The success of the cleantech industry will ultimately be measured by two yardsticks. One, of course, is its ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deliver environmentally friendly and sustainable forms of energy. The other is its economic impact and its ability to generate new businesses and new jobs.
Tag:
Renewables
The story of American energy used to be that we consumed and imported too much, that fossil fuel reserves were finite, and that a technical breakthrough in clean alternatives would save us.
How 20th century. The new narrative of American energy is this: We’ve been using less. A national
One reader recently commented:
Judging the risks (associated with a certain energy technology) is hard because it’s about making guesses about the unknown. … In a way it’s easier to predict that the sun will continue to shine than to
There are at least two kinds of “EV deniers” (as I call them), i.e., people who doubt that electric vehicles represent an improvement for the environment over gasoline. The first concept is that for the foreseeable future, an increase in the electric load means burning more coal. I.e., coal plants that would otherwise have been tamped down during off peak
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy just released its annual guide to the greenest vehicles. For the first time, an electric vehicle (the Mitsubishi i-MiEV) ranked highest. This factoid stirred up for me an issue that is not discussed often enough, and is understood even less. When driving an EV, where you charge the batteries will determine
In my quest to understand investors’ reluctance to assert themselves in the renewable energy space, a common theme continues to emerge: uncertainty. Where no one doubts that demand for oil and coal will continue for some time, and that the government subsidies that support them will remain a part of U.S. law, no similar confidence exists that the world will put
As the founder of the Bay Area networking group, Women In Cleantech & Sustainability, I am keenly interested in learning about who the media thinks as being the most influential women in the field. However, it feels like every top ten list for women in Cleantech always lists the same lovely ladies. This is not to say that the women are not contributing
One of my very first posts in 2010 was about what I called the triple crisis. As I noted back then “our economies are crumbling, our climate is warming and our energy supplies are getting scarcer.”
You would think that after two years, we would have started to do something about them. Well,
Renewable sources of energy provided a greater share of U.S. domestic energy production than nuclear during the first nine months of 2011, according to a new report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
In its latest monthly energy review, the EIA reports
Vote Solar staff attended meetings last week with staff of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the nation’s largest publicly-owned utility, serving about 10% of California’s electrical load. California law now requires munis like LADWP to get 33% of their power mix from renewables by 2020,
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s clarity of viewpoint, not to mention writing style, is quite impressive. In this short masterpiece, Big Carbon’s Sock Puppets Declare War on America and the Planet, he correctly identifies the issues that lie at the core of America’s pitiful abdication of world financial leadership.
Google Inc. says it is abandoning its ambitious program to drive down the cost of renewable energy, one of seven major initiatives canceled by the Internet giant this week as it looks to focus on its core projects.
Launched four years ago through Google.org, the
The more I delve into energy and climate issues, the more this seems completely evident: we should prefer energy efficiency and sobriety over renewables.
Making efficiency a priority – whereas renewables are the priority nowadays – will without a doubt benefit the consumer, the society as a whole and our
The good news is that on 8 November the International Energy Agency released its 2011 “World Energy Outlook.”
While it will cheer nuclear advocates, overall the report makes for grim reading.
Pulling no punches, the report states at the outset,