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Renewable Power issues loss warning

Shares in Renewable Power & Light (RPL) plunged 66pc after the company, which listed on the Alternative Energy Market in December, warned that the loss of a key contract meant that it will sink into the red this year.

RPL shares were suspended last week after the termination of a supply contract for palm oil used to generate electricity in two biodiesel power plants.

The alternative energy company said that it was suing the supplier, Safari Group, claiming breach of contract.
Analysts had forecast that RPL would make profits of around £12.5m this year.

Palm oil has soared in price in the past couple of years because it is in increasing demand as a fuel additive. RPL said that it would have to pay a much higher price for palm oil than under the terms of its Safari contract.

The oil, the world's most traded vegetable oil, is used in cooking, cleaning agents and as a fuel additive.

Palm oil futures in Malaysia, the benchmark for the commodity, have soared 64pc in the past year, partly as prices for soybean oil, the main substitute, surged and record oil prices boosted demand for alternative energy.

RPL said the problem will delay the start of production at its Massena and Elmwood Park power plants in the US. The company said in a statement that it is not able to buy enough oil "to operate its plants economically using biodiesel", and is now looking to source direct from feedstock firms, rather than buy on the open market, or grow its own palm plants.

RPL said it has got a temporary restraining order preventing Safari from selling palm oil to anyone else. Safari's oil palms are grown in West Africa. The company said that it has around $50m (£24.5m) in the bank to help it through the current problems.

RPL shares closed down 114.5p at 38.75p.

The Bloomberg news agency reported that its calls to Safari's head office in New York went through to an answering service saying the numbers were "disconnected."

No one answered an email sent to the company requesting comment.
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Traditional buildings 'more eco-friendly'

Traditional buildings with solid walls are more eco-friendly because they need less cooling in summer and less heating in winter than modern glass and steel structures, according to a study.

The study found that traditional buildings with solid walls cost 15-20 per cent less to heat or cool than modern designs with lots of glazing.

It was commissioned by Robert Adam Architects, a firm of traditional architects, from a leading environmental engineering firm, Atelier 10, which has worked for Foster and Partners, which builds large buildings in glass and steel.

The architect who commissioned it says it has implications for the three million new homes promised by Gordon Brown.

Researchers looked at two computer-modelled buildings of identical size, layout and orientation, the heavyweight building with a glazed area of less than 40 per cent of the façade, the glazed building with glass facades to the South and North.

They found differences when the building was an office or residential - with residential made of heavyweight materials the most energy efficient.

Gains from extra daylight in the office building were offset because the users tended to close the blinds on bright days and put the lights on.

Both buildings improved their energy efficiency with triple glazing but the gains from very high performance glass filled with argon did not entirely iron out the differences in energy efficiency between the glass walled building and traditional methods of construction.
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Robert Adam, the architect who commissioned the study, said: "Actually the architectural establishment do know this but they don't want it said - that traditional buildings are more sustainable. Environmental engineers know this too but they tend to work for architects. This is the great secret that no one wants to reveal.

"Glass and steel is a default position for the architectural profession but it is fundamentally unsustainable."

Glass and steel office blocks currently being built all over London "should have solid walls likely the early New York skyscrapers," he said.

Mr Adam argues that Modernist buildings have long been associated with glass and steel and these materials have become a "default mode" for all modern office buildings which was difficult to shift, even though truly modern buildings were "sustainable" buildings.

He is planning to build a skyscraper in Basingstoke with solid walls but local architects are trying to stop it because they want glass and steel.

Mr Adam said that pre-fabricated, industrially constructed buildings - such as some of the proposed designs for the £50,000 houses called for by John Prescott when he was in charge of planning - were likely to have far shorter lives than traditional buildings that make up most of our towns and cities.

In fact, the volume housebuilders usually built houses with solid walls, as that was what they market expected. "If you find a house with glass walls it is generally a house an architect has built for himself."

Mr Adam added: "The Government should "forget about tricks and gimmicks and build traditional houses and do it well.

"We know they work and we know people like them. But it will go to the architectural profession and get lots of tricks and gimmicks."

The Government has said it wants to see more architects being involved in the design of domestic housing and more economies of scale by manufacturing components off site.

Two housebuilders commented favourably on the report.

Graeme Simpson of Millgate Homes said: "At last, evidence that the kind of buildings we as developers know are most popular are also sustainable.

"This will stop planners telling us to be different to be modern. Nowadays, being modern is being sustainable and being sustainable is using traditional construction."

Ed Ware of, Edward Ware Homes, said: "This is the agenda for a sustainable future: simple buildings with windows and solid walls."

However, James Pickard, of James Pickard Architects, said the conclusions were "selective and over-simplistic."

"Traditional building is slow and inefficient. Government statistics show that 24 per cent of all UK waste comes from the construction and demolition of buildings. That is a shockingly high level of waste. The European Commission has done a survey of top industrial national looking at the efficiency of our construction industries and Britain came bottom with 25 per cent, less than Norway and Belgium.

"We're paying more for our buildings and homes than we need to and the reason given was lack of skills in the workforce and low levels of off-site manufacturing. We are still building by hand like the Romans did 2,000 years ago.

"Sustainability is now massively important. We have to deliver homes and buildings in a different way."
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Raft of flaws found in popular carbon offsetting schemes

A television documentary has uncovered flaws in a series of carbon offsetting schemes intended to make good the global warming gases emitted by flights and other polluting activities.

An episode of Dispatches on Channel 4 on Monday entitled "The Great Green Smoke Screen" will show academics and environmentalists questioning the ethics and impact of offsetting - and suggesting that offsetting schemes have not been effective as claimed.

Two of the country's biggest carbon offset companies, the Carbon Neutral Company and Climate Care, and offsetting schemes at BA, BP and Sky are scrutinised by the programme.

Carbon offsetting has becoming popular in recent years as a way for individuals and business to mitigate the effects of emissions, for example from cars or planes, as publicity has grown about the threat and speed of climate change.

Dispatches claims that schemes run by Climate Care, and promoted by BA, took no account of the "multiplier" effect which increased the damage done by aviation fumes in the stratosphere by a factor of three. In other words, the schemes funded by BA passengers only mitigate one third of the damage that their flights cause. Climate Care, which uses a multiplier of two on its website, told Dispatches that it was unhappy about the way Britain's biggest airline ran its scheme.

A project funded by BP to siphon methane gas from excrement at pig farms in Mexico will only produce half the savings claimed on the company's website, which is now being amended.

In Bulgaria, Sky funds a hydro-power plant that turns water into low-pollution electricity but the manager, Vladislav Tsvetkov, said that Sky's money, though welcome, was "not required" - a view backed by the Bulgarian bank which lent the capital. The manager later retracted his comments and the Carbon Neutral Company which administers the offsets insisted the money had been critical in establishing the plant.

At Donkleywood forest in Northumberland, the Carbon Neutral Company said the planting of the trees helped the climate. But it emerged that 70 per cent of the funding came from the Forestry Commission.

The programme analysed the behaviour of the electricity suppliers which offer customers the opportunity to match their bills to wind and solar power with "green tariffs" while doing no more than meeting their legal obligations to buy renewable power.

Dispatches questioned whether big companies such as HSBC and Sky had any right to claim they were "carbon neutral" as a result of buying offsets to undo the effects of their pollution. Instead the programme hinted that more should be done to limit the polluting activity in the first place.

Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, told the programme: "It's very, very fashionable for big companies who are actually engaged in pretty polluting activities to somehow embrace the slogan that they have gone carbon neutral, so we can go on consuming their products knowing that actually we're not damaging the environment. If only it was that simple.

"The idea that they can assuage their consciences by buying some offsets in the international market as a substitute to cleaning up their act - this is good perhaps PR and publicity, but substance I think is seriously lacking."
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