The German wind industry sits at the heart of a European energy market preparing for a disruptive transformation intended to promote integration and allow the rich wind resource of the North to fuel continent-wide growth, without the risks of nuclear power and reliance on foreign energy producers.
It is a comprehensive, ambitious vision that in Germany alone the environment minister Peter Altmaier has compared in scale to the country’s painful post-Communist reunification. Keep reading →
The verdant, rolling hills of Northeast Missouri look as if they were lifted straight from a George Inness painting. A blend of scattered, open-grown trees and lush prairie grassland — an idyllic savanna ecosystem — peppered prettily with ponds, small creeks and wildlife. Country life at its finest.
Some of the most influential voices in the clean energy sector gathered recently in New York for the US launch of the Corporate Renewable Energy Index and the Global Consumer Wind Study.
Companies manage what is measured, and increasingly understand their customers and their competitors by leveraging the data sets provided by measurements that in previous business cycles would have been difficult to gather, much less compare. Keep reading →
A year after the US government raced to meet a deadline to finish loan agreements with dozens of clean energy companies, less than half the total money promised has been handed over.
Technical questions and companies’ own failures in hitting contractual milestones are behind some of the holdups. But government officials fearful of taking a risk on firms that could collapse may have also caused some of the delays. The political firestorm after the failure of Solyndra, a solar panel maker that went bankrupt last year after receiving more than $527 million in a government loan, may have made the authorities wary, industry experts and investors say.
Innovations in the way electricity is created and delivered are already under way to transform the electricity system worldwide in the coming decade – and the innovations may be coming from surprising places.
“Other nations understand their success as nations depends almost entirely on their ability to electrify,” said Chris Hickman, CEO/President, Innovari, told GridWeek 2012 in Washington DC Oct. 2. Countries dealing with unreliable or insufficient power supplies are looking at distributed generating sources and microgrids in very different ways than the US does, he said. Keep reading →
Warren Buffett bought himself two more wind farms on Sunday.
OK, it’s a little more roundabout than that. MidAmerica Wind bought two Southern California wind farm projects, part of the sprawling Alta Wind Energy Center – and by “projects” we mean they aren’t operating yet, but are expected to be by the end of the year. (They better be, in order to qualify for expiring federal tax breaks.) Keep reading →
US President Barack Obama tours the General Electric Plant with GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt (L) and plant manager Kevin Sharkey January 21, 2011 in Schenectady, New York.
General Electric recently announced $1.2bn orders for its new FlexEfficiency 60 turbine, which the company claims is a step change for the industry in its ability to supply both baseload power and ramp quickly to smooth intermittent loads from solar and wind. Keep reading →
The world of renewable energy has changed rapidly over the past decade, moving from a marginal issue for environmentalists to a core component of both energy policy and the consumer mindset.
The energy business, which relies on lengthy lead times and regulatory certainty, has often been slow to adapt to the changes in the world around it and embrace renewable energy production or sustainability issues. That is no longer the case, as major corporations embrace direct investment in the sector to avoid an energy sector they increasingly see as adding major risk to operational reliability and customers become attuned to their energy choices. Keep reading →
Companies are at the leading edge of wind globally, not least in the US. Starbucks recently sent a joint letter with 18 other US companies to Congress to request an extension of the Production Tax Credit which has helped grow installed capacity.
Ben & Jerry’s, Clif Bar, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss & Co, The North Face, Sprint, Starbucks, Symantec, Timberland and Yahoo! are just a selection of household corporate names that understand the value of a sustainable wind industry to the consumer and the bottom line. Keep reading →
The Supposed Decline of Green Energy http://bit.ly/RUWjKw HarvardBiz
