Germany to keep Gas-fired power plants open by paying the fixed costs

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, in Electricity Sector Lessons from Ontario and Germany, Germany has now started the next round of increases in electricity pricing by moving to pay the fixed costs at 2 modern natural gas generators slated for closure by their owners due to an electricity system that made their profitability as merchant plants unlikely.

Irsching 4 and 5 Operators Agree with Tennet and BNetzA Not to Close Down Plants for Grid Security Reasons « German Energy Blog:

The operators of the Irsching 4 and 5 agreed with Tennet TSO GmbH not to close down the highly efficient but presently unprofitable gas-fired power plant units near Ingolstadt within the next three years. The units were needed to secure grid stability and the security of supply, and would continue to be operated to allow Tennet to resort to so-called redispatch measures if necessary, Tennet said. E.ON will receive the fixed costs for the power ...

The Irsching 4 and 5 are modern highly efficient combined cycle power plants. With a capacity of 569 MW, unit 4 (Ulrich Hartmann unit) reaches 60.4% efficiency, the highest efficiency worldwide. Unit 5 with a gross output of 860 MW reaches an efficiency of 59.7%. Yet it was not possible to operate the plants profitably in the recent past, as the growing renewable power plant output in Germany has to be purchased and transmitted with priority by the grid operators ...

Read the entire article at the German Energy Blog: 

Environmentalists Go Pro-Nuclear in 'Pandora's Promise' Trailer Premiere

Video: Environmentalists Go Pro-Nuclear in 'Pandora's Promise' Trailer Premiere | Rolling Stone:

Pandora's Promise examines the issue from the perspective of key environmentalists on both sides of the issue, starting with the writer Stewart Brand, who asks, "Can you be an environmentalist and be pro-nuclear? In light of climate change, can you be an environmentalist and not be pro-nuclear?" Stone admits that accepting that nuclear energy could be a viable power source was a struggle for him as well. "It's no easy thing for me to have come to the conclusion that the rapid deployment of nuclear power is now the greatest hope we have for saving us from an environmental catastrophe," he told Rolling Stone.

More text at Rolling Stone:

Great Lakes to get relief from low water levels

I have to cite this article because:

1. It's an issue taken up by grass roots folks concerned with the changes to their environment
2. They were told it wasn't a problem resulting from the dredging, for decades
3. That picture is taken not far from my home

Great Lakes to get relief from low water levels: Porter | Toronto Star:

Picture from source article

If you love Georgian Bay, as I do, I have good news for you.
We might be getting more water soon. Or, more aptly: we might stop losing as much water as we have been these past 14 years.
After years of cheerleading the “do-nothing” approach to the frightening drop in water levels on Lakes Huron and Michigan, the binational referee of water levels, the International Joint Commission, did a stunning about-face last Friday.
It instructed the Canadian and American governments to do something. In particular, research putting an adjustable plug in the St. Clair River, which drains water from Lakes Huron and Michigan down toward Lake Erie.
Hallelujah."

Continue reading at the Toronto Star:

The Dark Side of Energy Independence

I found this New York Times article particularly interesting having read a recent post at Gail the Actuary’s (aka Gail Tverberg) "Our Finite World" site titled "How Oil Exporters Reach Financial Collapse"

The Dark Side of Energy Independence - NYTimes.com:

...oil could fall to just $50 a barrel within the next two years, which could unleash unrest in regions crucial to American interests. Far from releasing the United States from the burden of global leadership, this process would force Washington to assume an even greater international role than it currently plays. 

Graphic from "Our Finite World"

If there’s one part of the world that America would like to be less encumbered by, it’s the volatile and oil-rich Middle East. But energy independence will not spell the end of American engagement in that region. On the contrary, lower energy prices will undermine the stability of the Persian Gulf monarchies, whose hefty oil revenues have allowed them to win their populations’ loyalties through patronage and a lack of taxation. These countries do not always share American values or help advance American interests, but anything that destabilizes them would create problems that Washington could not afford to ignore.
..

Graphic from "Our Finite World" 

Americans should cheer the energy revolution. It will do wonders for the American economy, and the democratic politics it could encourage in the Middle East and Russia may ultimately serve American interests. But in the meantime, Washington should expect a world far less stable than the one it is used to — and, in turn, prepare to adopt an even more outward-looking foreign policy.

Continue reading at the New York Times

How to Ruin an Electric Grid — Germany Shows Us How

William Tucker's article comes to a similar conclusion as my recent Electricity Sector Lessons from Ontario and Germany

Nuclear Townhall » Blog Archive » WILLIAM TUCKER: How to Ruin an Electric Grid — Germany Shows Us How:

Germany's coal and gas plants are losing money hand over fist while pampered renewables are collecting "feed-in tariffs” and all kinds of subsidies – and are still more expensive. As a result, their utilities are talking about putting some of fossil fuel burners in mothballs.

Now Germany certainly can't allow that because there wouldn’t be anything left to run the grid. So Chancellor Angela Merkel has come up with another idea. She wants to pay the coal and gas plants a "capacity fee" that will pay the just for standing by to generate electricity even when it’s not needed. She said yesterday:

“We have to think about how to slow down the dynamics so that we get a sensible expansion of renewable energies but not a situation in which no gas-fired power plant can be operated profitably anymore and each gas plant has to be subsidized so it provides baseload capacity.”

So that means Germans will be paying twice for their electricity – once when it is generated by renewables and again when it isn’t generated by something else. Renewables already added a 47 percent surcharge to electric bills at the beginning of this year. Now we’re going to see something worse. The big, power-consuming manufacturers have been exempted from these charges so they can stay competitive with the rest of the world, but everyone else is going to bear the brunt.

Japan ready to ditch target for emissions cut

Japan ready to ditch target for emissions cut | PHYS.ORG:

Japan is likely to abandon an ambitious pledge to slash greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter, the top government spokesman said on Thursday.
Asked to confirm if the new administration would review Tokyo's 2009 pledge, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government was "moving in that direction in principle".
"I have been saying for some time that it is a tremendous target and would be impossible to achieve," he told a regular news conference.
Then-prime minister Yukio Hatoyama made the pledge in 2009, following a landslide election victory by his centre-left Democratic Party of Japan.
It was lauded by environmentalists as one of the most ambitious of any industrialised country.
Hatoyama said the nation would slash its carbon emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, provided other major polluters such as China and the United States also made sharp reductions.
But officials say the pledge will be difficult to fulfil because of the huge rise in fossil fuel use since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima put Tokyo's atomic energy programme on hold.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-japan-ready-ditch-emissions.html#jCp

Why Throw It Away, When There’s a Productive Use for Nuclear Spent Fuel?

Why Throw It Away, When There’s a Productive Use for Nuclear Spent Fuel? - Ontario Society of Professional Engineers:

Society now recycles or reuses many of our resources that were originally considered waste. However, due to our fear of nuclear proliferation, the recycling and reuse of nuclear spent fuel was banned in the USA some decades ago.
Did you know that during the subsequent 30 years, technology has advanced to the point where rogue states no longer use spent fuel to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons? They prefer a much cheaper and easier method to make atomic weapons. They use high speed centrifuges to enrich natural uranium into pure U-235. Natural uranium contains 99.3% non-fissile U-238 and only 0.7% U-235 which is fissile and can be used to make atomic weapons.
Did you know that our current thermal reactors consume only 1% of the uranium in the original mined ore? The rest is sitting either in the spent fuel in the case of natural uranium fuel for our CANDU reactors or in a combination of the spent fuel and in depleted uranium stockpiles in the case of enriched uranium fuel.

Cap-and-trade programs in California and Quebec to merge

Cap-and-trade programs in California and Quebec to merge - latimes.com:

The California Air Resources Board on Friday linked its program for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and curbing climate change with one in the French-speaking, Canadian province of Quebec. The merger starts Jan. 1.
On April 8, Gov. Jerry Brown certified the two cap-and-trade systems as compatible. As a result, Quebec's permits that let polluters emit carbon dioxide can be purchased and used by California oil refineries, food processors, cement plants and other facilities. And California-issued pollution permits will be valid in Quebec.
The tradable credits earned by planting trees and other actions that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could be used by California companies to help them meet a state obligation to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Read the entire article at latimes.com:

Setting the record straight on affordable, clean nuclear

"Bruce Power sent this letter in response to an article that appeared in the Toronto Star and Metro News on April 18."

Setting the record straight on affordable, clean nuclear | Bruce Power: 

Editor:
We would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight on an article that appeared in the Metro News on April 18 that inaccurately portrayed the cost of nuclear power.
While the report that was cited and commissioned by the Independent Electricity System Operator was accurate, the conclusions drawn by Metro News need to be corrected with further information from the report.
The article cites that nuclear energy contributed to 42 per cent of the global adjustment costs on electricity bills last year and suggests this makes nuclear generation costly to ratepayers– this is not the full story. While the global adjustment cost can be a complicated item to explain in relation to our energy system, this inaccurate conclusion related to nuclear can be easily explained.
Nuclear generation produced 56 per cent of Ontario’s electricity last year. 

Continue reading at Bruce Power:

New York PSC approves 1,000-MW Québec-NY City power line

New York PSC approves 1,000-MW Québec-NY City power line | Canada | Reuters: 

(Reuters) - The New York Public Service Commission on Thursday approved a plan to build the Champlain Hudson transmission line, which will be capable of moving 1,000 megawatts of hydropower from Québec to New York City.
...
The PSC said the project could provide up to 10 percent of the power used in New York City and would probably reduce power costs there and in the rest of the state.
The project developers, not the state's electric ratepayers, will fund the power line's construction, the PSC noted.
The PSC also said the line would cut emissions by reducing the amount of power the city generates at its oil and natural gas fired plants.

The entire article can be read at Reuters

The Pacific Northwest’s Wind Fleet Integration Struggles

An extremely good, and relatively short, article

For Ontarians, an example of a region with more storage capacity and only 20% more demand struggling to cope with intermittent supply.

For all, a good example of California's protectionism harming expansion of more affordable energy (though it's not nearly as damaging as the northeast states' protectionism to block Quebec hydro)

The Pacific Northwest’s Wind Fleet Integration Struggles :: POWER Magazine:

Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing can be taxing.” The Pacific Northwest has a good thing—plentiful, carbon-free power from its huge wind and hydroelectric fleets. But wind’s huge variability can be taxing. The Northwest’s scramble to integrate growing wind generation, and the resulting litigation melee, underscore the importance of quickly solving the variable resource integration puzzle.
Over the past decade, wind generation in the Northwest has exploded. Wind capacity has grown from almost nothing to nearly 5,000 MW in the region’s largest balancing area, the Bonneville Power Administration. Already, hourly ramps from wind generation regularly exceed 2,000 MW. These rapid ramps will continue to grow with the size of the wind fleet, which Bonneville expects to reach 6,000 MW to 7,500 MW by 2017. With its huge carbon-free capacity and flexibility to rapidly adjust output, the Northwest’s hydro system is ideally suited to balance these ramps. But the hydro system is now often taxed to the breaking point to reliably integrate large volumes of wind generation.

Continue reading at POWER Magazine:

Amory Lovins' Propaganda Makes little sense

Only a couple of days after I posted Electricity Sector Lessons from Ontario and Germany...

In Germany's Renewables Revolution, Amory Lovins mixes messages relentlessly in attempting to display Germany as a success story for renewables.
Lovins begins the post with:

While the examples of Japan, China, and India show the promise of rapidly emerging energy economies built on efficiency and renewables, Germany—the world’s number four economy and Europe’s number one—has lately provided an impressive model of what a well-organized industrial society can achieve.... [Germany] remains the best disproof of claims that highly industrialized countries, let alone cold and cloudy ones, can do little with renewables.

Even so, Germans pay a lot for their household electricity, about $0.34/kWh in 2012. The household tariff includes a “renewables surcharge,” expected to amount to roughly $249 per three-person household this year. That’d be three-fifths smaller if households weren’t subsidizing many businesses, mainly large ones—exempted from nearly the whole renewables charge, allegedly to boost German competitiveness—by 3–4 billion Euros a year. Yet German industry enjoys the lower spot prices that renewables create, so it pays about the same for electricity as it did in 1978 ...

It takes two paragraphs for Lovins to argue that Germany's industry is proof that renewables don't damage an economy, and to show that Germany's industry hasn't borne any of the cost of renewables (in fact he later shows how it benefited as excess supply dropped the market rates).

He doesn't get any more coherent after that.

Blinding Solar Records

Now that we've entered the shoulder season of spring, Germany's continuing build-out of solar panel capacity is setting records.

This from the Cleantechnica site:

On Monday, the 15th of April, 2013, the approximate 1.3 million solar power systems in Germany set a new domestic/world record by reaching a peak power output of 22.68 GW at noon.
The New Normal
This new record is almost 0.5 GW above the “old” record of 22.2 GW, which was set on May 25th, 2012. Allthough I love celebrating all solar records, the biggest news might be that “just” 22.68 GW is apparently no longer newsworthy in Germany, because above 15-20 GW of solar have become a regularity.

Of course solar doesn't shine so bright in the highest demand periods during the winter; first quarter  production was down overall during what was reportedly a particularly bleak January and February, but production during peak demand periods equaled the performance of previous years.
At 0
During the first quarter Germany had more gas was used for heat, and I'm sure we will soon see more coal used to generate electricity.

BBC News - EU parliament rejects plan to boost carbon trading

BBC News - EU parliament rejects plan to boost carbon trading:

The European Parliament has rejected a plan to rescue the EU's ailing carbon trading scheme.
Members narrowly voted against a so-called "backloading" proposal that would have cut the huge surplus of allowances currently being traded.
Because of this excess, the price of carbon on the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has plunged to less than 5 euros a tonne.
But opponents won the day by arguing the plan would push up energy costs.
The price of carbon has fluctuated considerably since the ETS was launched in 2005. The scheme limits the emissions from around 12,000 power plants and factories across the 27-member bloc.
At one point the trading price was well above 30 euros per tonne.

Continue reading at BBC News:

Uncle Thomas, Grandpa James and an honest economist

I don't consider myself terribly patriotic, but when a New York Times article appeared, written by a Canadian professor at a Canadian university, I was offended as soon as I started reading:

IF President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.

Uncle Thomas Homer-Dixon went to the New York Times to ask the American president to do what's best for Canada.

Days later, a newly retired James Hansen would author a column in the Los Angeles Times.  I'm somewhat a fan of Mr. Hansen, which made it rather unpleasant to see him use "Canadian" as an adjective in a sentence structured to enrage an American isolationist:

...a Canadian company, TransCanada, gets a permit to build a pipeline to transport toxic tar sands through our heartland, connecting to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, for likely export to China.

With plans like that no wonder we need Americans to do what's best for us!

Bruce Unit 4 returns to service

Unit 4 returns to service | Bruce Power:

TIVERTON, ON – April 13, 2013 – Today, for the first time in two decades, all four units at Bruce A supplied clean, low-cost electricity to the people of Ontario, with the return to service of Unit 4.
Having all four units at Bruce A in operation is a significant achievement for the Bruce site, said Duncan Hawthorne, Bruce Power’s President and Chief Executive Officer.
“Through the return to service of Units 1 and 2 last year, combined with investment programs in both Units 3 and 4, we now have all Bruce A units generating low-cost electricity for the first time in two decades and for years to come,” Hawthorne said. “Electricity from Bruce A is important as Ontario moves forward to complete coal phase-out with affordable Bruce Power nuclear.”

Continue Reading at Bruce Power:

Mixed Messages from German Utilities' Planned capacity additions

Industry group BDEW has released data, along with a statement, on planned power generation projects.  Of the 37,755MW of capacity planned, by utilities and inclusive only of projects over 20MWe, 0 MW are solar, and 0 MW are on-shore wind.

German utilities plan 38 GW new power plant capacity by 2020: BDEW

Created from Data from BDEW (Page 2 here)

Germany's utilities have plans to build some 76 large power generation projects with a combined capacity of around 38,000 MW by 2020, the energy industry lobby group BDEW said Monday.

However, due to unstable political framework conditions, the uneconomic outlook for gas-fired power generation as well as public resistance to new coal-fired power plants, almost a third may be cancelled, the BDEW said.

"A new ice-age is threatening the construction of new power plants," BDEW chairwoman Hildegard Mueller said in the statement. "In particular, plans for projects beyond 2015 have been put on hold, even if they already have the necessary permits. Almost a third of all projects now have an unclear timing as investment conditions are currently just too uncertain."

Biomass: The hidden member of the "renewable" family gets some exposure

Biomass has always been the member of the renewables family that the other members of the family seldom mention in public.

Bjørn Lomborg posted to Facebook an introduction to this illuminating article:

The Fuel of the Future | The Economist

WHICH source of renewable energy is most important to the European Union? Solar power, perhaps? (Europe has three-quarters of the world’s total installed capacity of solar photovoltaic energy.) Or wind? (Germany trebled its wind-power capacity in the past decade.) The answer is neither. By far the largest so-called renewable fuel used in Europe is wood.
In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass) accounts for about half of Europe’s renewable-energy consumption. In some countries, such as Poland and Finland, wood meets more than 80% of renewable-energy demand. Even in Germany, home of the Energiewende (energy transformation) which has poured huge subsidies into wind and solar power, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption comes from the stuff. After years in which European governments have boasted about their high-tech, low-carbon energy revolution, the main beneficiary seems to be the favoured fuel of pre-industrial societies.

Continue reading at the Economist 

Nuclear Ontario

A couple of items of interest, regarding Ontario's nuclear fleet

The concentration on the renewable congregation for the FIT forum may have provided the right conditions for doing some business out of the limelight

Bruce B Update | Bruce Power: 

TIVERTON, ON – April 5, 2013 – Bruce Power and the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) have reached an agreement to amend the Bruce Power Refurbishment Implementation Agreement (BPRIA) to ensure Ontario ratepayers will continue to be supplied with low-cost electricity from the Bruce B units to the end of the decade, prior to the full refurbishment of the units.
The amendment involves an extension of the floor price for the Bruce B units, which remains the lowest cost generator under contract by the OPA at 5.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. Bruce B provides 15 per cent of Ontario’s electricity demand on an annual basis."
Throughout 2013, Bruce Power will continue to invest in Bruce B with an estimated $250 million expected this year to continue to optimize the life of the units, ensuring both system reliability and price stability. Over the next five years, Bruce Power’s planned investment program in Bruce B will be approximately $1.1 billion. In addition to the base employment on the Bruce Power site, which is 4,000 people, this ongoing capital program will create approximately 500-600 temporary jobs annually in support of these investment activities.

Stories fit to fight a feed-in frenzy

In honour of the "feed-in tariff forum" finishing up in Toronto today ... a review of recent articles with a special view to renewables, emissions and Germany, from whence the inspiration for Ontario's feed-in tariff (FIT) regime came

Wind-Power Subsidies? No Thanks | The Wall Street Journal has received a lot of recognition (including from Fox)as it is written by wind industry executive Patrick Jenevein:  

Government subsidies to new wind farms have only made the industry less focused on reducing costs. In turn, the industry produces a product that isn't as efficient or cheap as it might be if we focused less on working the political system and more on research and development. After the 2009 subsidy became available, wind farms were increasingly built in less-windy locations, according to the Department of Energy's "2011 Wind Technologies Market Report." The average wind-power project built in 2011 was located in an area with wind conditions 16% worse than those of the average project in 1998-99...
If our communities can't reasonably afford to purchase and rely on the wind power we sell, it is difficult to make the moral case for our businesses, let alone an economic one. Yet as long as these subsidies and tax credits exist, clean-energy executives will likely spend most of their time pursuing advanced legal and accounting methods rather than investing in studies, innovation, new transmission technology and turbine development.

 The perspective is a welcome one, particularly following the analysis I communicated in A(nother) reason to be skeptical about wind energy reducing emissions.

Life-saving case for nuclear

"I really don’t know why this study has been ignored. I’m especially surprised it’s not warranting mention in the environmental media. (Or maybe I shouldn’t be? I’m guessing places like Grist would be playing it up if Hansen found, instead, that nuclear power had killed millions of people.) "

-Keith Kloor, Collide-a-Scape

Life-saving case for nuclear | World Nuclear News

A landmark study has put the figure of 1.84 million on the number of lives saved by the worldwide use of nuclear power instead of fossil fuels. The report co-authored by former NASA scientist James Hansen presents a dramatic new case for nuclear energy.
It begins by taking historic generation data from the nuclear sector and estimating emissions from fossil fuels that would likely have met the same generation role if nuclear had not been used. Nuclear plants with poorer performance below 65% capacity factor were swapped for gas generation while higher performers were swapped for coal, which worked out as a mix of 95% coal and 5% gas replacing nuclear."
The results are projected total emissions that would have probably led to the deaths of 1.84 million people between 1971 and 2009 based on average mortality estimates from fossil combustion pollution. This is probably an underestimate, said Hansen and co-author Pushker Kharecha, noting that the life-cycle mortality estimates are the biggest source of uncertainty in the report: Some coal units produce three times more dangerous pollution than the average they have used. The higher estimate for lives saved by nuclear energy was over 7.5 million - and these figures do not count a range of serious respiratory illnesses, cancers, hereditary effects and heart problems.

April Fool's Day Reading suggestions

A couple of documents I've been notified of recently that, upon reading/skimming, I've briefly clicked my flashlight upon them and either me or them is really insane.

Ontario Society of Professional Engineers: Regarding Incentive Rate Making Options for Ontario Power Generation’s Prescribed Generation Assets (OSPE_Comment_ltr_20121210 here)

OSPE suggests the current OEB regulated prices that set nuclear rates higher than hydroelectric rates provide an unintended price incentive that encourages nuclear production over hydroelectric production. This unintended price incentive can be easily eliminated. OPG’s prescribed hydroelectric assets were recapitalized when OPG’s predecessor company, Ontario Hydro, was restructured at a much lower electricity price than we have today. If the portion of the stranded debt paid by ratepayers and held by the Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC) were reassigned back into the hydroelectric assets of OPG then the new rate for hydroelectric regulated assets would:

• Create incentives for OPG to curtail nuclear production before hydroelectric production

I think that suggests dumping debt from other businesses into a profitable business in order to drive the price sky-high because the highest cost supply should be the least likely to get curtailed...

Maybe OSPE is "Ontario Society of Pretend Economists"

Climate science: A sensitive matter

I read the noise on different climate change claims without the energy to explore the issue in depth, so I was encouraged to see Judith Curry's Climate Etc. blog entry  recommend, as "a must read" an article by "The Economist’s new editor for energy and environment, John Parker."  

Climate science: A sensitive matter | The Economist:

It is possible, therefore, that both the rise in temperatures in the 1990s and the flattening in the 2000s have been caused in part by natural variability.
So what does all this amount to? The scientists are cautious about interpreting their findings. As Dr Knutti puts it, “the bottom line is that there are several lines of evidence, where the observed trends are pushing down, whereas the models are pushing up, so my personal view is that the overall assessment hasn’t changed much.”
But given the hiatus in warming and all the new evidence, a small reduction in estimates of climate sensitivity would seem to be justified: a downwards nudge on various best estimates from 3°C to 2.5°C, perhaps; a lower ceiling (around 4.5°C), certainly. If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch. But it would not yet be downgraded.

The entire article can be read at The Economist:

The joy of global warming

Bjørn Lom­borg's article may not offer anything new, but it strikes me as doing a good job of explaining the rationale of the economists' argument for research and development as thee best bet for a lower emissions energy future

The Joy of Global Warming | The Sunday Times

As I fly into a snow-bound Britain, I realise that you might be asking where global warming has gone as you shiver in the coldest March for 50 years and wonder what you will do if gas has to be rationed. I have been involved in the climate debate for more than a decade, but I am still amazed at how wrong we get it. Let us try to restart our thinking on global warming. 

Yes, global warming is real and mostly man-made, but our policies have failed predictably and spectacularly.
I was one of the strongest critics of the Kyoto climate change treaty, back when it was considered gospel." 

Peo­ple were aghast when you crit­i­cised it then. Now Kyoto has no friends, and every­one remem­bers how they really did not believe in it

The article may be read in The Sunday Times (subscription) ... and also currently here