COMEX gold futures price hits new record high over $1111 as Dow rises 200 points

Wall Street continued its rally, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a 13-month high, as investors sought resource and financial shares. Gold futures again reached record levels, as the US dollar sank. Crude oil futures also went higher. The Dow closed 203.52 points up at 10,226.94, the highest finish since 3 Oct 2008. NYMEX crude oil prices for Dec 2009 delivery climbed for the first time in three days, rising to $US79.10. The rise came as oil and natural gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico evacuated workers and halted some output as Tropical Storm Ida blew through the region.

Gold futures climbed to a record for the second straight session as the slumping dollar spurred demand. COMEX gold futures for Dec 2009 delivery rose $US12.40 to $US1108.10 an ounce in New York. Earlier, gold prices reached a record high of $US1111.70. The dollar weakened to a 15-month low against the currencies of major trading partners after G20 nations agreed to maintain economic stimulus measures, encouraging investors to buy higher-yielding assets. The dollar depreciated in the biggest decline in four days. The EUR/USD forex rate touched $US1.5020, the weakest level since October 26.

- While gold futures have been setting record highs, silver futures have been holding their own as well above the $17 level. As a commodity, gold price movements seem arbitrary but if you treat it as a currency versus other currencies a clearer picture emerges, hence some of the online discussions re: gold commodity or currency? And if you are into gold trading, it is not really necessary that you go into the futures or options markets. Pick a gold ETF which will serve you well - and of course there's no doubt that GLD, the SPDR Gold Trust, is the proverbial $37 billion elephant in the room.

As for the current COMEX gold price, I would say that it may be heading into short-term overbought territory in the $1100 to $1200 range. Personally I am lightening up a little but regular readers know that I'm of course a long term gold, energy and general resource bull, hence the title of this blog : "Inflation, Investing and Everything". In the grand scheme of things, $1000 or $1100 gold prices are quite possibly just milestones on the way to greater heights. And with USDX, the US Dollar Index, doing its falling-below-76 thing, the gold-as-an-investment crowd will only get larger over time.

Singapore : First Zero Energy Building launched with largest solar power installation in Southeast Asia

channelnewsasia.com, manilatimes.net :

The inaugural Singapore Green Building week started with the launch of Singapore's first "Zero Energy Building". The Zero Energy Building along Braddell Road, a three-storey office building, cost S$11 million [USD $7.9 million] to retrofit and is expected to generate as much electricity as it consumes. It has various green features which act as a test bed for clean energy technologies before being introduced into the industry. The visitor's centre has plants on its walls which help reduce external wall temperatures by up to 12 degC while a solar chimney sucks out the warm air from the room. Panels help shade the building from the sun and bounce natural light into the interiors.

A massive array of solar panels of 1,300 sq metres [14,000 square feet] - almost half a football field and the biggest such installation in Southeast Asia - covers the roof. The solar photovoltaic power panels can generate about 207,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity annually. Three hours of sunlight would be enough to supply the building's energy requirement for a day. At night and when there is no available sunlight, the building can tap energy from the grid. While it might cost 5% more to retrofit existing buildings with green design and technologies, experts said the payback is not as long as some might expect. Cash incentives are already in place under the Green Mark certification scheme to encourage buildings to go green. The Singapore government aims to get 80% of all buildings on Green Mark certification by 2030.

- Another good eco/green initiative from the Singapore government, which, post-Kyoto, has been making quite a bit of progress in the area of renewable energy and other pro-environmental issues, from various tax incentives for green vehicles such as hybrid cars, to setting up a waste-to-energy power plant, water-recycling plants, and ongoing clean & green campaigns.

The Zero Energy Building will be a landmark Singapore development, and will pave the way to building green homes and other office buildings in line with the government's move towards Green Mark certification of all new buildings as green buildings and ongoing retrofitting of existing ones.

In Asia, Singapore aims to be one of the pioneers in building green homes, with the development of the Treetops@Punggol public housing project being a prime example. Though there is not quite enough land in Singapore for a full-scale solar or wind power project to provide grid power, as alluded to in my earlier post, ongoing developments will still tackle the issues of energy efficiency, and for eco-homes, solar power would still feature prominently with the existing power grid providing supplemental power.

Hopefully, the Singapore experience will show that the world needs a systems approach to tackling energy and environmental issues from many different angles, as opposed to slogans such as a "carbon zero building" or a "zero energy home". For homes, the cost of residential solar panels is still high though it has been coming down significantly, and of course it ought to be recognized that "eco-" or "green"-ness entails much more than putting up solar panels - we need a total systems solution that, as the peakoiler community is saying nowadays, necessarily includes "all of the above", whether it be energy efficiency, renewable/alternative energy sources, nuclear power, hybrid/electric cars, vehicle-to-grid (V2G), green building design, intelligent grids, cooling/heating system design, water and materials recycling, and more. The works, in short. The future of solar energy is bright, but what we really need, is truly "all of the above".