Jäämerenradan suunnittelu lopetetaan

Liikenne- ja viestintäministeriön tiedote 11.02.2019: 

Suomen ja Norjan välisen selvitystyöryhmän raportti Jäämeren radasta on valmistunut. Raportissa ei esitetä jatkotoimenpiteitä ratahankkeen edistämiseksi. Hanke ei olisi taloudellisesti kannattava minkään selvityksessä tarkastellun rahoitusmallin mukaan.

Olen tästäkin asiasta kirjoittanut muutaman vuoden ajan: Hanke on liiketaloudellisesti ja kansantaloudellisestikin täysin kannattamaton, eikä ole rahaakaan. Turhaan selvitykseen saatiin kuitenkin veronmaksajien rahoja kulutettua. Vihdoinkin järki voitti.

Sama pätee Tallinnantunneliin ja muihinkin miljardien ratahankkeisiin.

Euroopan suurin onshore tuulipuisto Serbiaan

Fintel Energija, the Serbian subsidiary of Italy's Fintel Energia Group, plans to start the construction of Europe's largest onshore wind farm in Serbia, it said.

The wind farm will have an installed capacity of 572 MW and will be located in the northern Serbian region of Vojvodina, Fintel Energija said in a filing with the Belgrade Stock Exchange on Monday. [emp]

Puukaupunki Torontoon

Can one of the world’s oldest building materials form the foundation of a sensor-integrated “smart” neighborhood? Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs is making a go of it on the Toronto waterfront and has enlisted wood advocates and Katerra partner Michael Green Architecture (MGA) to design flexible, mixed-use timber buildings for its 3-million-square-foot (278,709 square-meter) Quayside project.

If the 12-acre (4.8-hectare) site is developed as planned, it would become the largest timber project in the world.

The ground-up development in Quayside is leaning on mass timber because Sidewalk Labs has touted the material as sustainable and as tough as steel, as well as because cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels work well in prefabricated structures. MGA has designed a kit-of-parts that can be used for buildings of every scale, and Sidewalk Labs is reportedly looking at constructing a collection of 12 mass timber towers, with the tallest topping out at 30 stories. [ctbuh]

Raide-Jokeri maksaakin tuplasti

Helsingin ja Espoon valtuustot joutuvat maaliskuussa päättämään, toteutetaanko Raide-Jokeri rajusti nousseista kustannuksista huolimatta. 

Pääkaupunkiseudun poikittaisliikennettä parantavan hankkeen arvioidaan nyt maksavan 386 miljoonaa euroa. Tähän päälle tulee vielä 70 miljoonan euron varikko sekä 110 miljoonaa maksava vaunukalusto. Yhteensä puhutaan siis reilun 550 miljoonan euron joukkoliikennehankkeesta. Vielä 2015 arvioitiin, että projekti saataisiin tehtyä 275 miljoonalla. [t&t]

Hitachi keskeyttää jättimäisen 5,800 MW ydinvoimalan rakentamisen UKssa

Competing with ever cheaper renewable energy schemes, Japan’s Hitachi Ltd. has suspended work on its U.K. nuclear power program after failing to strike a financial deal with the government. Hitachi’s wholly owned project company Horizon Nuclear Power will mothball work on two Advanced Boiling Water Reactor plants totaling 5,800 MW at Wylfa Newydd, North Wales, and Oldbury-on-Severn, South Gloucestershire, England. The Welsh project was estimated to cost about $20 billion. The write-off accrued will be $2.8 billion. 

The government offered to provide all required debt to complete construction and to secure a strike price for energy generated of $96.8 per megawatt hour, which was 19% less than the figure agreed for the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant three years ago.

Kaasua Israelista Eurooppaan

After two years in intense negotiations, shadowed by on-off parallel talks with Turkey, Israel has agreed with European nations to supply the European Union with its future natural gas needs. The project will turn Israel into a significant fuel-exporting nation. It is expected that the official signing will take place at a very public event some time in February 2019.

It will take a year to put the financing in place. Then construction will begin on the longest and deepest underwater fuel pipeline in the world. Some 2,100 kilometers in length and lying three kilometers under the Mediterranean Sea. The $7 billion project will take five years to complete but could be in place and ready to pump even sooner.

It has been agreed that the financing will be operated through IGI Poseidon, a subsidiary of the French company, Edison, which was involved with the engineering feasibility studies and tests for this challenging project.

The project will be known as the East Med Pipeline Project. Natural gas will flow from Israel’s Leviathan offshore gas reservoir via Cyprus, Crete and Greece to reach its terminal at Otranto on the southeast heel of Italy, 100 kilometers south of Brindisi. This multinational pipeline will supply Europe with 125 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually by 2030. [emp]

USAn öljyntuotanto ohittanut Saudi-Arabian ja Venäjän

USAsta suurin raakaöljyn tuottaja. Ja vientikin kasvaa. Ja hinnat ovat laskussa; Iranin poistuminen markkinoilta ei näytä nostavan hintoja.

Kaupunkibulevardit kaatuivat

Jan VAPAAVUORI etc luulevat voivansa tehdä mitä vain. Paha tyrmäys tuli kuitenkin eilen, kun KHOn teki mm seuraavat päätökset:
·        Lahden, Hämeenlinnan, Turun ja Länsiväylää ei saa kaavoittaa kaupunkibulevardeiksi. Perustelut selvät, kuten olen jo aikanaan kirjoittanutkin.
·        Vartiosaari ja keskuspuisto säilyvät ennallaan viher- ja virkistysalueina; ei asunto- tms rakentamista.
·        Malmin lentokentän saa ottaa asuinkäyttöön.

Kaksi ensimmäistä päätöstä ovat erinomaiset, mutta kolmas valitettava. Luulenpa, että Malmin kentän rakentamisessa käy kuten Sipoon ryöstössä; nyt yli 10 vuoden jälkeen ei alueelle ole rakennettu yhtään asuntoa, eikä ole kaavaakaan.

Hesarin mukaan kaupunkibulevardit eivät olleetkaan tärkeitä. Vapaavuoren mukaan "Kaupungin asuntorakentaminen jatkuu vielä vuosia nykyisillä kaavoilla". Ja Anni SINNEMÄKI taas sanoo "Voimme jatkaa tästä eteenpäin ilman, että tämä päätös aiheuttaisi meille haittaa". Ei tunnustuksia tyrimisestä, ei katumusta.

Jättimäinen peiliteleskooppi Hawaijille

After years of delay, including lengthy court battles and passionate protests from those willing to be arrested for blocking construction crews, builders of a giant telescope plan to move forward with constructing the $1.4 billion instrument on a Hawaii mountain Mauna Kea that is considered sacred.

A group of universities in California and Canada make up the telescope company, with partners from China , India and Japan . The instrument's primary mirror would measure 98 feet (30 meters) in diameter. Compared with the largest existing visible-light telescope in the world, it would be three times as wide, with nine times more area.

Tuulen puute iskenyt Euroopan tuulivoimaan

The current heatwave in Western Europe is also contributing to a ‘wind drought,’ negatively impacting wind farm operators across the region, which includes the U.K., France, Spain, Germany and much of Scandinavia. Meanwhile, solar power plant operators are seeing increased production of solar energy because irradiance is up in many of the same markets.

This is according to wind and solar performance maps of Europe by Vaisala, a company that collects and analyzes weather-related data globally. Vaisala has for a long time recommended that renewable energy power producers create a balanced portfolio of wind and solar assets in order to account for situations exactly like what is occurring in Europe right now.

The performance maps show that wind farm operators saw the available resource in July dip by as much as 20 percent from long-term averages, while solar irradiance in many of the same markets was up to 20 percent above average. The high-pressure system over Europe that caused these anomalous conditions is expected to persist until October.

These conditions follow another notable ‘wind drought’ across the U.S. in 2015, which had a widespread financial impact. “The 2015 conditions caused many wind energy investors in the U.S. to think very seriously about how they could diversify their portfolios, not just geographically, but also by technology,” said Dr. Pascal Storck, Director of Renewable Energy, Vaisala.

“This new data shows that large-scale anomalies are not a one-time occurrence, and it may be time for the European market to follow suit in thinking about how it can become ‘climate resilient’.”  [rew]