Downtown Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
When Americans think about the states that lead in energy, they conjure up Texas, California, perhaps Alaska or West Virginia and – with fracking – now Pennsylvania and Ohio. Maryland isn’t an obvious choice. Keep reading →
Energy efficiency and solar are the low hanging fruit for American companies both at home and overseas, former President Bill Clinton said yesterday.
“We should pick the low hanging fruit. It always begins with efficiency. We’re much more energy efficient than we used to be but we have not made a serious attempt to get it to scale,” Clinton said in the closing keynote of the National Clean Energy Conference in Las Vegas last week. Keep reading →
Luke Nicholson takes a late and frugal lunch of soup and bread in the fourth-floor conference room of a former fabric warehouse in London’s East End. The walls are thinly-painted brick, the floors are bare wooden planks, and there’s a visible gap by a nearby window frame, letting air and light in through a place they shouldn’t go.
It’s an unlikely setting for Nicholson’s company Carbon Culture, a cutting-edge clean-tech startup that writes software to monitor energy consumption, expenditure and carbon emissions in eight U.K. government departments, and is about to roll its product out to the private sector. Keep reading →
Vanadium is a metal used in the steel, aerospace and energy storage industries – and as with virtually all commodities – the supply, demand and price outlook for this commodity varies depending on who one speaks with.
The energy and metals markets first collided in the 1970’s and 80’s when oil and gas companies looking to expand their businesses merged with mining companies. For example, Union Oil of California (UNOCAL) acquired rare earth miner Molycorp in 1977 – UNOCAL was subsequently acquired by Chevron in 2005, making Molycorp a fully owned subsidiary of the oil giant. Keep reading →
Denmark has been a European haven for cleantech companies seeking to install new renewable energy infrastructure. As other European countries have labored under the impacts of an economic slowdown rooted in a currency and sovereign debt crisis, Denmark – still outside the eurozone if closely linked to it – has remained comparatively committed to ambitious clean energy goals.
Situated on a windy peninsula that divides the North and Baltic seas, Denmark has turned to wind power as an obvious mechanism for building out its clean energy capacity. Huge windmills turning serenely along the water are a feature of the above video, as are interviews with a number of officials, energy industry executives and politicians attending a recent European Wind Energy Association meeting. Keep reading →
Large corporations are steadily replacing governments and banks in financing renewable energy transport fuels and technologies, helping a popular sector for venture capital and private equity early stage funding cross the infamous development “valley of death” in search of scale.
The renewable energy transportation sector has reached a pivot point in which the needs and criteria of investors is changing ahead of a new race to scale up transformational technologies, a panel of bankers, lawyers and project developers said at the Renewable Energy Transport Forum in Washington, DC this week. The event was hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy (and this author spoke on one of the conference panels). Keep reading →
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, will leverage its scale to bring affordable renewable power to consumers using its experience from the retail industry.
Rahul Raj, director of sustainability and merchandising innovation at Walmart.com, said that the retail giant aspires to 100% renewable power. Keep reading →
David Willetts
Stable policy and massive infrastructure needs will limit the impacts of a looming double-dip recession in one of the world’s leading advanced economies, a government minister told Breaking Energy last week. Keep reading →
Over the last five years, the smart grid has triggered debate, ranging from whether it should have been part of the stimulus package to concern over health and privacy risks to rising gas, electricity and water rates to the public’s lack of trust in utility companies. Surveys from the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative revealed that less than 25% of the people in the U.S. have heard of the smart grid and even fewer truly understand what it is and more importantly what it means to them.
So why are we so excited about the potential of the smart grid? Keep reading →
The oil and gas industry can bring new resources to bear in its battle against critics and efforts to achieve a “social license to operate.” A small cleantech firm has developed patented technology that allows producers to recycle up to 100% of their well flowback and produced water during hydraulic fracturing operations.
“We use and have invented an advanced oxidation process to treat water on the front end of the [fracking process] and at the flow rate of the [fracking process], eliminating liquid biocides and chemicals for bacteria growth and scale inhibition, and allowing 100% recycling of the flowback and produced waters,” said EcoSphere Technologies Chairman and CEO Charles Vinick said during a recent radio appearance. Keep reading →
