Renewable Energy News

For the past two years, Vestas Wind Systems has struggled. Last year the company announced it was cutting more than 3,000 jobs in order to try to stay solvent. An oversupply of wind turbines on the market forced turbine prices down over the past years. This plus uncertainty around the U.S. production tax credit, increased competition from Chinese companies and a tightening of the European renewable energy market have all added up to difficult times for the giant wind turbine manufacturer.

The U.S. is noting a somber milestone this year: It has been a decade since the invasion of Iraq. Over the years, the opportunities forsaken and cost to future Americans have become clear. The enormous debt it incurred has weighed on Washington, DC, where austerians shout that the nation can no longer afford to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure due to the mounting interest on this debt.

London Array, the world's largest operating wind farm at sea, set the last of its 175 turbines whirling as backers EON SE, Dong Energy A/S and Masdar Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co. seek to cut costs by building at scale.

Venture capital investors these days favor startups that are involved in the retail side of the solar business. The latest evidence of that trend comes from Clean Power Finance, which said on Monday that it had raised $37 million from investors such as Edison International.

So you’ve done a lot of work blogging and using social media, plus paid web ads, to drive traffic to your website, but visitors don’t stay very long, and even when they do, most don’t contact you. Bummer. But why? There’s no one single reason for poor website conversions, but let’s go through a few common reasons and some solutions. 1) Your website

As the deployment of grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) systems has increased, so too has the desire to track the installed price of these systems over time and by location, customer type, and system characteristics.

Companies in the global energy industry are under intense pressure from all directions. Growth in power demand must always be met and compliance with increasingly stringent health, safety and environmental regulations is mandatory. New facilities must be brought online quickly, and infrastructure must be upgraded and modernized. And throughout, a retiring workforce with the potential loss of know-how and experience must be replaced — all with minimal service interruptions.

We're losing the race against global warming. Worldwide coal production increased about eight times faster than solar- and wind-power generation last year. China added more new coal plants in 2011 than are running in Texas and Ohio, even as it leads the world in wind-power capacity. Meanwhile, the United States is only modestly cutting carbon emissions by transitioning from coal to natural gas, which is still a carbon-rich fuel.

A team of Virginia Tech researchers has discovered a way to extract large quantities of hydrogen from any plant, a breakthrough that has the potential to bring a low-cost, environmentally friendly fuel source to the world.

It's an existential question in France: When is fracking not fracking?

The National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) is at the nexus of a changing landscape, where the mountains meet the plains. It's also where changes in the wind industry are being previewed. And, a visitor or passerby will notice significant yet subtle changes taking place on site, including a new turbine installation and new blades on another of the site's giant turbines.

Reforming our patchwork of rules directing the electric utility industry is essential. The generation and delivery of electricity is as fundamental to our national prosperity as the air we breathe and the water we drink. Most of us rely on electricity from the moment our alarm buzzes in the morning until we turn out the lights to sleep at night. In the case of regulations affecting our natural resources, we have elected to fight back against their degradation through comprehensive federal, state and local environmental laws and regulations that by comparison to energy rules are clear and effective. By contrast, the current legal framework regulating the electric utility industry is a hodgepodge of reactive rules cobbled together in response to periodic developments in the energy industry.

Nevada's major public utility NV Energy announced Wednesday that it plans to shutter its four coal plants in southern Nevada and increase its investment in renewable energy and natural gas. Three of its coal plants will be shut down by 2014, and the fourth is scheduled to close its doors by 2017. NV Energy is calling its proposal "NVision," and included it as an amendment in Senate Bill 123.

BrightSource has cancelled the proposed Hidden Hills concentrated solar power (CSP) plants in California's Inyo County, saying proposed changes to the site's configuration would require numerous revisions and re-analyses, and even more delays and uncertainty.

The Republican Party is not known for taking action on climate change, or even for acknowledging its existence. Republican voters across the country evidently do not feel the same way. A recently released national survey conducted by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and the Yale Project on Climate Change Communica

Triodos Investment Management BV, an arm of Dutch lender Triodos Bank NV, plans a clean-energy fund focused on emerging markets as growth in the industry shifts away from Europe.

Increasingly countries and regions are leapfrogging timid renewable targets and moving toward full 100 percent integration of renewables into electricity supply. Some thought leaders, politicians, and advocates are moving even further, suggesting 150 percent, even 300 percent renewable electricity generation to meet not only electricity supply but also heat and transport.

While the broad market of small stocks as measured by my benchmark the iShares Russell 2000 Index (IWM) managed to turn in a small 2% gain in March for the third month in a row, clean energy stocks repeated February's performance, giving back more of January's spectacular gains. My clean energy benchmark, the Powershares Wilderhill Clean Energy Index (PBW), declined 3.2% to end the quarter up 5.5% for the year, while IWM closed up 12.2% for the first quarter.

Last week in Phoenix, I watched the very conservative governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, deliver a brief keynote speech to open the second day of the CleanTech Future conference put on by CleanTech Connections and the Arizona Commerce Authority. Nineteen floors above the impressive solar PV arrays at Arizona State University's downtown campus across the street, Brewer extolled the virtues of solar and other clean energy as a business boon for her state.

It's almost a cliché that there's a "friendly debate" pitting utilities against renewable energy. But concerns on the utility side of the table are real: intermittency, potential destabilization at the feeder level, non-baseload, and peaks in generation that don't necessarily match demand peaks. Today's power infrastructure involves unpredictability in both supply and demand that is extremely difficult to manage. The choice comes down to two options: over-generate so as to not undersupply, or find ways to better match up supply and demand.