Environmental groups celebrated last fall when President Obama delayed the northern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would pipe carbon-intensive tar sands crude from Canadian strip mines to refineries in Texas. Now that Obama is back in the White House for a second term, those same forces are banding together to encourage the president to kill the pipeline altogether. […]
With much of the US continuing to experience high heat and drought, distributed solar, and renewable power sources are helping alleviate the strains on electricity grids. Ongoing progress to integrate more clean, renewable energy into US power grids is threatened by utilities’ efforts to derail efforts such as California’s Net Metering program, however, according to Protect Net Metering. […]
A New Focal Point In the first part of this “Road to 2020” series of posts, I looked at how the pro-nuclear & renewable-sceptical center-right federal government of Germany made a 180° turnaround in terms of energy policy back in 2011. While this was good news, it’s of course … [continued]
Political Fallout In the summer of 2011, the conservative federal government of Germany passed a law that will phase out nuclear power in Germany by 2022, and they proclaimed the so-called “Energiewende.” This announcement was made with a lot of pathos and was accompanied by even more talk about the … [continued]
They’re at it again–Republicans and Democrats in a practically dysfunctional Congress fought over budgetary matters this past week, specifically an extension of the wind energy production tax credit. The wind energy PTC has helped spur billions of dollars of investment in a young, emerging industry that’s going to prove vital in decades to come. It’s helped create thousands of good jobs when job creation has cratered. It’s improved environmental and health conditions. We won’t have it, Congressional Republicans voted once again.
A key to sustaining renewable energy economic & jobs growth in the wake of the “Great Recession,” the US Treasury 1603 grant program is due to expire at the end of 2011. A study conducted for the SEIA indicates that extending it for one year would create an additional 37,394 solar industry jobs and some 2,000 megawatts (MW) of new solar installations.
Some more great cleantech stories from the week that we haven’t yet covered. This week, I decided to just organize them by topic (note, of course, that some topics overlap — in such cases, I put a little note about which other categories each article could be filed under after titles for those of you only interested in a particular topic). Check out these other interesting cleantech stories …
