This country’s 130 million homes together generate more than 20% of the nation’s carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions. This is one of the most significant contributing sources in the country to global warming. Existing techniques and technologies in energy efficiency retrofitting can reduce home energy use by up to 40 percent per home on average which would also lower our national greenhouse gas emissions by 160 million metric tons annually by the year 2020. In addition doing so would reduce home energy bills by $21 billion a year and over time these savings would more than pay for the high up-front costs for energy efficiency retrofitting.
Greenopia has released an environmental sustainability rating that ranks the nation’s 100 largest universities according to a comprehensive set of criteria that includes: green building design, waste program, food selection, campus vehicle fleet, water conservation measures, climate performance, renewable energy usage, and the overall environmental transparency of the school. The top rated ranking of four out of four was achieved by the University of Washington located in Seattle, Washington and by the University of California at Santa Barbara.
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced in Washington that the Department of Energy (DOE) will provide up to $750 million in new funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to help accelerate the development of renewable energy generation projects. This funding will be targeted to cover the cost of loan guarantees for renewable energy projects and could support as much as $4 to 8 billion in lending to eligible projects, and the Department will invite private sector participation to accelerate the financing of these renewable energy projects.
The National Energy Technology Laboratory’s Recovery Act – Local Energy Assurance Planning (LEAP) Initiative is offering grants to city or township governments for programs and initiatives that help them develop energy assurance and resilience plans. The deadline for application is 10/22/09 and awards will be in the range of $60,000 and $300,000.
The Solar Decathlon is a competition in which teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar powered house. The winners of the 2009 competition – the fourth to be held – were announced on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. by U.S. Department of Energy Deputy Secretary Daniel Poneman. The contest is organized by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and supported by event and team sponsors from the private sector.
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced grant awards for up to $24 million, from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to three university-led wind energy research facilities that have been selected to support university research and development programs to improve land-based and offshore wind turbine performance and reliability and to provide career educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in wind energy technologies. The three universities are: Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Maine and University of Minnesota.
Seriously folks you read it right… fracking (an actual technical term for hydraulic fracturing) hot dry rock reservoirs has the potential to open up vast hot dry rock “heat” reservoirs for use as a reliable geothermal energy source. According to a 400 page MIT study The Future of Geothermal Energy sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE) and published in 2007 the economically recoverable potential for “Heat Mining” in the US could grow to a cumulative installed generating capacity of 100GW in less than fifty years.
By some measures 2009 has been the worst year in the young solar PV sectors history. In fact, global revenue for Photovoltaic (PV) panels is expected to drop by nearly 20 percent in 2009, as oversupply causes prices to crash by nearly fifty percent. Many of the weaker firms may not survive this shakeout and right now things do look very gloomy – even though by some other measures 2009 is not as bad as it may seem. For example more newly installed capacity (4.2 GW) is installed this year than any year – ever; however this is of little comfort to the many firms in this sector that are being buried under an avalanche of negative revenue. This article examines the short term outlook for the solar PV sector going forward, basing itself on market data from a recent iSuppli study.
Distributed energy systems can range from the micro sized do it yourself systems being installed on rooftops and on hilltops to small scale systems ranging up to around 20MW (megawatts) of capacity, although it must be understood that this is a pretty fuzzy boundary. The defining characteristic of distributed energy systems is that they generate energy close to the point of use where that energy will be consumed; hence the admittedly fuzzy 20MW upper boundary for their size.
