In 2016, Ohio lawmakers tried to gut the state’s clean energy standards, which had created thousands of jobs and saved Ohioans over $1 billion on their electricity bills. They almost succeeded, until Gov. John Kasich stood up for Ohio’s clean energy economy and vetoed the harmful bill. Now state legislators are back with a new… Keep reading →
SunPower engineers are testing the use of drones to survey wide regions and help design a solar power farm that can fit more solar panels on a piece of land, more quickly, and for lower costs than it previously could.
Under pressure from greens, Amazon Web Services – the online retail giant’s market-leading cloud business – is moving to clean up its carbon act. AWS on Tuesday announced it would buy power under a 13-year contract from a wind farm that Pattern Energy will build in Indiana. The way some companies pay to get stadiums… Keep reading →
It’s no secret that the rise of distributed generation is fundamentally altering the traditional centralized power generation, transmission and delivery system, but utilities are dealing with these changes in different ways and NRG appears to be embracing new models instead of fighting to preserve the status quo. In this letter originally printed on the company’s… Keep reading →
Wifi-enabled thermostats can deliver substantial efficiency benefits when they’re used, but the trick is expanding deployment to as many households as possible. Broadening the range of wifi thermostats that can link up to any utility’s demand response program could help to achieve that. Home thermostat technology has made evolutionary leaps and bounds, such as the… Keep reading →
“The world has failed us,” Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa recently said regarding a missed opportunity to preserve pristine Amazon rainforest from oil development. The government offered to forgo drilling in the oil-rich region if the international community donated $3.6 billion to a preservation trust fund. The initiative reportedly raised only $13 million. The proposal dates… Keep reading →
Not green enough, which is worrisome given how fast its energy use is growing At first blush, the Internet appears as green as it gets. Buying and reading an e-book on line obviates the need to drive to the bookstore, or having it shipped, and avoids chopping down trees to make paper to print it… 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 →
Nuclear Fusion: ‘This is the Adventure Part of Venture Capital’
By Jared AndersonWhile eating lunch at a recent energy conference with the usual random selection of delegates and speakers, I asked the co-founder of a leading energy venture capital firm what technology he finds most exciting right now. Without hesitation, he began telling me about his company’s ambitious, longer-term bet on a small nuclear fusion company. He then put me in contact with his partner and co-founder, who helped fill in the details for this story. Keep reading →