Originally Published in the ECOreport. “You know that it is a tradition in the tunnel boring industry to name the machine after woman,” Premier Christie Clark began. “We are here today to christen this machine Alice, after Alice Wilson, who was the very first woman they ever hired in the … [continued]
Climate change is #1. When we say that, we don’t mean we’re all cheering for global warming. We mean the subject tops the list of the most important underreported issues in the world today—at least according to news aggregation site Upworthy. Joe Romm of ThinkProgress says the topic huge number … [continued]
Wave power has been grabbing the spotlight lately, but the US also has vast tidal power potential and the race is on to engineer a tidal energy device that can overcome some serious obstacles, namely interference with shipping, aquatic life, and recreation. It looks like a research team at Brown … [continued]
How Communities Can Reduce Transportation Emissions by 50% Originally published on the ECOreport. “Would we have a sustainable transportation system if all automobiles were electric powered?” asked Todd Litman, the founder and Executive Director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. Then he added that while electric power would reduce emissions, … [continued]
SolarCity and Best Buy announced this week that they have teamed to sell residential solar in New York, Oregon, Arizona, Hawaii, and California. There are now SolarCity kiosks in over 60 Best Buy stores. “This is the largest consumer electronics retailer in the United States,” said SolarCity vice president Jonathan Bass. … [continued]
Originally published on the ECOreport. The next energy storage breakthrough will be in efficiency, rather than time. During high-peak-demand times, utilities charge commercial customers a premium (per kW) called “demand charges.” These charges often make up 40% of the total electricity bill and have, on occasion even been as much … [continued]
Nine major and statistically reliable studies covering roughly 270,000 property transactions by different respected and independent organizations in three different countries spread over fifteen years have found no correlation between operating wind turbines and negative property values (in fact, three found slight but statistically insignificant improvements). Another low reliability study … [continued]
Editor’s Note: we’ve been covering BYD’s cost-competitive electric bus for a long time now, and have enthusiastically shared news of many small orders, but orders totaling 1,800 electric buses is huge. Let’s hope we see more such orders soon. Originally published on the ECOreport. Build Your Dreams’ (BYD) sale … [continued]
The clean energy sector, backed by innovative entrepreneurs, investors, and government policymakers, has seen enormous growth over the past 6 years. US solar power capacity recently surpassed 10 gigawatts as the price of solar panels has fallen some 75% during the past 5 years. Every 4 minutes, US installers put … [continued]
Originally published on Rocky Mountain Institute. By Leia Guccione and Peter Bronski. For years, low-cost solar-plus-battery systems were seen as a distant possibility at best, a fringe technology not likely to be a threat to mainstream electricity delivery any time soon. By far, the limiting factor has been battery costs. … [continued]
