Lord John Browne, the former BP chief executive, will head up new oligarch-backed $10bn fund L1 which is buying up energy industry assets while price of oil is low. “John Browne, who was appointed executive chairman of the oligarch-backed L1 Energy group last week, is scouring the industry to snap up assets at knock-down prices, said friends, who added that few outside observers have realised the huge ambitions Browne has to create a major global force in energy.

The man once dubbed the Sun King for his pre-eminence in the oil sector and who celebrated his 67th birthday last month, is said to be “enormously excited” about building a fossil-fuel business from almost scratch.

The venture will be based at first in Hamburg, where Browne was born into a British military family, but will focus future interests on North America and the Far East using debt and equity from the Russians.” [The Guardian]

A new concept in renewable energy is spreading across the United States, allowing customers who find solar panels too expensive or impractical to buy green energy.”Community solar gardens first took off in Colorado a few years ago, and the model — also known as community or shared solar — has spread to Minnesota, California, Massachusetts and several other states.

Capacity is expected to grow sharply this year, and interest is up among both residential customers who just like the idea and large companies that want to cut their carbon footprints.” [ABC News/AP]

The New York Mercantile Exchange released thousands of incorrect oil and gas prices on Friday, leading trading platforms to show occasional spikes and dips that didn’t actually occur.

Buying and selling of commodities functioned properly on Friday despite the momentary blips, the exchange’s owner, CME Group Inc., told The Wall Street Journal. Traders and brokers said they were able to work around what they considered obviously inaccurate data that showed up in the stream of energy prices on screens run by other data providers and fed by the Nymex. [WSJ]