This has been a busy year for the Stranded Wind Initiative and I'm not sure I take the time to sum things up as often as I should. We've launched a hydroelectric powered ammonia plant, assisted in fundraising for a solid state ammonia synthesis method, filed a patent for a methanol synthesis method suitable for use with wind power, and our next effort will be the exploration and possible patenting of the century old Haber Bosch ammonia synthesis method, making it behave with the variable power typical of renewable sources.

If we execute on all of the things describes above we'll have cut the first little bit of brush on the path to freeing our agriculture from fossil fuels for both transportation and fertilization.

This is just about as grim as it gets:

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- In the third quarter of 2007, Volvo AB booked 41,970 European orders for new trucks. Guess how many prospective purchases Volvo, the world's second-biggest maker of heavy rigs, received in the third quarter of this year?

Here's a clue. Picture a highway gridlocked by 41,815 abandoned trucks -- because Volvo's order book got destroyed to the tune of 99.63 percent, with customers signing up for just 155 vehicles in the three-month period, the Gothenburg, Sweden-based company said last week

This all sounds lovely, the central banks making a sort of heroic stand against ... something. The effect on any currency when that currency's central bank gets involved in this mess will be deflation. Divide $750 trillion in derivatives by $75 trillion in global real estate values and today's dollar will buy you a dime's worth of product after this comes to pass.

Central banks on both sides of the Atlantic are actively engaged in discussions about the feasibility of mass purchases of mortgage-backed securities as a possible solution to the credit crisis.

Such a move would involve the use of public funds to shore up the market in a key financial instrument and restore confidence by ending the current vicious circle of forced sales, falling prices and weakening balance sheets.

Financial Times' coverage of the horrorshow is here

The subprime mess is generally treated as a crisis, a catastrophe, one of those unpredictable pathologies that happen in our economy because the ingenuity of corporate and financial types outpaces regulatory understanding and control. Sure, crises like this one happen because creative cupidity outpaces regulatory control. But what the subprime crisis isn't is unpredictable or pathological.

When discussing financing of pending renewable energy projects I often make reference to the crash of 2008 and people give me a funny look. NBBooks over at The European Tribune has summed it up nicely in this recent posting. I've changed the format a bit and taken some small liberties with the original text to make it more readable, then I'll expand upon what it means for renewable energy projects.