APRIL 2007

ENVIRONMENT

Portugal has inaugurated what it says is the world's most powerful solar power plant. The array of electricity-generating solar panels covers about 60 hectares (150 acres) in one of Europe's sunniest areas in southern Portugal.

Officials say the plant should produce enough energy to supply 8,000 homes.

The plant is part of Portugal's efforts to cut its reliance on imported fuel and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that add to global warming. The plant is also meant to bring development and jobs to the Alentejo region 200km (125 miles) southeast of Lisbon, a poor area traditionally dominated by cork and olive production.

Renewable energy drive

The 11-megawatt plant has 52,000 photovoltaic modules, which will produce 20 gigawatt hours of power each year. Burning fossil fuels to generate the same amount of energy would result in 30,000 tons of greenhouse gases being emitted over the course of a year. "This project is successful because Portugal's sunshine is plentiful, the solar power technology is proven [and] government policies are supportive," said Kevin Walsh of Renewable Energy GE, which built the project.

Anger as UK's carbon dioxide emissions reach 10-year high

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

Published: 30 March 2007 Independent

A six-million-tonne question mark was placed over Britain's climate change strategy yesterday with the release of figures showing that UK greenhouse gas emissions, which the Government has pledged to cut radically, are actually soaring.

Emissions of the principal greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from power stations, motor vehicles and homes, amounted to 560.6 million tonnes last year, 6.4 million tonnes higher than the 2005 figure. The increase of 1.15 per cent means that Britain's emissions are now at the highest level since Labour came to power a decade ago, nearly 3 per cent above 1997.

The disclosure, which seems to be a stark illustration that Britain's climate strategy is not working, despite all the pronouncements of Tony Blair and his ministers, was greeted with concern in Whitehall and with anger and scorn by environmentalists and opposition politicians. They said the Government was clearly not on course to meet its targets of cutting CO2 by 30 per cent by 2020 and 60 per cent by the middle of the century. (It has already admitted it will not meet its long-standing target of a 20 per cent cut by 2010.)

Record meteorite hit Norway in 2006

At around 2:05 a.m. on Wednesday, residents of the northern part of Troms and the western areas of Finnmark could clearly see a ball of fire taking several seconds to travel across the sky.A few minutes later an impact could be heard and geophysics and seismology research foundation NORSAR registered a powerful sound and seismic disturbances at 02:13.25 a.m. at their station in Karasjok.

Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time. "I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash."I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said.

Astronomers were excited by the news."There were ground tremors, a house shook and a curtain was blown into the house," Norway's best known astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten.no.Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms."This is simply exceptional. I cannot imagine that we have had such a powerful meteorite impact in Norway in modern times."

The astronomer believes the meteorite was a giant rock and probably the largest known to have struck Norway."The record was the Alta meteorite that landed in 1904. That one was 90 kilos (198 lbs) but we think the meteorite that landed Wednesday was considerably larger," Røed Ødegaard said, and urged members of the public who saw the object or may have found remnants to contact the Institute of Astrophysics.

http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1346411.ece?contentType=t