One of my former students, Michael Park, recently set up a company providing advice for expats looking to find work in emerging markets around the world – and, not surprisingly, much of his target audience has focused on Asia. He recently posted an interview with me, and I certainly wish him the very best of success with his new start-up, Emerging Market Careers!

San Gimignano

On this year’s visit I took the opportunity to spend some time outside the city at a number of favorite Tuscany haunts, making trips to a few new places as well. First on the list was another visit to Siena – this time on a warm Springtime day, rather than the freezing, multiple-sweater November weather of a previous visit. The Piazza del Campo was a bit quieter than that scene in the latest James Bond movie – and I stayed firmly on the ground & didn’t climb the tower this time. But I did do a bit of hiking in San Gimignano, the hilltop town of towers, and recovered from that with some nice wine tasting in the vineyards of Chianti.

I saved my climbing for the 462 steps in the cupola of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore – Florence’s well known Duomo. I was reading Ross King’s absolutely fascinating book, Brunelleschi’s Dome, on this trip, describing the incredible engineering feats necessary to build this structure, still the largest brick dome ever constructed (and larger than St. Peter’s in Rome, or the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC). In addition to designing the hoists necessary to lift the 37,000 tons of materials, Brunelleschi chose to build the structure without the internal wood supports normally employed for arches and such curved structures. And he did all that without any knowledge of statics (that bane of engineering students that I suffered through in sophomore year!) or analytical approaches and techniques that still lay a few centuries in the future. The climb up between the two shells of the dome made me all the more appreciative of the amazing architectural and construction feat that he accomplished!

I was back in Jakarta once again in March, conducting a two-day training course at Pertamina’s Learning Center, as part of the GE/IFP instructional program. This course had 33 participants, and was definitely one of the best classes I’ve had in recent years – one group even cornered me after dinner, and we continued our discussions well into the evening.

Iskandar at IBEKA microhydro plant

This trip was especially interesting, however, because I arrived a few days early and headed up into the mountains outside Jakarta to visit IBEKA, the environmental NGO which specializes in micro-hydro applications. Ms. Tri Mumpuni was in New York, but her husband Iskandar, a geologist & mechanical/electrical engineering guru who coordinates all of the technical aspects of IBEKA’s work, was a gracious host. We drove up to see their 120 kW plant at Cinta Mekar, which was one of their early applications supported with UN ESCAP funding (you can read about the plant in a case study document, with Cinta Mekar also featured on the cover of a ‘best practices’ report); and we then stayed at their nearby training center/mountain home-base. I had seen both Puni & Iskandar in the U.S. after last year’s visit, & also had a very brief chance to see Puni when she arrived back home from New York. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to catch up with them again sometime soon – in Asia, North America, or wherever our paths cross!

Dr. Liu (left) & Prof. Yang

We did another one-day workshop for the GEF/World Bank SO2 trading project – and I spent the morning bringing the project team up-to-speed about the U.S. Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR). This is a rather complicated topic even for U.S. utility executives and power plant personnel actually affected by the regulation – let alone foreigners who have only cursory knowledge about the U.S. legal system, and the numerous challenges and lawsuits that always come about when EPA promulgates a regulation. CSAPR was thrown out by the courts a few days before it was to go into effect, and the court will not be hearing arguments about the case until this coming April. Even before this latest case, however, the SO2 markets had crashed when EPA first proposed the limited trading approach (in July 2010), and it is now becoming clear that full controls on SO2 will ultimately happen – and those plants still uncontrolled will probably be shut down instead. (The posting about the Eddystone plant in late 2010 was a harbinger of such coal-plant shutdowns, and the boom in shale gas makes such actions even more likely.) My colleague Prof. Yang Jintian of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning led the afternoon session about Total Emissions Control (TEC) in China. You can see both of us – along with Dr. Liu Junguo, the GEF/World Bank project director, in the nearby photo.

China has been moving aggressively to implement its energy & carbon intensity goals (announced prior to Copenhagen, & incorporated into the 12th Five Year Plan), and I had a chance to meet up with UNDP’s environmental team in China about their on-going projects supporting this effort. UNDP arranged meetings with the Energy Research Institute, the Sinocarbon Innovation & Investment Co., Ltd., the World Bank, and others during my visit – and it was especially nice to meet up with Ms. Hou Xin’an once again. Xin’an and I had worked together in Ulan Bator in Mongolia in the late 1990s, and she has moved up the UNDP management ladder and is now heavily involved in governance issues within the country.

Old Ford Factory

While in the city, I took a guided walking tour around the old Chinatown section, and was surprised to find that a small hotel I had stayed at in a previous Singapore visit had a reputation because of its previous occupants – it had been a well-known brothel! (Wonder how I missed that one before!) The city was commemorating the 70th anniversary of its surrender to Japan during my visit, and I was able to reserve a place at one of the sessions held at the Old Ford Factory, the location of the British surrender. There is a fascinating museum there now, and the commemorative sessions had speakers and a graphic documentary film. You might recall my visit to the Changi museum on my last Singapore trip — & as before, I was struck by how much the city has changed, and how much for the better!

On this visit, I was reading William Gibson’s latest book, Distrust That Particular Flavor. I became a Gibson fan back in the mid-1980s, when I picked up a copy of Neuromancer, his first novel & my introduction to ‘cyberpunk’ fiction — & now I read his newly-published books as soon as they come out. This new one is a bit different, since it is his first non-fiction work, a collection of formerly published articles, speeches, book forwards, etc. Interestingly, one of the articles (from the early 1990s) was about Singapore. Given its title — “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” — you can probably guess that it was controversial (it even has its own Wikipedia page), & wasn’t particularly well received in the city. But what attracted my attention were his comments about information technology:

“They’re good at this stuff. Really good. But now they propose to become something else as well: a coherent city of information, its architecture planned from the ground up. And they expect that whole highways of data will flow into and through their city. Yet they also seem to expect that this won’t affect them. And that baffles us….”

My presentation at the ESI session discussed how emissions markets were increasingly moving towards what is often called “big data,” massive streams of ubiquitous energy and environmental data, flowing in real time – and how disruptive this will likely be for China’s environmental governance system (which still considers much of this information to be “state secrets”). But perhaps not surprisingly, I found that Gibson had already explored the topic – almost two decades ago!

Masdar personal rapid transit (PRT)

Things have certainly changed at Masdar as well. The taxi dropped me off at the parking garage, and I hopped into one of the personal rapid transit (PRT) vehicles there – an electric, driverless vehicle that can reach speeds of up to 40 kph. It took me over to the Masdar Institute, a cluster of buildings housing a Knowledge Center, laboratories, and other research facilities.

Masdar Institute wind tower

Particularly noticeable is a 45m wind tower, which has louvers at the top which open in the direction of the prevailing winds, diverting wind down the tower and into a courtyard at the bottom. I sat in a coffee shop in another of the Institute’s courtyards, and read about its relationship with MIT, and the upcoming Phase II – seven new buildings, including labs, residential buildings, and a large, multi-purpose recreation center, which will double the Institute’s physical size. Work has slowed down because of the financial crisis, but the city’s first phase is expected to be completed by 2015, and the second in the early 2020’s.

In November I was back in Abu Dhabi again, doing a GE/IFPEN training program for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). This course had twenty seven participants, and was held at the Petroleum Institute. I stayed once again at the Al Raha Beach Hotel, & was cordially invited to a special event for their best customers (courtesy of my association with ADNOC) — and therefore had a really great stay!

View from Burj Khalifa

I also took some time to head up to Dubai to hang out at the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Of course, everyone in Dubai has been anxiously awaiting the new movie Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol, which has its world premiere there in early December – and if the scenes near the end of the movie’s trailer are any indication, this will be one really amazing show. You can see them filming the Burj Khalifa scenes in another clip, and while Tom Cruise really was ‘hanging out’ at the building, I stayed safely – very, very safely – inside! [Note: I checked out the movie over the holidays (in an IMAX theater), & while the last part was more than a bit melodramatic, the Burj Khalifa scenes were truly stunning!]

Tom Cruise on Burj Khalifa (photo credit: Paramount Pictures)

Wei-Yin is Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Mississippi, and does cutting edge research on combustion reactions and control, addressing both NOx and CO2 emissions. I first met him several years ago in China, when we were both delegates at the Sino-American Technology and Engineering Conference in Beijing in late 2006. (You can see him and his lovely wife Tsuei-Ju in the picture on my Nov. 2006 posting, standing in the second row, fifth and fourth from the right, respectively, over my right shoulder). Wei-Yin is currently on sabbatical at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou (absolutely one of my favorite Chinese cities!), so I certainly envy him that — & he definitely deserves a break after all that work!

Luckily, my own chapter efforts received a tremendous amount of help from my co-author, Ms. Sudha Iyer. If you have a great memory, you might remember that Sudha and I previously worked together on a UN project addressing energy system integration in Asian cities (noted in a July 2009 posting). Sudha has now graduated from Penn, and runs her own company, Cerebronics, LLC, based in Princeton, NJ. She has been spending a lot of time in Europe over the past year on project work, but never let our joint effort lag… so I’ve been particularly appreciative. It was really great to work with her once again, & I certainly look forward to other collaborations in the future!

I recently finalized my report on International Experience with SO2 Emissions Trading Mechanisms for the GEF China Thermal Power Efficiency Project. As the title makes clear, it focuses on international – rather than Chinese – experience, but does include a few recommendations for the programs in Shanxi & Shandong provinces. I’ll be receiving the domestic consultants’ reports over coming months, & look forward to continuing work on this project.

China has been actively exploring emissions trading mechanisms over recent years – and recently added Shenzhen as a seventh pilot trading area for its carbon reduction program. (You might remember that I met with — and made a presentation for — the Shenzhen folks last summer.) Meanwhile, as the attached report indicates, the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange will be closing down after the first quarter of 2012. As someone who started off as an emissions broker in Chicago in 1981, it has certainly been more than a little depressing to watch the U.S. simply walk away from both the environmental ideas and ideals it pioneered years ago.

I was back in Paris in September, giving lectures for the Executive MBA program that IFP runs in conjunction with the BI Business School in Oslo & the NTU Nanyang Business School in Singapore. This year’s class had energy engineers, financing specialists, and renewable technology developers, and was a well-seasoned cohort with an average age of forty. They invited me along on their evening dinner cruise on the Seine, and we passed by the Eiffel Tower just as its hourly light show started – which the nearby picture hardly begins to capture!

I was reading Jill Jonnes’ book Eiffel’s Tower on this visit, an interesting work which might have been more accurately entitled L’Exposition Universelle de 1889 à Paris, since it included significant chunks of material about Thomas Edison, Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody, and the painters Whistler and Gauguin, all of whom were participants in the international exhibition. What I found particularly interesting was the section near the end that described Eiffel’s considerable efforts to keep his tower from being demolished at the end of its twenty year contracted lifespan. It’s hard to believe that such an iconic and beautiful structure – what Jonnes calls “the most celebrated and instantly recognizable structure in the world” – had come close to such a dismal conclusion. But having read one of Jonnes’ previous books, Conquering Gotham, about the building of Pennsylvania Station (as well as the rail tunnels under the Hudson River) in New York City, I realize that such a fate might have been all too real.

I also took some time after my lectures and headed up to Normandy, to visit the beaches and battlefields that were the site of the WWII D-Day invasions in 1944. The visit included Pointe du Hoc, where U.S. Army Rangers scaled 100 foot cliffs to tackle a German gun fortification; and the sweeping, wide-open Omaha Beach, whose bluffs must have seemed towering and impenetrable to soldiers landing under severe hostile fire. The cemetery and memorial at the top are testament to their bravery and sacrifice. It was a solemn location, and I’ve added Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day to my movie queue to revisit over coming weeks with a new perspective.

Pillbox view at Pointe du Hoc