from Britain’s homes, transport and light industry. It says that five million would do the same for the whole world.

Dr Fox said that prototypes had been shown to work using a technology, developed by Klaus Lackner of Columbia University in New York, that isolated CO2 using low levels of energy. “The technology is no more complex than what is used in cars or air-conditioning units,” he said.

Professor Lackner estimates that in production the units would cost $20,000 (£12,000) each, while the emissions associated with building and running each unit would be less than 5 per cent of the CO2 it captures over its lifetime.

“The trees could be located in artificial forests close to depleted oil and gas reserves,” Dr Fox said, allowing captured carbon to be stored underground. He added that “it would also be logical to put them by the side of highways”, capturing CO2 from traffic.

The report recommends that algae be grown in plastic tubes down the side of buildings, where it would take in CO2 from the air. The algae could even be used as fuel in photo-bioreactors, providing energy to generators while using the CO2 emitted to grow more algae. This technology has yet to be tried as a working system, however.

More elaborate solutions, such as launching giant mirrors into space to reflect the sun’s rays, are ruled out by the report, which says they are too expensive, unpredictable and could have dangerous side-effects on weather systems such as rainfall.

However, the institution does recommend more limited use of reflective surfaces on buildings. Although this would not reduce global warming overall, it would cool sweltering cities and reduce energy used in air-conditioners by between 10 and 60 per cent, the report says. At its simplest, this could involve simply painting walls and walls white. But smart materials could reflect infra-red light — which makes up about half of solar radiation — without dazzling people.

Dr Fox emphasised that geo-engineering should not be a substitute for cutting emissions. But the institution is lobbying the Government to drop its opposition to supporting research into such technology and contribute between £10 million and £20 million to research. “We are urging government not to regard geo-engineering as a plan B but as a fully integrated part of efforts against climate change,” Dr Fox said.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “Our primary aim must be to deliver a global deal which cuts global emissions. It’s clear that geo-engineering technologies are undeveloped and untested and at present remain a long way from being practical solutions to an urgent problem.”

International representatives will meet in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. But yesterday Mr Prescott, who now works on climate change for the Council of Europe , said that securing a deal would be ten times more difficult than at Kyoto because developing nations insisted that richer ones should make the deepest cuts, a position likely to be opposed by the US.

U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, Champion of the Environment and Clean Energy, Dies at 77

U.S. Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy died yesterday [Tuesday, August 25, 2009] of a brain tumor at his home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. He was 77.

Kennedy was the third longest-serving member of the U.S. Senate in American history. The voters of Massachusetts first elected him to the Senate in 1962 and sent him to the Senate as their representative a total of nine times, a record matched by only one other senator.

Ted Kennedy was often referred to as the “Lion of the Senate.” He was respected on both sides of the aisle for his legislative ability, his willingness to compromise, and his bi-partisan approach to important issues.

"I believe there surely is such a thing as truth, but who among us can claim a monopoly?" Kennedy once said during a speech to a conservative audience. "There are those who do, and their own words testify to their intolerance."

More Sun for Less: Solar Panels Drop in Price

When Greg Hare looked into putting solar panels on his ranch-style home in Magnolia, Tex., last year, he decided he could not afford it.“I had no idea solar was so expensive,” he recalled. But the cost of solar panels has plunged lately, changing the economics for many homeowners. Mr. Hare ended up paying $77,000 for a large solar setup that he figures might have cost him $100,000 a year ago.

“I just thought, ‘Wow, this is an opportunity to do the most for the least,’ ” Mr. Hare said.

For solar shoppers these days, the price is right. Panel prices have fallen about 40 percent since the middle of last year, driven down partly by an increase in the supply of a crucial ingredient for panels, according to analysts at the investment bank Piper Jaffray.

The price drops — coupled with recently expanded federal incentives — could shrink the time it takes solar panels to pay for themselves to 16 years, from 22 years, in places with high electricity costs, according to Glenn Harris, chief executive of SunCentric, a solar consulting group. That calculation does not include state rebates, which can sometimes improve the economics considerably.

American consumers have the rest of the world to thank for the big solar price break.

Until recently, panel makers had been constrained by limited production of polysilicon, which goes into most types of panels. But more factories making the material have opened, as have more plants churning out the panels themselves — especially in China.

“A ton of production, mostly Chinese, has come online,” said Chris Whitman, the president of U.S. Solar Finance, which helps arrange bank financing for solar projects.

At the same time, once-roaring global demand for solar panels has slowed, particularly in Europe, the largest solar market, where photovoltaic installations are forecast to fall by 26 percent this year compared with 2008, according to Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm. Much of that drop can be attributed to a sharp slowdown in Spain. Faced with high unemployment and an economic crisis, Spain slashed its generous subsidy for the panels last year because it was costing too much.

Many experts expect panel prices to fall further, though not by another 40 percent.

Manufacturers are already reeling from the price slump. For example, Evergreen Solar, which is based in Massachusetts, recently reported a second-quarter loss that was more than double its loss from a year earlier.

But some manufacturers say that cheaper panels could be a good thing in the long term, spurring enthusiasm among customers and expanding the market.

“It’s important that these costs and prices do come down,” said Mike Ahearn, the chief executive of First Solar, a panel maker based in Tempe, Ariz.

First Solar recently announced a deal to build two large solar arrays in Southern California to supply that region’s dominant utility. But across the United States, the installation of large solar systems — the type found on commercial or government buildings — has been hurt by financing problems, and is on track to be about the same this year as in 2008, according to Emerging Energy Research.

The smaller residential sector continues to grow: In California, by far the largest market in the country, residential installations in July were up by more than 50 percent compared with a year earlier. With prices dropping, that momentum looks poised to continue.

John Berger, chief executive of Standard Renewable Energy, the company in Houston that put panels on Mr. Hare’s home, said that his second-quarter sales rose by more than 225 percent from the first quarter.

“Was that as a product of declining panel prices? Almost certainly yes,” Mr. Berger said.

Expanded federal incentives have also helped spur the market. Until this year, homeowners could get a 30 percent tax credit for solar electric installations, but it was capped at $2,000. That cap was lifted on Jan. 1.

Mr. Hare in Texas cited the larger tax credit, which sliced about $23,000 from his $77,000 bill, as a major factor in his decision to go solar, in addition to the falling panel prices. Sensing a good deal, he even got a larger system than he had originally planned — going from 42 panels to 64. The electric bill on his 7,000-square-foot house and garage has typically run $600 to $700 a month, but he expects a reduction of 40 to 80 percent.

Mr. Berger predicts that with panel prices falling and the generous federal credit in place, utilities will start lowering rebates they offer to homeowners who put panels on their roofs.

One that has already done so is the Salt River Project, the main utility in Phoenix, which cut its homeowners’ rebate by 10 percent in June. Lori Singleton, the utility’s sustainability manager, said the utility had recently spent more than it budgeted for solar power, a result of a surge in demand as more solar installers moved into Arizona and government incentives kicked in.

California has been steadily bringing down its rebates. An impending 29 percent cut in rebates offered within the service area of Pacific Gas and Electric, the dominant utility in Northern California, means that “with the module price drop over the last few months, it is pretty much a wash,” Bill Stewart, president of SolarCraft, an installer in Novato, Calif., said in an e-mail message.

Even if falling rebates cancel out some of the solar panel price slump, more innovative financing strategies are also helping to make solar affordable for homeowners. This year about a dozen states — following moves by California and Colorado last year — have enacted laws enabling solar panels to be paid off gradually, through increased property taxes, after a municipality first shoulders the upfront costs.

Some installers have adopted similar approaches. Danita Hardy, a homeowner in Phoenix, had been put off by the prospect of spending $20,000 for solar panels — until she spotted a news item about a company called SunRun that takes on the upfront expense and recovers its costs gradually, in a lease deal, essentially through the savings in a homeowner’s electric bill.

“I thought well, heck, this might be doable,” said Ms. Hardy, who wound up having to lay out only $800 to get 15 solar panels for her home.

Airport travellers get a robot chauffeur

Driverless, battery-powered pod-cars will soon zip passengers around part of London's Heathrow Airport. The manufacturers of the Ultra personal rapid transit (PRT) system say it is the world's first public transport to balance the convenience of a taxi with the efficiency of a bus or light rail – albeit only for business passengers arriving at the world's third busiest airport.

Personalised rapid transit has been an elusive dream of engineers and city planners. Since the mid 1970s, many schemes have been proposed at sites around the world, and a PRT-like system has been built at Morgantown in West Virginia. But Ultra is the first PRT system to give passengers control over their destination.

Ultra has been in the works since 2005, when BAA – the company that runs Heathrow – ordered a pilot project from Advanced Transport Systems (ATS) of Bristol, UK. Four years later, Ultra is undergoing final tests before its opening to the general public, planned for later this year.

The Heathrow Ultra system will initially carry passengers between the business car park and terminal 5. Each pod-car holds up to four passengers and can travel at speeds of up to 40 kilometres per hour on 4.3 kilometres of dedicated roadway, stopping at any of three stations. The journey takes around 3 minutes, non-stop, with wait times of no more than a minute for the next available car. A central computer system monitors demand and controls traffic.

Bus buster

"It's faster and more convenient than [airport] buses, and uses half the energy" to move the same number of passengers in the same amount of time, says Martin Lowson, who first came up with the Ultra concept and is deputy chairman of ATS. That's because it only stops at the station the passengers require, and it's so small that there's no wasted capacity even if just one or two people need a ride.

Lowson says 70 per cent of passengers have zero waiting time – the buses currently used at Heathrow run every ten minutes. He also claims that the system averages 0.55 megajoules per passenger kilometre, making it the most energy efficient system of its kind. Buses average just over 1 megajoule per passenger kilometre.

According to Peter Muller, president of PRT Consulting of Franktown, Colorado, which has helped roadtest several PRT systems including Ultra, the promise of PRT goes beyond airport transit.

"It has the ability to transform our way of life," says Muller. "You could have a city where the automobiles are kept on the periphery, with PRT bringing people into the city."

As an example he points to a PRT system being installed in Masdar City, a new city under construction in Abu Dhabi that is intended to be carbon neutral. Built by the Dutch company 2GetThere, based in Utrecht, it could go online later this year.

"All of a sudden you have a city that is very pedestrian friendly. You don't have to waste space on roads and parking garages inside the city," says Muller.

We are the Jetsons

Muller says that other locations are starting to consider PRT systems. The city of San Jose, California, and the US army's Fort Carson base outside Colorado Springs are looking at the feasibility of installing such a system. ATS recently announced that it has been commissioned to study how Ultra might be used in the city of Bath in the UK.

Despite widening interest in the idea, Muller says that many city planners and architects do not consider PRT a feasible option for urban public transport.

"People think PRT is The Jetsons and it'll never be here," says Muller. "They don't realise it's here now."

If the Heathrow pilot proves successful, ATS hopes to expand Ultra to cover all the airport – from its current three-station, 21-car set-up to 50 stations attended by 400 cars.