This is probably not what the US coal industry had in mind when it lobbied — successfully — to put a President Donald Trump in charge of US energy policy. ExxonMobil has just dropped a tweet in support of putting the Paris climate agreement into force. Connect the dots, and that means the Trump Administration is poised to throw coal under the bus.
The US presidential election is over. I know many of you are waiting for my initial comments on what this means for cleantech. Donald Trump’s candidacy has been so devoid of specific policy proposals, he has flip-flopped so many times on a large variety of issues, and he has so little (er … no) experience in government, that this question is more up in the air than not. Nonetheless, I will present several documented facts, some probabilities, and some pure speculation in the article below.
The United States has an election tomorrow. Unfortunately, ~50% of the voting public won’t vote.
China’s leading wind turbine maker, Goldwind, is to supply 1.87 GW of turbines for the 1,870 MW Master Plan for Carbon County Wyoming, being developed by relative newcomer Viridis Eolia.
French electric utility company Engie has announced that its Hazelwood brown coal power station in Victoria, Australia, will shut its doors in March 2017.
The latest Low Carbon Economy Index report from PwC has revealed China led the way in decreasing its carbon intensity during 2015, in a year which saw global carbon intensity drop by 2.8%, double the average fall of 1.3%.
Clearly, the political focus of the year is a certain mind-boggling presidential candidate who hardly touches policy matters — and when he does, tends to push absurd ideas and proposals that would tank our economy, lead to world war, destroy our climate and environment, and piss off our allies. However, as I wrote the other day, Donald Trump’s success in politics wasn’t magic — far from it. Donald Trump’s success in politics was built on the back of decades worth of conspiracy theories and anti-science rhetoric and extremism from the Republican Party. (Come on, people, there’s a reason he won the GOP nomination.)
ExxonMobil is still trying to make carbon capture happen, but a partnership with FuelCell Energy might just delay the inevitable.
Three US-based Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) startups are now making the leap to gigawatt-scale CSP projects at the global level. Two — SolarReserve and BrightSource Energy — were recipients of Department of Energy federal support through the Loan Guarantee Program and subsequent ARPA-E awards for R&D that helped them refine their innovative technologies. The third, Glasspoint Solar, took a different approach.
This week, the North Star solar farm north of Minneapolis – St. Paul began producing electrical power for the first time. North Star is the largest solar farm in the midwest and will supply enough electricity to power 20,000 homes. The 15,000 solar panel installation took about 6 months to construct after all the necessary permits were obtained from local land owners.
