CleanTechnica

As U.S. policymakers debate the best renewable policy for the country, many German experts are already convinced they know the answer: a feed-in tariff. Germany’s feed-in tariff, which offers generous set prices for renewable electricity fed into the grid, stimulated 1.5 gigawatts of new solar capacity last year, and similar programs also have boosted markets in countries such as Spain, Greece, Italy, Turkey and South Korea. All the fastest-growing solar markets in the world today have feed-in tariffs.

Gainesville, Fla., and Ontario, Canada, also recently created German-style feed-in tariffs, but the policy hasn’t yet taken hold as a U.S. state or federal policy. I recently wrote a post for Earth2Tech about the difficulties of implementing a German-style feed-in tariff in California: the policy isn’t responsive to market signals that would encourage electricity generation when and where it’s most needed, it’s more challenging to make work in places with lower conventional electricity prices and widely varying utilities with different restrictions, and it doesn’t address retail electricity or encourage customers to use less energy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Goes one further….

If every building had a white roof, we would be able to cool the surrounding areas. That is the reasoning behind a California law about to go into effect next month requiring light reflective roofs on all new buildings. It is already the law for new flat roofs here.

Read the rest of this entry at GreenbuildingElements…

When it comes to environmental news, doom and gloom often rules the day. And it’s easy to get discouraged. But scientists from Yale University say most polluted ecosystems can recover in as little as 5 or 10 years.

The study means it’s not too late to turn things around if societies commit to cleanup, restoration and sustainability, according to Yale’s analysis of 240 independent studies. The findings appear in this month’s issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.
Read the rest of this entry »

LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, has become the alpha acronym when referring to green, or eco-friendly, buildings. The standard, from the U.S. Green Building Council, recently went 3.0.

Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, is taking the green diploma to an even higher degree. University officials are betting a new Living Learning Center will meet the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most stringent green building rating system from the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, a chapter of the USGBC and its Canadian counterpart.

Read the rest of this entry »

The United States have already started down the path of Renewable Portfolio Standards.

There are now almost 30 states with their own RPSes, which require utilities to generate more of their power from renewable sources, like wind and solar and even landfill gas. Different states have set different standards, often with percentages based on years: 15 percent by 2015, for instance. It’s more catchy that way.

Now Congress is discussing a national RPS, which would set minimum standards for all states. RPSes, also known as Renewable Electricity Standards, can drive investment in renewable technologies. They can pave the way for new investment in turbines and panels, and associated jobs that come with the pay out. Sure, renewables may cost more for now, but you probably remember that economies of scale thing from high school.

• » Consumer solar power aggregation project launched in Denver, CO
• » Get CleanTechnica by RSS or sign up by email.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory looks at three proposed standards in a new 30-page report (.pdf). They’re the master plans — from Senator Jeff Bingaman and Representative Edward Markey, and jointly by representatives Henry Waxman and Markey — that have risen to the top for now, being discussed in U.S. House and Senate committees.

The bottom line: The report doesn’t really choose a “best plan.” But Markey seems to get the best marks for a 25% by 2025 RES target with no energy efficiency substitutions allowed.

“The Markey RES legislation requires significantly greater renewable power deployment and the construction of new transmission infrastructure in a timely manner,” it says on pdf page 22.

Browse the report, and tell me what you think. Which of these plans is best for America? Or is there a fourth plan that was left out?

Image Credit: Divwerf via flickr under Creative Commons License

Could a regular light bulb end up being an energy efficient competitor to a compact fluorescent bulb? Researchers at the University of Rochester say yes.

A team of optics researchers at the school say they’ve developed a process that makes a 100-watt incandescent bulb use less electricity than a 60-watt bulb. The process, they say, would keep the cost of a traditional light bulb well under that of its fluorescent counterpart while maintaining the more pleasant light an incandescent bulb gives off.

Professor Chunlei Guo  (pictured above) and his team developed a laser process that treats the tungsten filament in a traditional bulb. The process creates nano- and micro- level structures on the filament that dramatically improve its efficiency.

Read the rest of this entry »

There were many viewpoints this weekend at TIE’s annual ‘pow-wow’ TIEcon 2009 when it came to cleantech, but if I were to boil them down (in a electric stove running on renewable energy) I would say the essence can be summarized as this: the mundane matters.

I say this not because there was a lack of enthusiasm in the air-absolutely the opposite-rather I say it because a more zoomed-out perspective on cleantech has begun to crystallize, and with that everyone from VC’s to the entrepreneurs bootstrapping their way through the battlefields of innovation has recognized the value of niches within the ‘ecosystem’ of cleantech.

This, of course, is a fitting metaphor for the area of innovation hoping to save us from ourselves. The area of innovation slated to reinvigorate our intuitions about what it means to work alongside nature as opposed to taking it for granted. At the same time, the principles of business and innovation surrounding growth of capital via monetization requires these innovations to return deep profits for those invested. Here’s how that duality played out in real-time:

Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s plan to roll-out home energy monitoring systems took a step towards reality Tuesday when the company announced the first round of utility partners for its PowerMeter demand-side energy management software.

The pilot program for Google’s foray into smart grid and energy management infrastructure will be available to select customers at a group of eight utilities that have installed—or are in the process of installing—smart meters. With the move, Google will be making the company’s first significant play in energy-use data, an entirely new dimension of consumer data for the company.

By having real-time information about home energy usage on a desktop (running as a Google Gadget), those using the meter will be able to use their energy more efficiently, save money on their monthly bill, and be able to monitor/reduce household carbon emissions. Read the rest of this entry »

Experts call energy efficiency the low-hanging fruit, because it’s cheaper to cut power use than create new energy from fossil fuels like coal.

But our creature comforts — like iPods, cell phones, PCs and plasma TVs — are sucking the life out of advances in energy efficiency around the world, the International Energy Agency says.

In other words, too much fruit is rotting on the vine.

The IEA says in a new “Gigawatts and Gadgets” report that electricity consumption from power-hungry electronics could cause household energy use to triple by 2030. That means increased greenhouse gases from electric generation, and increased electric bills for creating that power. Read the rest of this entry »

Building managers and environmental passers-by always scream when they see office lights on in the middle of the night, illuminating someone’s cubicle for hours when they’re not there. Ledalite’s Ergolight Controls System has been designed to take care of that problem, as well as increase office energy efficiency. It’s such a good solution, that it was recognized by the David Suzuki Foundation as one of their climate change solution case studies. Designed to help building designers and architects achieve LEED certification, depending on the set-up, customers can decrease their energy consumption by up to 80%.

Read the rest of this entry »