As I posted a few years ago, so many of the best opportunities for cleantech to have immediate benefit can be found in China. Every day, evidence accumulates supporting this thesis. Of course, this winter’s air pollution crises in Beijing and other cities made global news. More gruesome was last week’s discovery of nearly 7,000 [...]
Earlier this month, I turned 50 years old. Such milestones are natural occasions for reflection. Beyond recalling many of the phases and individual episodes of my life, my reflection included a consideration of how the world had changed in the 50 years in which I had lived. And, naturally, given my profession, I pondered what it would have [...]
I’ve been working with new energy inventions and their creators for almost 15 years now. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard a new technology described as “the Holy Grail”: solving all of the world’s problems forever. Well, here’s the newest one using the Holy Grail cliche: a supposedly carbon-neutral method of using microbes [...]
It’s Presidential Election year. Ergo, time to discuss our 40 year whacked out excuse for an energy policy. Royally botched up by every President since, umm? Objectives: Make US energy supply cheap for the US consumer and industry, fast growing and profitable for the American energy sector, clean, widely available and reliable, and secure, diversified, [...]
For several years, the U.S. military has been one of the most active proponents and early-adopters of renewable energy and alternative fuels, with their Operational Energy Strategy. Why? Several reasons: 1. Fuel delivered to the remote front-lines such as in Afghanistan for use in power generation and transportation has an “all-in” cost of $400/gallon. Any energy source [...]
Our Cleantech Linkedin Group, over 20,000 members strong, has had a seven month running discussion started by Robert Drummond entitled “Renewable Energy that will Really work”, asking for readers views on what’s practical in renewable energy. Kind of crowd sourcing opinion and facts on the subject of renewable energy. Robert’s discussion reached a staggering 1,500 comments this [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi Something grand is emerging on the vast dusty plains of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. Tres Amigas is an ambitious scheme to interconnect the three primary power grids in the U.S. — the Western grid known as WECC, the Eastern grid known as the Eastern Interconnection, and the Texas grid known [...]
by David Anthony It’s true. Cleantech investment hasn’t worked out exactly how people dreamt it would back in the overly-optimistic days of the last decade. One of the main obstacles deterring venture capital investors from the sector is the frequently lengthy time lag between investment and commercialization. More importantly, the number of successful cleantech exits [...]
This week I’m going to break one of my self-imposed ‘blog’ rules and dip into last week’s news. My reasoning will become clear. On Thursday I attended Envirolink North West’s Developing New Technologies for off Shore Wind event at the Met in Leeds. Apart from gaining a new respect for gearboxes (not to mention the [...]
Classic definitions of cleantech, and the industries under its umbrella, have gotten long in the tooth. The sector has changed, and taxonomies haven’t kept up. Why is a clean technology taxonomy important? As a list of nested categories, it shows where a clean technology “fits”. It helps vendors understand their competitive sets. It defines and [...]
by Jigar Shah, Founder SunEdison and CEO of the Carbon War Room As wind come out at a robust 9.9GW in 2009, Solar at maybe 600MW, etc, it looks like the zero-emissions folks will again install a majority of incremental MWs. The balance is mostly natural gas a little bit of Coal. Getting this number [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi It’s been about a year since T. Boone Pickens announced that his investment firm BP Capital Management (note that BP stands for “Boone Pickens”, and thus the company bears no relation to the oil behemoth BP) planned to invest about $6 billion to install the world’s largest windfarm of nominally 4,000 [...]
In his speech in Constitution Hall this week, former Vice President and renewable energy investor Al Gore extolled a stretch goal challenging America to achieve 100% renewable power within 10 years. The quote: “Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi Last week, the International Energy Agency released a study entitled Energy Technology Perspectives 2008, in which the agency estimated the shifts in the world’s energy system required to reduce CO2 emissions substantially. In their so-called “BLUE” scenario (I haven’t figured out what “BLUE” refers to), a 50% CO2 reduction from 2005 [...]
Cleantech Blog had a conversation last year with Stuart Hemphill, now the newly appointed Vice President for Renewables and Alternative Energy at Southern California Edison, a subsidiary of Edison International (NYSE:EIX), one of the largest purchasers of renewable power in the US. We caught up with him again today in a lively discussion around his [...]
I have long had a respect for GE (NYSE:GE), and how it runs its business. In cleantech, I am very, very jealous. They have made themselves into the company to beat. Whether by plan, luck, or simply applying sound business discipline, GE has made itself into a top 3 global cleantech player no matter happens. [...]
by Frank Ling Sulfur Batteries The EPA has banned sulfur in gasoline but not in batteries. Sulfur, in the form of a sodium salt, has been used as large-scale storage systems. Pioneered in Japan, these batteries are gaining acceptance in the US as a reliable form of energy storage. Due to the intermittent nature of [...]
by Frank Ling My Sustainability is Greener Than Your Sustainability In his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie says that people are motivated by a sense of importance. For many people that means gaining status. Now that green is entering the mainstream, it is also a status symbol among a growing [...]
by Heather Rae (8/1/07) The Natural Resource Council of Maine (NRCM) sponsored a tour of the Mars Hill wind farm this past Saturday. I went along to represent Maine Interfaith Power & Light (MeIPL) and to talk about Wind Watts, the renewable energy certificates (RECs) generated by the 28 turbine, 42MW project. MeIPL is the [...]
The cleantech sector received a huge boost this week from the news that Portugal’s EDP anounced the acquisition of Texas based Horizon Wind for a price of over $2 Bil. EDP operates globally in Spain, Portugal and Brazil. One of the intriguing aspects of this deal is the history. Horizon Wind was formerly Zilkha Renewable [...]
