Tag: industry news

In a series of discussions on Earth Day, I found myself returning to two 1970s reports by the Club of Rome: The Limits to Growth and Mankind at the Turning Point. While those analyses were weak on policy design, they did a thorough job of describing the interconnected set of problems that remain at the heart of the world’s environmental

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While many people associate cooperatives with a place for hippies to buy organic food, the cooperative movement has actually grown far and wide, creating sustainable enterprises that generate jobs and strengthen local economies. Today, there are nearly 30,000 cooperatives in the United States, with more than 100 million members. From day care centers to hardware stores, cooperatives seem to be

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign use a printing process to assemble tiny cells into multilayer stacks for extraordinary levels of photovoltaic conversion efficiency. As an energy source, the Sun has always been a dependable provider. Although it freely shines on everyone, the ability to capture and convert the Sun’s abundant energy is anything but free. However, new

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You’ve heard of thin film wearable solar cells, and now a thin film, flexible battery is in the works. A team of researchers at Rice University has come up with a new lightweight battery that combines the flexibility of graphene with the high storage capacity of inorganic metal compounds. You don’t usually find that high flexibility – high storage combo

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The largest utility-scale solar PV power plant yet constructed in Japan, the 82 MW Oita Solar Project, is now online. Commercial operations at the plant are now ongoing, helping to notably boost the country’s, and region’s, renewable energy capacity. The new, nearly 100 MW solar plant is located in southern Japan, in Oita City, and was constructed by the noted

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The roots of energy independence lie in the energy crises of the 1970s. US oil production peaked in 1970, and we became increasingly dependent on oil imported from the Middle East. In response to US support for Israel, OPEC cut production and doubled prices in 1973 and again in 1979. The economy stagnated for most of the decade, and Americans

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Siemens is challenging General Electric’s bid to buy Alstom, setting up a trans-Atlantic power struggle that could create a new supergiant in smart grid technology, or be scuttled by regulatory and political pressure. That’s the latest update from Paris, where talks over the fate of the French power, train and grid giant were disrupted by Siemens’ offer of a cash

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Significant cost cuts in niche areas are still possible that could bring utility-scale solar down to $1.35 per watt, according to a panel of industry experts at the recent GTM Solar Summit. Five to ten years out, inverter and tracker technologies will have significant impacts on balance-of-system costs, according to E3 International Engineering VP John Schroeder. But for now, perceived

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California issued a storage mandate and settled its net metering debate last year. Texas is in the process of overhauling its ancillary services market. Minnesota has set a value-of-solar tariff. But all of that is small potatoes compared to the market transformation for electric distribution utilities that New York just announced. New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has asked his public

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New-build wind and solar energy systems can generate electricity for up to 50 per cent cheaper than new nuclear power plants, a German study has found. The research, commissioned by German think tank Agora Energiewende, compares feed-in tariffs for new nuclear in the UK with FiTs for renewables in Germany, and finds that nuclear and carbon capture and storage (CSS)

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