by Elisabeth Pain on 30 May 2013, 4:55 PM | 2 Comments

France's government hopes that science can help shore up the country's lackluster economy. On Tuesday, the National Assembly approved a new law that aims to simplify the national landscape for research and higher education and make it more efficient, better able to address societal and economic challenges, and more competitive at the European level. The bill, which comes hand in hand with a new strategic plan for France's research priorities, also gives the government a greater role in coordinating research. The bill and the road map have been sharply criticized by various groups of researchersand university professors.

The French government is rolling out its new policies after an extensive, 4-month national consultation on research and higher education that ended in November. It presents the plans as a break from the government of Nicolas Sarkozy because it gives the state a more active role in defining priorities. French Higher Education and Research Minister Geneviève Fioraso described the road map, called France Europe 2020, as " the return of the strategist state" in an article in Le Monde.

The road map brings national priorities in line with the European Commission's nascent 7-year funding scheme, Horizon 2020, in part because France hopes that its researchers will score better in that program than they have in previous E.U. funding rounds. Health, food security, climate change, sustainable energy, urban systems, digital technologies, and space will be the national priorities; they will be further refined and periodically revised by a newly created strategic research council, chaired by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, with input from the French national research agency (CNRS) and five large research-coordinating networks.


Trade unions say that the government can't make science responsible for rescuing the economy and worry that the new plan will erode basic research—despite Fioraso's insistence that it won't. "There is a big concern because [the government] wants research to solve an economic problem and an industry problem," says Patrick Monfort, a marine ecologist with CNRS in Montpellier and the general secretary of SNCS-FSU, the national trade union for scientific researchers. Monfort worries that with the government's focus on innovation, basic research will come under even more pressure, he says. "If France and Europe are doing the same thing, where is the space of freedom for fundamental research?"

The road map is partly designed to reinvigorate industry through the development of pathbreaking areas such as nanotechnologies and the promotion of industry-academia partnerships. Researchers and scientific institutions will be encouraged to transfer their knowledge to industry through training and performance evaluations, and startups will get more support.

The unions are also disappointed that the government hasn't touched some of Sarkozy's reforms, including a2007 law that gave universities more autonomy and the €22 billion Investments for the Future program, which selectively endowed a small number of universities with new money. Meanwhile, there are no promises about more permanent research jobs, as the unions had hoped. Compared with the previous government, "only the tone has changed," complained Alain Trautmann, a former leader of the researchers' movement Sauvons la Recherche, in Le Monde.

But other researchers applaud the government's plan to bring industry and universities closer together; that is "indispensable" if the French economy doesn't want to become completely service-based, says Gilbert Béréziat, who was president of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris between 2001 and 2006. Boosting the national capacity for producing goods of high added value is necessary to create industry jobs for students, he adds.

Béréziat would actually like to see the new government expand Sarkozy's reforms. "With Nicolas Sarkozy, there was a lot of blah-blah, but virtually nothing was done" in technology transfer, he says. For instance, a plan to create an innovation park in the heart of his former university's campus in Jussieu was never fully realized because the finance ministry didn't want to unblock the funding, and industry didn't push the issue either. To really bring academia and industry together, universities need even more autonomy, he says, combined with stronger incentives to collaborate. As Fioraso pointed out in her road map, the National Research Agency has already issued a funding call for universities and public institutes to set up joint laboratories with small and medium companies.


The bill, which passed the Assembly in an accelerated procedure at the government's request, is now headed to the Senate.

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2013/05/frances-message-to-science-help-.html

by Dan Ferber on 18 February 2013, 11:48 AM | 13 Comments


On the decline. In region after region, utilities are shutting down coal plants like this one and instead generating electricity from natural gas.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

BOSTON—During the presidential campaign last fall, a single message was repeated endlessly in Appalachian coal country: President Barack Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency, critics said, had declared a "war on coal" that was shuttering U.S. coal-fired power plants and putting coal miners out of work. Not so, according to a detailed analysis of coal plant finances and economicspresented here yesterday at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes ScienceNOW). Instead, coal is losing its battle with other power sources mostly on its merits.

Although the United States has long generated the bulk of its electricity from coal, over the past 6 years that share has fallen from 50% to 38%. Plans for more than 150 new coal-fired power plants have been canceled since the mid-2000s, existing plants have been closed, and in 2012, just one new coal-fired power plant went online in the United States. To investigate the reasons for this decline, David Schlissel, an energy economist and founder of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in Belmont, Massachusetts, dove deeply into the broader economics of the industry and the detailed finances of individual power plants. 

Schlissel, who serves as a paid expert witness at state public utility board hearings for both utilities and advocacy groups that oppose coal plants, found several reasons for coal’s decline. Over the past decade, construction costs have risen sharply, he said. For example, when the Prairie State Energy Campus in southern Illinois, which opened last year, was first proposed, its then-owner, Peabody Energy, said it would cost $1.8 billion to build. Instead it cost more than $4.9 billion, Schlissel said.

Live Chat: Our Cyborg Future Thursday 3 p.m. EDT

In addition, since the mid-2000s, the price of natural gas has plummeted, and Schlissel found that when coal-fired power has to compete with natural gas on its economic merits, it struggled. For example, profits from the subset of the nation’s coal-fired power plants that sell electricity on the open market plummeted from $20 billion in 2008 to $4 billion in 2011, Schlissel said. 

And at the giant, 1.6 GW Victor J. Daniel Electric Generating Plant in Escatawpa, Mississippi, which is run by Mississippi Power and Gulf Power, has two coal-fired generator and two natural-gas-powered generators. In 2006, the plant got most of its power from the coal generators, which produced 80% of the power they could have if they had been running around the clock at full capacity. Meanwhile, the plant’s two natural-gas-fired generators produced just 30% of the power they were capable of. By 2012, those percentages were reversed: the coal generators produced just 25% of their possible power, while the natural-gas generators produced 84%. These trends indicate that the company profited by burning natural gas more and coal less, Schlissel said. 

Coal is also struggling because many power plants that burn it are aging to the point that more parts break and they’re becoming expensive to maintain, Schlissel says. Sixty percent of the nation’s coal plants are more than 40 years old, and the median age of coal plants retired in 2012 was 53 years. If the plants aren’t going to produce electricity for long, the cost of installing expensive scrubbers to comply with long-pending, but newly implemented environmental regulations can be difficult to justify. "It’s like hip transplants for coal plants," he said. 

"I don’t think there’s any question" that coal is losing on its economic merits, says Melissa Ahern, an economist at Washington State University, Spokane, who wasn’t involved in the study. In addition to the factors Schlissel cited, she adds that the costs of shipping coal by train, barge and truck are large and rising, which adds significantly to the fuel’s cost. Aside from that caveat, she adds, that "utilities have incentives to move to natural gas if they can."

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/02/coal-plants-are-victims-of-their.html?ref=hp