There’s another Gold Rush in California – only now renewable energy is the precious commodity, and big corporations are the prospectors. Last week Apple struck solar and Google mined wind. Now Kaiser Permanente has discovered both. The giant health-care company announced a threefer on Wednesday: The purchase of 43 megawatts of wind power from… Keep reading →
British oil major BP issued its annual energy outlook and reported that rising energy demand in the coming decades will cause increasing carbon emissions despite efforts to draw them down. BP projects that the growing global economy will cause energy demand to rise 40% in the next twenty years and two-thirds of the demand will… Keep reading →
US renewable energy sources continued to grow in 2014, as reported by Breaking Energy, with data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission showing that “15,384 megawatts of new generation went into service in 2014, and 49.9 percent of [all that capacity] came from wind, solar and other renewables.” According to the International Renewable Energy Agency… Keep reading →
The growth in installed solar power capacity over the past several years is nothing short of astonishing. Decreased costs and innovative financing mechanisms, along with supportive policy at national, state and local levels has helped solar power take off. Traditional fossil-based power generation sources like coal and natural gas had a huge head start and… Keep reading →
Is that massive Apple solar play that made news on Tuesday burnishing the tech titan’s green cred? It might be, but environmentalists aren’t thrilled about the whole thing. Not that they’ve got anything against Apple – or solar power, they say. Kim Delfino is California director of the group Defenders of Wildlife, an organization that has… Keep reading →
Crescent Dunes will be generating electricity before the end of March, and SolarReserve’s south-central Nevada solar project won’t stumble out of the gate the way power-tower forerunner Ivanpah did, CEO Kevin Smith said in an interview with Breaking Energy. It would be an understatement to say there’s a lot riding on him being right. Crescent Dunes,… Keep reading →
Just two weeks ago, the year 2014 was dubbed the hottest year on earth since the start of record keeping in 1880. Separate data compilations from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed this 2014 record, as reported by Justin Gillis of The New York Times. Now, the Australian Climate Institute finds… Keep reading →
Germany’s Siemens has handed over the first of a total of five commissioned North Sea grid connections, the BorWin2 offshore platform, to its customer TenneT, a German-Dutch transmission grid operator, for immediate commercial operation, the company announced in a press release on January 30. TenneT is one of the four Transmission System Operators (TSOs) that… Keep reading →
The numbers are still pretty small, but the latest data compilation from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows renewable electricity generation rising steadily in the United States. Here’s a key chart from NREL’s just-released Renewable Energy Data Book, which includes data through the end of 2013. Capacity is the amount of total power that… Keep reading →
President Obama’s proposed budget for 2016 invests heavily in his agenda to combat climate change. “The failure to invest in climate solutions and climate preparedness does not just fly in the face of the overwhelming judgment of science — it is fiscally unwise.” – The White House, as reported by the National Journal The proposal… Keep reading →
