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 !
According to an International Energy Agency official, a third of ALL global energy needs could be answered by solar energies within the next five decades. (photovoltaic, concentrated and thermal)
And this could be a low estimate : as Climate Progress notes : ” Solar is clearly proving itself without a price on carbon. With an effective pricing regime in place, a 30% penetration would almost certainly be low. “
Today, oil is accounting for around a third of the energy we use. I wonder how our world would look if solar became this ubiquitous. I hope I will be able to see this ! ( I would be 77 years old then…)
Cleantechies published last week a tremendous article on solar thermal and why it is “is about to see explosive growth”. I am not entirely surprised of that as I have been a strong advocate of this solution for more than five years.
Presenting the industry, the article goes on and gives no less than seven reasons why solar thermal could soon take off in the USA. Many of these reasons could apply elsewhere as it is more efficient and cheaper than solar PV.
Just as 2011 saw an increase of interest in energy efficiency, I hope 2012 will see an increased interest in solar thermal. Continue »
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)
According to Renewable Energy World, Thailand is on its way to install more than four gigawatts of renewable energy capacity in the very next years thanks to an innovative feed-in tariffs system dedicated to small local projects.
Solar thermal and biomass constitute the majority of projects with 1,400 MW and 2,100 MW respectively. Since the beginning of the project in 2006 850 MW have been installed.
Among the many ideas that could be replicated in other countries is a bonus for offsetting diesel-fired generation. Could it be part of UN’s Clean Development Mechanisms ?
You know if you have been reading this blog for some time now : China is determined to become the leader on cleantech. But it’s not only about making money in tomorrow’s leading industry : it is also about the environment.
Indeed, if China is investing $12 million each hour on cleantech, it is also to clean the air and solve its dependence on dirty fossil fuels that pollutes massively the air of its capital and many other cities.
Today, Cleantechnica published an article reporting that the People’s Republic wants 500 GW of renewable energies by 2020. Continue »
Good news everyone ! (*) You – as well as many and many other people – will now be able to read my humble articles about solar energies on the Solar Feeds News Network.
The world’s largest solar news network, it will enable me to reach over 59,000 Twitter followers and over 1,400 Facebook fans. The amount of subscribers is also much larger than mine.
Many thanks to Scott Weitzman the president and editor of this awesome website for featuring my work. Continue »
Solar photoelectric and concentrating solar thermal are all the rage and little is said about the much simpler solar thermal. However this technology has a huge potential as New York will soon show.
Indeed the US State is willing to add the equivalent of no less than two gigawatts of capacity by 2020. Heating water and buildings with solar on such a scale would enable NY to save up to $175 million per year (around 135 million euros).
The goal is to enable New York to ” become the national leader in the research, development, deployment and manufacture of solar thermal technologies.” Continue »
This year will remain as an important milestone in the history of solar power. Indeed to GreenTech Media : ” In 2010, we will cross the threshold of 10 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar installed globally in a single year.”
This is indeed amazing as in 2000 only 170 megawatts were installed. This is 58 times more, which means a 51 percent increase per annum. If we were to continue this trend we would install 580 GW in the year 2020…
Such a thing is unlikely to occur. Specialists believe however that we could install up to 100 GW of capacity in 2020. This is still a note-worthy figure and a bright prospect. Continue »
It is no news for you if you subscribed to this website : solar thermal alone could provide up to a quarter of global electricity by 2050. The use of molten salt could enable our civilization to store solar electricity for up to seven hours.
Morocco is ideally located to harvest all this energy as the average sunshine there is over 3,000 hours per year ( over 8 hours a day ). The Kingdom will build for $9 billion (6.6 billion euros) up to 2 GW of capacity.
This will be brought by five different plants of both solar photovoltaic and thermal and will answer up to 42 percent of the national need by 2020. Continue »
France is promoting via aggressive feed-in tariffs the expansion of solar photovoltaic. I believe this is quite a good thing even if our electricity is 90 percent low carbon. (80 percent nuclear and ten percent hydro)
Indeed, we will soon need additional capacity for both heat pumps and electric vehicles. However I believe the French (and other) government(s) should promote more aggressively solar water heaters.
Electricity is often generated by heating water. So using electricity to heat water is a very inefficient process. Using solar water heaters would enable us to change that. Continue »
