Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
After the quite depressing news from the International Energy Agency yesterday, here is something that might cheer you up. If proven true, this could literally change everything. According to Bloomberg :
” Solar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric Co. “
(…) The cost of solar cells has fallen 21 percent so far this year, and the cost of solar power is now about the same as the rate utilities charge for conventional power in California, Italy and Turkey “
During my daily hours of ride in the trains to go and come back from the job I read books but also newspapers. This allowed me to read a great article in the New York Times about an unexpected problem with solar power plants in California.
” Just weeks after regulators approved the last of nine multibillion-dollar solar thermal power plants to be built in the Southern California desert, a storm of lawsuits(…) are clouding the future of the nascent industry.“
You would think that an energy source that is virtually CO2 free would have less problems for its plants to be built. (See also this post on the NYT green blog)
To CleanTechnica, a new film developed by HyperSolar, a Californian company, could halve the costs of solar panels and boost their efficiency by 300 percent. The film would replace the sheet of glass currently used with solar PV panels.
“With HyperSolar as the top layer, manufacturers can use significantly fewer solar cells in the production of solar panels, thereby dramatically reducing the cost per watt of electricity. We believe this is a revolutionary way to make solar panels.”
Here is another technology promised to a bright future if it reaches the markets soon enough. I would personally use it to cut by three the amounts of panels used to bring electricity… What about you ?
Are the United States staying idle in the climate change fight ? At the federal level, it seems to be the case. But at the State level, the situation is different as more and more of them are moving forward.
Indeed, as CleanTechnica notes that ” Massachusetts joins California and New Mexico to cut GHGs 25% below 1990 by 2020. “ I already blogged about the situation in California in the past.
Three States in nearly three months ? Could this mean that the United States as a whole could pledge themselves toward slashing emissions quickly ? I have a dream this afternoon… Continue »
To the Huffington Post : ” California progressives have demonstrated that we have the power to deliver a resounding defeat to the big oil companies, if we fight on our own terms and harness the power of the grassroots.”
” Proposition 23, had it passed, would have effectively repealed the state’s landmark global warming law. California is the world’s 12th largest emitter of greenhouse gases”
” Its global warming law, passed in 2006, mandates the largest legislated reductions in greenhouse gases in the world. “ Continue »
While the US federal government is still haggling about a climate and energy bill, the richest state is willing to have a third of its electricity coming from solar, wind and the likes by the end of the decade.
The local government points to the fact that this will decrease the dependence on foreign fossil fuels, improve air quality and create jobs. This is not what I call a gloomy prospect
I don’t understand why not all US States are following their example. This is the boldest plan in the United States. (Colorado comes second) Continue »
One of the main hindrances of solar energy is that when there is no more sun, there is no more electricity as well. This problem is being solved with the molten salt technology which stores energy for seven hours.
A Californian company is willing to build a 150 Megawatt plant – The Rice Solar Energy Project – using this technology in the Sonoran Desert near Palm Springs. A similar project with 280 MW of capacity could soon be built in Arizona.
Answering the main issue faced by solar, molten salt and similar technologies will play an important role if solar is due to answer a quarter of our global electricity needs.
In these times of heat waves – it was 37°C here in France yesterday – we all know that solar energy can heat places but it seems the sun could also cool them down thanks to air conditioning.
Even if this is not entirely new as I read about such technologies as early as 2005 and as many various technology exists – cf. Wikipedia page – I came across via Digg an interesting article in the L. A. Times.
The tests carried out by Southern California Gas Co could soon slash A/C costs by 60 percent for large premises such as offices, supermarkets or factories.
I never write about renewable energy projects who will bring only a few megawatts to the grids. I prefer to focus on huge plants that will bring at least several hundreds megawatts which are more interesting in a global scope.
This is the case of two projects I heard about this week. One will bring 1.3 GW to California with solar thermal, while the second will bring another GW to London thanks to offshore wind turbines.
As we will see in today’s post, this is very nice but many other projects like these will be needed if we want to stop relying on dirty coal for our electricity. Continue »
I was reading the Arctic Circle, the comics strip (left) provided by the Daily Green, and this reminded me I never wrote about what is referred to as the Pacific Trash Vortex.
Spreading from California to Japan and Hawaii, it is the world’s largest dump and the biggest sign – with the billion tonnes of CO2 – that we have gone way to far in polluting our planet.
But the Pacific is not the only one: all our oceans are polluted by million tons of plastic. I collected for today’s post two articles on that most dreadful fact. Continue »
