Wishing you a wonderfully green festive season, with the news that the City of Cape Town is using energy efficient festive season lights this year!

The City’s Public Lighting Department has transformed the outdated strings of colourful bulbs into an illumination extravaganza made up of about 5 000 LED's (light emitting diodes) and 15 000 metres of rope lighting.

According to Charles Kadalie, the City's manager for public lighting, the energy-efficient lighting system will save about 80% of the electricity that would normally be consumed, and at the same time save on costs.

Sources: SA Cities Network Green Clippings

Those that attended the FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany can sleep better at night knowing the extra carbon dioxide generated because of the event will be offset against investment in emission reducing projects in good ole S of A.

One project is to replace a coal fired boiler used by the SA's largest citrus processor - African Realty Trust.

The second project includes capturing methane emissions from a waste water treatment plant in the Johannesburg area and using the biogas to generate clean electricity.

I thought this showed great leadership by FIFA and as the largest global sporting event they have now set the standard for other sporting bodies to follow. [fifa.co.za]

Who would have thought that Frik De Beer from Naboomspruit would be leading the way in green fuel technology in South Africa?

When I saw his company's name - De Beers Fuel Limited - I thought the Oppenheimer family might have used the proceeds of their recent sale of Anglo's shares to branch into a very different field. After all they do garden organically and they were talking about diversifying...

It actually turns out that Frik De Beer's Infiniti Biodiesel has secured a deal whereby American company Green Star Products builds 90 biodiesel reactors for South Africa within 18 months. Yep, that was my reaction too: NINETY REACTORS in 18 MONTHS! Blimey!

This will surely catapult SA to the forefront of environment friendly fuel production, literally overnight. Each reactor is capable of producing 6000 litres of biodiesel an hour. According to Green Star that works out to 10 million US gallons (37.8 million litres) each year for ONE reactor.

So when all 90 are on-line that will be 3.4 billion litres of biodiesel, which is 4 times greater than the entire US output.

But that's not all folks...

Incredibly, Inifiniti Biodiesel are also harnesssing the technology developed by Green Fuel Technologies to produce biodiesel from algae (and blogged about only last week). So instead of only using sunflowers where one acre will yield 350 litres of biodiesel, one acre of algae can produce 40 000 litres of biodiesel.

And what's more the biodiesel reactors will be installed where? At Eskom's coal fired power plants around the country!

There are also various other positive spin-offs by the business:

As a developing country, South Africa can sell carbon credits to first world countries that exceed their carbon emission quotas through the World Bank.

Enviro-friendly byproducts such as bioplastics, biohydrogen, protein for feedstocks, animal feed or ethanol could also be produced.

And obviously many jobs will be creatd by the venture.

Perhaps the merging of coke and eskom is not so far-fetched after all.

It turns out there is some use for carbon dioxide, other than to heat up the planet: have algae turn it into a clean fuel!

The state of New York together with power producer NRG Energy and GreenFuel Technologies are testing CO2 recycling technology at (Eskom, take note) a coal-fired power plant in Dunkirk, NY.

The project uses a bio-reactor in which a single-celled algae takes up C02 in the presence of light. The algae can then be converted into ethanol or biodiesel.

This is one website someone at Eskom should be looking at: greenfuelonline.com