Renewable Energy News

Has a Carbondale, CO, company found the 'holy grail' of community renewable energy projects? In this podcast with with Paul Spencer, President and founder of the Clean Energy Collective (CEC) in Carbondale, CO, we explored how CEC is pioneering the process of delivering clean power-generation through medium-scale (mostly solar) facilities that are

After raising £130 million (€151 million) in an IPO, the UK’s first solar fund with institutional backing has begun trading on the London Stock Exchange.

No one can really debate that the California Solar Initiative, a 3,000-MW solar program started in 2007, has been very successful. In fact, the utility customer portion of the program targeted 1,940 megawatts of solar by 2017 and we’re on track to cross that milestone later in 2013 or early 2014. This is really impressive and good news for Californians.

From stadiums in Brazil to a bank headquarters in Britain, architects led by Norman Foster are integrating solar cells into the skin of buildings, helping the market for the technology triple within two years.

U.S. private-equity firm Kawa Capital Management Inc. agreed to take over Conergy AG, once Germany’s biggest solar company, two weeks after the Hamburg- based company filed for bankruptcy.

The Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) is planning another round of solar energy support with its Clean Solar Initiative-II (CSI-II) program, building off lessons learned from the first such program. The CSI-II seeks to bring on another 100-MW of solar energy generated on Long Island, with a couple of unique criteria. LIPA expects to begin accepting applications for CSI-II from the end of September through the end of January.

“We have to try to balance the interest of the military with those of developers, investors, and lenders,” said Scott Provinse, Director of Government Programs at SunEdison, speaking at the ACORE (American Council on Renewable Energy) U.S. Military and Renewable Energy Industry Forum in Washington, D.C. on July 18th.

  If you don’t know about Solar Battle of the Bands, then you probably haven’t been to Intersolar North America in the last three years. Sponsored by multiple solar companies (see below), Solar Battle of the Bands is the new annual “must-attend” event where the solar industry comes together in one room and celebrates music and solar. “Battle” is re

Did you just buy a sustainable mutual fund? No. The answer is no because human economies are still so far from real sustainability that even a highly idealized portfolio of our most sustainable enterprises necessarily still falls short. Ultimately, the best any portfolio can do is mirror the reality of the world, and today, still, even the best representatives of sustainability can be found wanting compared to what will be required if we would like to keep society thriving indefinitely. At best, whatever fund you just bought can only be described as, to a greater or lesser degree, more sustainable than its non-green counterparts.

India has tremendous energy needs and an increasing difficulty in meeting those needs through traditional means of power generation. On July 30th and 31st, 2012 the world's largest blackout, The Great Indian Outage, stretching from New Delhi to Kolkata occurred. This blackout, due to failure of the northern power grid, caused nearly 700 million people — twice the population of the United States — to be without electricity.

Georgia’s minister of energy and natural resources, Kakha Kaladze, has announced that work has begun on the nation’s first wind energy project, planned as a 20-MW pilot installation.

First Wind Energy, through subsidiary Blue Sky West, is proposing what would be the biggest wind farm in New England: 62 turbines with up to 186 MW capacity, spanning several towns in two counties in a stretch of Central Maine.

It was billed as the mother of all electrical reforms. The one that would finally do away with Spain’s pernicious ‘tariff deficit’. But what emerged was yet another savage cut to the country’s crippled energy industry — and one that will not even cure its underlying malaise.  For those unfamiliar with the matter, the tariff deficit is the mismatch

In a vote of 43-21, with one MEP abstaining, Europe’s Parliamentary Environment Committee (ENVI) has voted to cap the amount of biofuel derived from food crops, or “conventional” biofuels, at 5.5 percent of its renewable transport fuel target.

Paramount Equity’s subsidiary Paramount Solar has partnered with U.S. Bank to create a new fund to support solar leases with Clean Power Finance. The new fund, the Paramount Energy Fund, will allow homeowners to finance solar projects through Paramount Solar. Paramount Solar in turn will use Clean Power Finance’s CPF Market, its software, underwrit

Finland is, above all, a land of abundant, and growing, forests. "We produce 100 cubic meters of wood per year, while 50 cubic meters per year is harvested. We have more forest than we can use," said Jukka Leskelä, director of power generation for trade body Energiateollisuus, or Finnish Energy Industries. So it's no surprise that, given an almost complete lack of indigenous fossil fuel resources, high per-capita energy consumption, and a long-running forest management program already in place, Finland is investing in biomass and biofuels in a big way as it looks to define its future energy mix.

The never-ending push to improve the fundamentals of wind turbines, which have become many times stronger and more efficient through the years, continues.

What is happening to the solar PV industry? At a time when solar PV should be helping us win the war against rising emissions, and creating jobs, the industry is being hurt by a trade war between the U.S. and China and, perhaps, between China and the EU.

Two new reports on rural electrification applications for pico and hybrid PV systems have been published by the Photovoltaic Power System Programme from the International Energy Agency (IEA PVPS).

On the shoulders of previous generations, women have made remarkable strides in gender equality, but we all know the fight is far from over. Around the country, gender politics are coming to head.  In state and Federal legislatures and in the U.S. military establishment, women are on the front lines battling for basic and fundamental human rights,