During the early morning hours of April 15, with a steady breeze blowing down Colorado’s Front Range, the state’s biggest utility set a U.S. record — nearly 57% of the electricity being generated was coming from wind power.
Coal
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Indian passengers sit on the railway tracks near the platform of Sealdah train station waiting for the resumption of services during a power failure in Kolkata on July 31, 2012.
Even on a good day, millions of people in India are without access to electricity or deal with power outages on a fairly regular basis. However, the massive power failures that hit the country during the last days of July were striking in how widespread they were. Keep reading →
Natural gas prices have surged over 70% during the past three months, fueled by increased air conditioning use, a switch from coal in power plants, and declining production rates.
It all comes down to the price of natural gas.
Complying with pending mercury and ozone rules, and possibly carbon regulations, will mean replacing substantial amounts of coal capacity, mainly with natural gas, Dale Nesbitt, founder of Deloitte MarketPoint, told a Deloitte Center for Energy Solutions seminar in Washington July 18. Keep reading →
Tough week for Apple on the green front. It ran into a buzz saw of ridicule for its decision to withdraw from the EPEAT product registry, and now Greenpeace is saying the company’s ballyhooed ultra-green North Carolina data center amounts to “mostly talk and not enough walk.”
Greenpeace on Thursday did boost Apple’s “How Green Is Your Cloud?” score, moving it to 22.6 percent from the 15.3 percent the company received in April. That puts Apple well ahead of Amazon (13.5 percent) but a long way behind Dell (56.3 percent), Google (39.4 percent) and Facebook (36.4 percent), among others. Keep reading →
A police officer stands guard after the ExxonMobil annual shareholders meeting at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center May 28, 2008 in Dallas, Texas.
One of the world’s largest oil companies – ExxonMobil – expects considerable renewable energy growth over the next 30 years, primarily for power generation and mostly from wind. Keep reading →
Don’t ban coal for electricity generation.
That was the plea from utility officials and state regulators trying to cope with the flood of regulations now coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency. Keep reading →
Will Netflix still be around in 2147? How about Facebook in 2154? Or Groupon in 2158? Probably not. Scores of companies, particularly in consumer tech, come and go. That makes the longevity of a business like railroad giant Union Pacific (UNP) all the more remarkable. The company celebrated its 150th anniversary on July 1. President Lincoln apparently took time from his busy schedule of fighting vampires on July 1, 1862 to sign the Pacific Railway Act. That paved the way for Union Pacific to start building part of the first transcontinental railroad.
I spoke with Union Pacific president and CEO Jack Koraleski Monday at the New York Stock Exchange, where he and 11 other Union Pacific workers rang the closing bell in honor of the company’s sesquicentennial, about the company’s long track record (Sorry. Couldn’t resist … just consider yourselves lucky I’m not indulging Baby Buzz and sprinkling references to Thomas The Tank Engine and Dinosaur Train throughout the piece) and the U.S. economy.
Koraleski said that Union Pacific is holding up well despite the global market and economic turmoil, noting that the fact that markets react to the morphing stance of German chancellor Angela Merkel shows how volatile the climate is right now. It’s clearly a concern for the company since Koraleski said that about 40% of its business either originates or terminates somewhere outside the U.S.
A single Northeastern US state is preparing to miss out on growing export markets for woody biomass fuel production due to pending new regulation designed to lower carbon emissions. The decision would be a departure from the design of most regulations and markets designed to prevent global warming in Europe and the US.
Massachusetts is poised to adopt a regulation which, according to biomass experts, would keep forest products on the renewable energy sidelines. Keep reading →
