Companies specializing in centralized fossil fuel fired generation need to move towards energy efficiency and diversity of generation, Scottish and Southern Energy, Britain’s second largest energy supplier, said today.

“The days of meeting an unchecked demand for energy through monolithic carbon intensive power stations are coming to an end. Increasingly the emphasis will be on energy efficiency, renewables, cleaned up fossil fuel plant and micro generation,” the company said in a statement accompanying its full-year results, according to Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.

The number of OPEC countries has dropped to 12 from 13 after Indonesia an OPEC member since 1962, has announced it will leave the oil producers’ consortium due falling oil production. This from Bloomberg:

Indonesia, the only OPEC member in Southeast Asia, will pull out of the group as aging fields and declining production force the region’s biggest economy to boost imports.

Although it’s tempting to describe sky-high commodities prices as being the latest ‘bubble’ to hit the markets, for commodities such as crude oil and corn, basic supply and demand may be pushing up prices. This from The Wall Street Journal:

Prices, to be sure, are soaring — crude oil fetched $132.19 a barrel in New York on Friday, up 103% from $64.97 a year earlier. Yet crude has posted similarly massive increases a number of times in the past three decades. Most notably, in the spring of 1980, as gasoline lines lengthened, the price of crude oil was 150% above the year-before level.