Renewable Energy News

The welcome end of 2012 approaches and with it hopefully a slowdown in the steady march of solar failures, depressing financials and mind numbing trade disputes. Thankfully, the long, long, long, oh so long US presidential campaign season is over, though another is just 'round the bend. Hopefully the recession in Europe will be short lived and the U.S. and other countries will not slip into another recession. Among these wishes for 2013, 2012 can be remembered for the starkly different attitudes held by participants along the solar industry value chain.

Whether you welcome it with enthusiasm or pretend it's not happening, the holiday season is upon us. This year, all of us here at RenewableEnergyWorld would like to highlight organizations that uphold the spirit of giving, charity and work for the greater good. Below you will find some of the many organizations with goals to promote and establish renewable energy worldwide.

Pain at the pump. $5 gasoline in California. $8 gasoline in the EU. We hear about it all the time. But in biofuels, the pain comes long before the pump. It arrives with the plant.

Most of Germany’s pro-Energiewende voices think that Germany will far exceed its 2020 target of 35% clean energy. The Heinrich Böll Foundation, a Green think tank, is definitely among them. It argues that Germany could — with the right policies — go 100% renewable by 2050. But for Germany to do it, argues the report "A European Union for Renewable

There's a flurry of news coming from the embattled solar sector, led by a sharp cutback by Suntech (NYSE: STP) at its main US plant that looks suspiciously like it is being ordered by Beijing part of a government rescue plan for the struggling company. Meantime, JA Solar (Nasdaq: JASO) and LDK (NYSE: LDK) are struggling just to stay listed as their

The U.S. geothermal industry's recent innovations contribute to increasing potential for the use of geothermal to power the renewable energy future, but high upfront risks and costs of development are one reason geothermal needs federal funding programs to expand.

Having the stated objective of achieving 25 percent reliance on renewable energy by the year 2025, the Department of Defense is already off and running in pursuit of that goal. Thanks to the combined efforts of SolarCity and Balfour Beatty Communities, plans are currently in motion to install rooftop solar panels on 4,700 military homes at Fort Bliss, Texas and neighboring White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico. The solar equipment that is set to generate up to 13.2 megawatts of capacity when completed will be leased to the Department of Defense by SolarCity, which will perform installation as well as maintenance.

In a welcome departure from recent trends, Taiwan's solar industry saw revenues rise by 7.5% on increased shipments to China, Japan and the U.S. Wafer makers were up 52%, but the much larger cell industry was down 2%, absorbing the overall gains. Green Energy Technology (GET)'s 66% surge in October was credited with most of the gains in both the wafer industry and the overall solar industry. On the cell side. Gintech regained top billing with an 11% rise while Neo Solar Power (NSP) eked out a more modest 2% month-over-month. Motech, Taiwan's erstwhile market leader was down another 22% — its second in a row after mild gains in August.

World Trade Organization judges largely backed complaints by the European Union and Japan against Canada over subsidies the province of Ontario gives to renewable-energy producers that use domestic technology, according to the Sierra Club and Public Citizen.

The climate of uncertainty caused by deadlock in Washington is leading to penny-wise, pound foolish behavior at all levels of government, and Ameresco, Inc. (NYSE:AMRC) felt the pain severely in the third quarter.

It started with off-grid locations, places where electricity was either carried in or generated on-site. Then it beat expensive diesel generators. In 2010, unsubsidized solar electricity could best on-grid retail electricity prices of major utilities in Hawaii. In the next decade, residents in metropolitan areas representing 100 million people will

Chinese wind-turbine makers have broken into the South American market, the world's fastest-growing, by offering government-backed loans at interest rates as much as 50 percent lower than local offerings.

The solar value chain, meaning its ecosystem, begins with raw material suppliers, winds its way through equipment and consumable suppliers, to ingot, wafer, cell technology manufacturers to module assemblers (most cell manufacturers also assemble modules), to demand side participants (system integrators, modules assemblers, installers, distributors, et al), to developers of balance of systems technology (inverters, tracking, etc), to investors, utilities and other end users. Currently the low price of PV modules (technology) has placed the manufacturing side of the solar ecosystem in dire straits and suffering low margins and failure. Virtually no PV technology (referring to cells/modules) manufacturer has remained untouched.

As Sandy ravaged parts of North America three weeks ago, hundreds of power generation assets were threatened. According to SNL Energy, there were 731 operating power plants of 10 MW or larger in the path of the storm. Among these facilities were 20 nuclear plants, 80 coal-fired plants, 237 gas-fired plants and 394 plants of various other fuel types, including hydropower, solar, biomass and wind power plants.

One of the leading concentrating photovoltaic companies in the world, SolFocus, has just announced that it is restructuring the business in hopes of finding a buyer. As part of the restructuring, the company let go 35 people last Friday and "the focus of our effort [now] is really around an acquisition," said Nancy Hartsoch, Senior VP of the company.

I rarely write about Facebook solar marketing because the Facebook interface and its rules and tools for brand sharing and advertising change often. In a month, the information becomes old and needs to be revised. That being said, there are two basic core strategies that won’t be affected by whatever changes Facebook decides to do next week or next

The Green Alpha Advisors' approach to portfolio management utilizes a top-down macroeconomic model reflecting how global economies will evolve to meet demands presented by modern challenges such as resource scarcity, growing populations, land and food management, atmospheric carbon and extreme weather, to name a few.

California's cap and trade system kicked off this week, and the ARB will announce results of the auction on November 19. A November 8 Reuters story, "Auction to kick-start California carbon market," quoted analysts that 2013 permits are expected to sell at between $11 and $12 per unit. Leading up to the sale, there has been much discussion over the likely results.

Federal regulators rejected a request from the governors of eight U.S. states to waive requirements for blending corn-based ethanol into gasoline, a mandate they said was driving up food costs during the worst drought in a half century.

Senator Adam Kline (D-Seattle) could potentially reintroduce a bill in Washington State's upcoming legislative session to modify the state's geothermal laws. Kathleen Callison, Attorney, offered this summary of last year's effort to GEA in February of 2012: