CleanTechnica

Probably the biggest news piece this week was Obama’s State of the Union address. David Roberts of grist seemed to hate it. Whereas often like-minded and equally critical Joe Romm of Climate Progress actually seemed to love it.

Dan Harding of CalFinder had mixed reactions, first “feeling passion stir deep within [him] and tingles of inspiration buzz beneath [his] skin,” then thinking that “[Obama's] speeches have grown more and more centrist.”

Immediately after reading those first two reviews (David and Joe’s), the idea for this article came to my mind. Who’s more powerful than the President of the United States of America?

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In a high tech, low key twist on American Idol, green technology competitions are springing up all over the country.  Among the newer ones is the Clean Energy Prize sponsored by the University of Michigan and DTE Energy, and it offers some clues about the technology stars of the sustainable energy future.  For one thing, they better be prepared to go on stage and pitch their talent – one element of the competition is an oral presentation before a panel of judges.

DTE’s involvement is another interesting aspect of the competition.  A large part of the company is a conventional natural gas utility, Detroit Edison, but an emerging part is DTE Energy Ventures, which focuses on sustainable energy tech.  That puts DTE among a growing list of large energy companies that are turning more investment resources over to sustainable fuels – yet another indicator that peak times for fossil fuels are on the horizon. Read the rest of this entry »

If the US was smart, we would be funding a massive switch to renewable energy now, while we still can. By 2012 we could be out of luck. China is sitting on the only currently mined sources of many of the rare earth minerals needed to build electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines. Reasonably enough, having developed the resources, China wants to keep them for its own needs, that is has planned for.

But we are not smart. Even before the Supreme Court ruling this week, we already allowed fossil interests to dictate our energy policy by allowing the purchase of both policy makers and the formerly public airwaves to impede smart energy policy. In no other democracy is such corruption allowed.

The result is that we will be out of the ability to protect ourselves from peak oil from 2012 to at least 2020 (the earliest that new rare earth mines outside China might begin to come online). If we don’t pass effective climate legislation this year, we will miss that crucial transition window.
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FloDesign, an R&D start-up in the US that has created a wind turbine design based on jet engine technology, just secured $34.5 million to help begin commercial development of its turbines. Lars Andersen, former president of Vestas China, has also just been appointed as the company’s CEO.

FloDesign claims that its turbines are 3-4 times more efficient than traditional open-fan turbines. They have several other beneficial features as well that help economically, environmentally, and in other ways.

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Anecdotal evidence suggests that cheese and biogas go together like – aw heck, let’s cut the cheese jokes and get straight to the point.  The Holmes Cheese Co. is installing a wastewater treatment system at its Millersburg, Ohio factory that will double as a sustainable biogas recovery plant, thus joining a growing number of cheeseries that are generating their own sustainable energy to power equipment.

The new system is a proprietary process called the Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket.  It was developed by Biothane, a subsidiary of leading wastewater treatment company Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies.  As an added bonus, N.A. Water Systems (another Veolia subsidiary) is installing high-tech filtration and treatment equipment that will enable the effluent from Holmes Cheese to meet strict water quality limits for phosphorus.

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In an attempt to step up pressure on the developing countries to take up ambitious emissions reductions and forcing them to move to renewable energy sources for power generation, a high ranking US official has written to the World Bank recommending it to stop financing coal-fired plants in the developing countries.

In a letter written to the World Bank, the United States Executive Director at the World Bank Group, Whitney Debevoise said that multilateral development banks like the World Bank have the responsibility of building a financing framework that ensures mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and strengthens the developing countries economies against climate change. Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t often see affordable housing and solar power being combined. There have been a couple of projects in San Francisco and San Diego in the past year. But Sunwheel Energy Partners just went way beyond that — it just finished a major solar installation on affordable housing units in San Francisco and it hired the residents to install the photovoltaics.

This great project was part of San Francisco’s larger GoSolarSF initiative (launched by San Francisco Mayor and contributing author on CleanTechnica Gavin Newsome).

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Huiming Yin, an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is developing a solar panel that could help put sustainable energy within reach of more U.S. households.  The system incorporates solar cells that have a conversion rate of 12 percent, which makes them a good deal less effective at converting sunlight to energy than some of the new technology on the market, but they have the potential to become a good deal more affordable.

Rather than focusing on getting the highest solar cell conversion rate, Yin is concentrating on other factors that can make solar power more cost-effective and attractive to homeowners and other property owners.  To do this he combines two emerging trends in the solar industry: “integrated” solar panels that double as building elements, and “hybrid” solar systems that produce both electricity and hot water.

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It’s not a team from the Sunshine State (Florida), but one from equally sunny California. The NBA team with a huge new solar installation is the Golden State Warriors.

You may think that putting some solar panels on a practice facility isn’t a big deal. But when you consider that this solar installation will save the team $2 million in electricity costs over the next couple of decades ($36,000 in its first year of operation), that changes things a bit.

The Golden State Warriors cut the ribbon on this new installation on Thursday, January 21^st.

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That takes my breath away. In one of the biggest renewable energy deals in the history of the world, a Korean consortium led by Samsung* has agreed to build 2,500 megawatts of wind and solar power capacity in the Canadian province of Ontario.

Samsung C&T and the Ontario government signed the deal on Thursday, January 21^st. The agreement will bring thousands of jobs and clean energy for more than half a million homes to Ontario.

Building off of this new deal, Korean trade officials plan to make Ontario their base of operations for all of North American.

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