Posts from ‘May, 2009’

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A growing number of Utah businesses and homeowners are willingly paying more on their power bill to support renewable energy projects.

Giving further push to its bid to emerge as the greenest state, Gujarat Electricity Regulatory Commission (GERC) is now seeking to raise the purchase limit for renewable energy to 8 per cent of the total power consumed by the state in the next one year.

HANOI -(Dow Jones)- Vietnam’s Asian Renewable Energy Co. will invest VND1.82 trillion ($107 million) to build a wind power plant in the country’s southern region, a local government official said Thursday.

May 15 (Bloomberg) — General Electric Co ., Gamesa Corp . Tecnologica SA and other wind-turbine manufacturers say targets set by Congress for renewable power are too low and will reduce such investments in the U.S.

Suntrica is making available two solar gadgets that outdoorsmen may find highly useful.

Sunny Italy is expected to nearly triple photovoltaic capacity thanks to government incentives and see solar energy become competitive in 2010, sector experts said on Wednesday. 

As power plants look to go green, Japan’s solar cell panel developers are expanding their focus from residential applications to deployments on a grander scale, targeting 1-gigawatt-class production within a few years.

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco supervisors Tuesday gave preliminary approval to a contract with a private solar company for an ambitious 5-megawatt solar installation in the city’s Sunset district.

United solar Ovonic says it will shut down production and furlough its Greenville employees for four weeks due to reduced demand for its solar panel products.

More Farms in Europe, North America Using Organic Waste to Generate ‘Free’ Onsite power JENBACH, Austria–23 April 2009– With the international community seeking to expand the development of different types of renewable energy, more farmers in North America and Europe are using GE Energy’s ecomagination-certified Jenbacher engines to generate onsite power from biogas created from [...]

OMAHA, NE–(Marketwire - May 4, 2009) - Green Plains Renewable Energy, Inc. ( NASDAQ : GPRE ) and BioProcessAlgae LLC have executed a grant award agreement with the Iowa Office of Energy Independence for a $2.1 million research and development grant from the Iowa power Fund to build an algae pilot project at Green Plains’ [...]

We continue our energy series, the Switch, with a look at the one renewable source of energy that started booming a decade ago: wind power.

China is aiming at 100 GW wind power capacity by 2020 and expand its renewable energy consumption to 40% of the energy market by 2050. The new goal for wind power capacity is more than three times of the 30 GW target that the government set 18 months ago. According to a forecast by Global [...]

Look out! The Big Bellies are here to eat your trash.The city yesterday unveiled one of the new solar-powered trash compactors that they plan to install throughout Center City in the next several months.

Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of solar power (particularly solar thermal)? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? [...]