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 !
If you think 2009 was a rotten year for all businesses, read on. To the Global Wind Energy Council 37.5 GW of wind energy capacity was installed in 2009 alone. This represents a 31 percent increase over 2008.
In Europe, capacity grew up by 10 GW and investors pumped 13 billion euros into the industry. Spain is the first with 2.5 GW, then comes Germany with 1.9 GW. The United Kingdom, Italy and France follow with around a gigawatt each.
China doubled its capacity with 12 GW plugged to the grids and the capacity in the United States also grew by ten gigawatts. I find all these figures impressive and look forward to see what will happen in 2010.
I believe fossil fuels will be replaced sooner or later by electricity. This might prove to be a good thing as heat pumps and electric vehicles are two excellent energy efficient solutions.
Thus, electric consumption is rising and is due to keep rising in the next decades. Having low carbon sources to generate electricity is very thus important for a country.
This is the occasion for me to propose you data on the carbon intensity and origin of electricity generation in some affluent countries. Continue »
According to Reuters Spain will add up to 8.8 GW of renewable energies by 2012. As GreenUnivers [Fr] points out this would increase by 37 percent the current renewable electricity capacity in just three years.
This occurs as now wind energy has more installed capacity than nuclear in Spain and even supplied the country more than half of its electricity needs for several hours. (source: The Guardian)
For more on this event, please check out the official press release in Spanish. Some interesting stuff there including a table of the development of renewables.
