China is clearly taking a lead on solar and wind energy. However, in the smaller but growing field of marine energy, it has been somewhat invisible. That is changing now.
Israeli marine renewables firm SDE Energy has announced that it will be completing construction of a 1MW marine power plant in China by the end of April. But there is much more in the pipeline.
French startup McPhy Energy may be making a fortune soon due to a hydrogen storage system it has just developed that could solve problems posed by the intermittent nature of renewable energy.
Despite the economic recession, the solar industry grew significantly in 2009. The solar industry added 17,000 jobs to the US economy in 2009. Installed solar capacity grew by approximately 37%. And we saw a serious drop in the cost of solar. (more info and graphs below)
46,000 jobs are supported by the solar industry now, but that number is expected to climb to over 60,000 by the end of 2010.
As I discussed yesterday, it looks like streetcars are making a comeback. Curious about which cities are on the move? The Community Streetcar Coalition held a summit earlier this year in Alexandria, Virginia where it brought together people working to get new streetcars running in 22 cities across the nation.
Cities that may be constructing streetcar lines within a year or two are below, as well as a few insights on and expectations for those most likely to be built.
The Empire State Building is in the middle of a green makeover. It is aiming to reduce energy usage by about 38%. Next on the makeover list is a change to its 6,500 windows. This improvement is predicted to not only protect the environment from tons of CO2 emissions, but also save $400,000 a year.
Thanks to a small transformation in federal transportation policy since Obama took office, cities around the nation are looking at the real possibility of creating new streetcar lines within the next year or two.
In a series of momentous moves, the Obama Administration has made it easier for cities to start or expand streetcar lines. The crux of the changes come from the understanding that streetcars are not just about saving people time, they are also highly useful in building an attractive urban landscape, stimulating and channeling investment and growth into the urban core and into other specifically targeted areas of the city, and attracting non-transit riders to efficient mass transit.
It isn’t technically feasible to have renewable energy supply us with 100% of our electricity needs, right? Wrong. Renewable energy is prohibitively expensive, right? Wrong.
A new report just put out this week, Roadmap 2050: a practical guide to a prosperous, low-carbon Europe, gets into technical and economic details surrounding these important issues. The report includes contributions from world leading economists and renewable energy experts, including people from McKinsey, KEMA, Imperial College London and Oxford Economics.
The report claims to be the most comprehensive assessment of the viability of zero carbon power supplies available today (focused on Europe).
A new report published in the journal Conservation Letters shows the results of the first global assessment of turtle “bycatch” by longline, gillnet and trawl fisheries. Basically, bycatch is when these fisheries accidentally catch animals they don’t intend to catch. Unfortunately, the news is not good for millions of sea turtles, with six out of seven marine turtle species listed as “Vulnerable”, “Endangered”, or “Critically Endangered” on the IUCN Red List largely as a result of this.
3,000 US businesses are not waiting around any longer to see if climate and clean energy legislation will move along in Congress. They are pushing for it with full force.
American Businesses for Clean Energy (ABCE), the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) and other businesses outside of these organizations have created a new national advertising campaign to push for swift action on this important legislation.
The 3,000 businesses working together on this include global leaders like Google, Nike, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Gap, Johnson & Johnson, Michelin, Shell, Whirlpool and Timberland as well as smaller mom-&-pop businesses.
New official stats from China show that renewable energy capacity is growing faster than coal now.
By the end of 2010, hydro, nuclear and wind power should account for 26% of the country’s electricity generation, providing about 250 GW of capacity. “Thermal power”, largely coal-fired power stations, accounts for about 700 GW of capacity. However, 96 GW of the China’s 178 GW of new power capacity will be from renewables in 2010, compared to 80 GW from thermal power. So, the tide may be changing.
A new monitoring system from California startup SunReports allows for in-depth but simple monitoring of your solar technology. There are numerous environmental and long-term economic reasons to use solar technology, but once you have solar installed, how do you know what it is actually accomplishing?
As its homepage says, “SunReports is built upon the premise that energy monitoring need NOT be costly, complex, or confusing.” Apollo 1, SunReports’ new monitoring system, helps the company to prove that correct.
NASA has announced a dramatic climate science budget increase this month. Although, it is really just a correction for dramatic budget cuts made during the George W. Bush era.
NASA’s Earth Science Division will get an additional $2.4 billion in funding, a 62% increase, in the next five years. The budget for NASA’s other programs, in the meantime, will generally remain flat.
On Friday morning, Greenpeace activists sacrificed their Easter holidays in order to help stop the killing and trade of endangered fin whales. Fewer than 50,000 fin whales are expected to exist in the North Atlantic Ocean and CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna) has put a ban on the international trade of fin whale meat. Iceland and Japan will not sign onto the treaty but the Netherlands has done so. Greenpeace wants the Netherlands to live up to its commitment to stop the killing of endangered whales by not allowing this meat to leave its port.
“Greenpeace activists have chained themselves to the mooring ropes of a ship carrying an illicit cargo of whale meat to prevent it leaving the port of Rotterdam bound for Japan,” Greenpeace wrote this weekend.
Well, if you saw Avatar, you know it had a bit of an environmentalist message in it. Apparently, this upset a number of climate change deniers who, very selflessly, are trying to protect us from Al Gore and climate scientists who just want to take over the world or be super rich. (The fact that they are more knowledgeable about the sneaky scientific magic tricks climate scientists are performing than independent scientific authorities like the National Academy of Sciences is nothing to question, of course.)
Worldwide, investors put $1.9 billion into clean tech startups in the first three months of 2010. That is an 83% increase from the same quarter last year and a 29% increase from the fourth quarter of 2009. Additionally, the number of deals hit a record high.
This is what a new report from Cleantech Group and Deloitte shows.
It’s much more fun to write on the good stuff environmentally friendly people and businesses are doing, but occasionally we have to take a look at what is keeping the world down, too.
A new report put out by Greenpeace, Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine, uncovers where many of the leading anti-climate science campaigns, organizations and people get their money — from Koch Industries or affiliated charities.
Before getting into what exactly Koch Industries funded, though, what is Koch Industries?
It may not be a brand ingrained in the cultural consciousness, like Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, and it doesn’t sell shares on the stock market, but Koch Industries is actually the second largest privately held corporation in the United States (and the first at some points in recent years). It is a captain of the oil industry. It has operations in 60 countries and about 70,000 people work for its 20 companies. As billionaire and co-owner David Koch likes to say, Koch Industries is “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.”
Now, to the dirty work.
The European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) released figures yesterday showing that the global solar photovoltaic industry had a record year in 2009. But it is expecting a lot from 2010 as well.
This post is our contribution to sustainablog’s Pedal-a-Watt Powered Blogathon this weekend. The long-running green blog (and new green shopping site) is publishing for 24 hours straight to raise funds for the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Northeastern Missouri. Go join the fun: read post contributions from around the green blogosphere, leave a comment to be entered in a drawing for some great green prizes, and join in the Tweetchat at #susbppb.
I became very interested in sustainable communities, intentional communities, ecovillages, new urbanist communities, etc. while studying sociology and environmental studies as an undergraduate at New College of Florida (years ago). Something about working in community and living a fairly self-sustaining life (on the community scale) stood out to me as one great solution to many of the world’s problems.
Nonetheless, it went against the modern-day cultural norm. And I wondered what it would actually feel like and how it would work to live in such a place, especially being a bit of a solitary, I-need-my-space kind of person.
For five months or so, as a full-time intern, I got the opportunity to look into that by living in and throwing myself into all the workings of an ecovillage in upstate New York — EcoVillage at Ithaca.
Some of what I expected, I found. Some of what I expected, I didn’t find. Much more than either of those, I think I found a lot that I didn’t expect. A lot of what I experienced can’t actually be put into words — it was about an experience, not an intellectual thought. But for what I can convey through words, I decided to write this post.
Nike, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, and other major international companies have opposed the US Chamber of Commerce’s negative stance on climate and clean energy legislation in the past year (as well as the hundreds of millions of dollars it is spending on lobbying against such legislation). Now, electronics retail giant Best Buy is putting on its boxing gloves as well.
Like others have announced, it says that the US Chamber of Commerce does not represent its views or interests on this key legislation.
We know that it is actually a positive thing these days to care about the environment. It is not a fringe, weirdo concern. For this reason, we now even have the problem of corporate greenwashing — companies (or politicians, people, etc.) trying to convince people they are green when they are not.
As we approach a major worldwide environmental event — Earth Hour — we can see that we have come a long way in the world of corporate environmental care. Currently, corporate support for Earth Hour is coming from a wide range of large, mainstream companies, such as Canon, Coca-Cola, HSBC, Nokia Siemens Networks, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics and Wells Fargo.
Are these companies really concerned about the environment, or are they just looking for good, easy publicity? Either way, their support for the event is going to make a huge difference.