A new report by Bloomberg finds that renewable energy investment may increase by 23% worldwide this year and could hit $200 billion.
Renewable energy investment was $162 billion last year, but Bloomberg predicts that it will be somewhere between $175 and $200 billion this year.
But the real questions are, what will happen in the years to come and who will be the world leaders in this field?
Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay is ending its $700,000-per-year diesel habit. It will replace the fossil fuel with a clean, fifty-year supply of free solar fuel this Spring. Two belching diesel generators that have till now provided the electricity to keep the lights on will be put out to pasture.
Alcatraz, like all the National Parks, is subject to President Obama’s Executive Order requiring that all Federal Agencies must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions 30% by 2020, which can be accomplished by replacing fossil energy with renewable energy. Alcatraz is managed by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
The Recovery Act (ARRA) green stimulus funds will fund the project. Last year, the National Park Service received $754 million in stimulus funding that can help it achieve the carbon reduction mandate, nationwide. It had a spare $129 million at the end, which will fund 68 more projects, including solar power for Alcatraz Island.
The switch to fifty years of free fuel will also save taxpayers serious money over the next decades. Read the rest of this entry »
Pittsburgh-based Alcoa and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory have partnered up to take us another step closer to low cost solar power. The lab is hosting a test run of Alcoa’s new concentrating solar power technology, which was designed to be competitive in the U.S. energy market partly due to a low cost, energy efficient process. It could also result in more green jobs in manufacturing – if the company takes advantage of opportunities in the U.S.
Conventional solar technology relies on glass mirrors, and glass is not Alcoa’s area of expertise. That would be aluminum, one of the world’s most inexpensive and abundant metals. In addition to its other advantages Alcoa notes that aluminum can be “infinitely recycled” (nicely put!), which is something to think about for future sustainability because at this rate the world will soon be awash in solar panels.
The Indian government has launched a new fund aimed at providing state governments with financial help to promote energy efficiency. The Energy Conservation Fund will be formed by contributions from the state governments which can later request for grants to promote energy conservation programs.
State governments will have to make a initial contribution of INR 2 Crore (more than $440,000) to the fund. Assuming that at least 25 of the 28 state governments make the contribution the fund could up to $11 million. Although the quantum of initial contribution is quite low, the contributions are expected to increase as the government brings in stricter energy efficiency regulations and state governments realize the advantages of energy conservation projects. Read the rest of this entry »
PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) financing is one of the most exciting clean energy topics of the past few years. It is also one of the hottest topics to keep an eye on, I think.
I’m not the only one who thinks so, though — Harvard Business Review has named PACE financing one of the “Breakthrough Ideas for 2010″.
If you’ve missed previous stories on the topic, very simply, PACE financing lets people pay for clean energy and energy efficiency retrofits to their homes or businesses through a slightly higher property tax over the course of 20 years. The government fronts the money and you pay it back over time while you save money on electricity. In many cases, the financial savings are greater than the increase in annual property taxes.
PACE financing started in Berkely, California in 2007, but it has been spreading across the US. Now, it has hit Florida. The Florida legislature just passed PACE financing legislation this week.
A new study out of the University of North Carolina (UNC) shows that North Carolina could have 100% of its power coming from off-shore wind turbines, “without significant human or environmental impacts.”
Plans are now for Duke Energy to build three pilot off-shore wind turbines in state waters, which would make North Carolina “the first state to generate wind power from in-water turbines.”
North Carolina has a goal of supplying 12.5% of its power from renewable energy by 2021. However, marine ecologist and co-author of the new study, Pete Peterson, says much more is possible. “We concluded that you could generate enough electricity from wind turbines off the coast to power the entire state. You’d have to put up a tremendous number of turbines, and the power grid infrastructure would need to be upgraded. But even if you developed one-sixth of the offshore region suitable for wind farms, you could generate twenty percent of the state’s power needs.”
The UNC study was commissioned to examine the human and ecological viability of generating power from wind turbines off the coast and to identify the best locations for such turbines. It involved researchers from UNC, North Carolina State University (NCSU) and East Carolina University (ECU), as well as “experts on birds, bats, insects, sea turtles, fish, butterflies and marine mammals…. duck hunters, ecotourism professionals, whale watchers, park service workers, academics and fishermen.”
It’s been a long time coming, but the U.S. EPA will finally assess the pollution caused by hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as fracking. It’s a mining method that involves injecting massive amounts of chemical brine deep underground in order to release natural gas (among other things). According to an article in the New York Times, hydraulic fracturing involves more than 260 chemicals, including benzene and many other toxic substances. Maybe that hasn’t drawn too much notice in sparsely populated areas but there’s a natural gas drilling boom going on in higher-population states like Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus shale formation is drawing gas companies like flies to honey, and now people are starting to pay attention.
In most places you can’t even dump out a few pints of toxic chemicals such as used motor oil without getting into serious trouble with the law, so how is it that all these fracking people (corporations are people, too!) get to dump umpteen millions of gallons without any kind of accounting whatsoever? I mean, isn’t there a little something called the Clean Water Act, right? Right? Hello, anybody there?
Apartment building owners typically meter the electricity of each of the apartment units they rent out individually, unlike the “common area” places such as the parking lots typically provided for their renters in general.
But that might change. We are approaching a future in which parking lots could be providing electricity, not just to keep the parking lot lights on, but to also provide electricity to charge up any electric cars that will parked there at night.
How to get repaid for that soon-to-be greater use of “common area” electricity?
SemaConnect, a Maryland based company has the solution. Apartment owners and even homeowners might want to make vehicle charging an option, but need to be repaid for the electricity used.
While Coulomb Technologies and the other big players in vehicle charging are focusing on the municipal or large business charging market for cities, SemaConnect is looking out for the little guy.
Wow, too many cool things in one places! Sanyo has just completed two solar parking lots for electric bikes in Tokyo. And a third one is on its way.
The first two stations are for 40 Eneloop electric bikes and the third one will be for 20 such bikes.
Not only that, but the bikes will be “community bikes” for residents and visitors in the Setagaya ward to share (details on how the system will be run are still to come).
Read the rest of this entry »
This summer Alcoa will test a new way of making the solar troughs used to make concentrated solar power (CSP) that could reduce the cost by 20%.
Alcoa is working with the NREL, funded by a $2.1 million DOE grant under the Recovery Act funding for renewable energy – to develop cheaper, more durable aluminium mirrors to replace relatively fragile glass mirrors for use in solar CSP technology.
This summer’s tests of the 20-foot by 46-foot solar collector will evaluate its efficiency and structural performance outdoors at NREL’s test facility in Golden, Colorado.
Read the rest of this entry »
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