The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is seen from the beach along San Onofre State Beach on March 15, 2012 south of San Clemente, California.
The head of the Nuclear Energy Institute yesterday said he was optimistic that California’s San Onofore nuclear plant would again start producing electricity and denied that the US industry was troubled by high costs and safety concerns after Fukushima. Keep reading →
America’s oil refiners are preparing to intensify efforts to press the federal government to drop mandates to encourage the development of advanced biofuels and counter the Obama administration’s “war on fossil fuels.”
The Renewable Portfolio Standard requires that 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel be blended with petroleum-based products by 2022 under the Bush-era Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Keep reading →
An 11th hour withdrawal from a long-anticipated initial public offering could be a potentially damaging blow for a cleantech startup trying to raise additional capital from the public markets.
But BrightSource, the concentrating solar power startup with 9 GW of projects in the pipeline, has not ruled out another attempt at a public launch. Keep reading →
Energy storage technologies – notorious for falling into the infamous financing “valley of death” – are set to get a stronger bridge across the abyss from lab to market in California.
CalCharge, a consortium based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, launched May 29. Keep reading →
Information technology is the most powerful tool to accelerate cleantech adoption, but is being blocked by energy regulation developed during the industrial revolution, a leading investor told a Silicon Valley conference last week.
Sunil Paul, founding partner of Spring Ventures, which has invested in social networking
company LinkedIn and biofuels startup Solazyme, said: “Our entire regulatory regime is built for the industrial revolution and we have a different way of working today that requires a different code.” Keep reading →
Open innovation in information technology is key in developing the smart grid, the recently appointed US Chief Technology Officer said yesterday [22 May]. Keep reading →
Startup Battlefield Finalists pose onstage at Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 held at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse on September 14, 2011 in San Francisco, California.
Low natural gas prices in the US have slowed momentum in the development of grid-level energy storage solutions, an expert panel gathered from venture capital, power generation and utility companies said last week. Keep reading →
A legal storm in the energy industry that has been rumbling in the distance for three years is likely to come to a head this summer as petroleum refiners, ethanol producers and Washington lobbyists pursue their battle with state agencies in Sacramento.
The latest flare in this clash between a powerful pantheon of US energy titans and federally influential regulators in California occurred last week, after a temporary injunction was lifted by a US court of appeals in San Francisco. Keep reading →
The chair of the California Air Resources Board, yesterday brushed away concerns that the state’s cap and trade program had failed to give the energy industry enough market certainty.
Mary Nichols told delegates at the Navigating the American Carbon World conference in San Francisco yesterday said she saw no problem with traders in the US power markets adopting a “wait and see mode” on whether the pioneering scheme would begin next year. Keep reading →
State Renewable Portfolio Standards may come under increasing pressure amid low natural gas prices, excess power generation capacity and the cost of compliance, leading energy analyst says.
“The world for renewables today is quite different from the renewables world we faced over the last several years,” Ron Norman, renewable energy specialist at PA Consulting Group, told a symposium held in San Francisco last week. “Before 2009, we had extraordinarily high gas prices and pending C02 legislation, low growth throughout the US and since that time we’ve had a crash in natural gas prices.” Keep reading →
