Palo Alto, a chartered city located in Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California has put out a Request for Proposal (RFP), seeking proposals to provide electric power generated by renewable resources. The city is seeking contracts for power for terms ranging from five years to 30 years from eligible renewable resources.
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.
Yesterday, Clean Edge, Inc., a clean-tech research and publishing firm, released Clean Tech Job Trends 2009. The report provides an investigation of how clean-tech jobs in the U.S. and globally are changing the face of industry, where the hotbeds of growth exist, and whether current clean-tech salaries are living up to their ‘green-over blue-collar’ promise.
Green Dream Jobs and green workforce development consultant Jim Cassio, recently released data that shows the top green job titles posted by employers and in which cities over the past year – during the recession. Despite the fact that there are scores of studies that show the potential for green jobs going forward, many note the dearth of data on current green jobs in the U.S. economy. Green Dream Jobs has collected concrete historical and current data on the job titles employers are actually looking to fill.
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.
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.
The Guardian and Cleantech Group recently announced the Global Cleantech 100. This is the first ever list of this scale highlighting the most promising private clean technology companies around the world. The Global Cleantech 100 recognizes companies at the forefront of cleantech innovation offering solutions to some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. The final list represents the collective opinion of hundreds of leading experts from cleantech innovation and venture capital companies in EMEA, North America, India and China.
CareerApple, a career resource and coaching organization, is offering a free webinar, titled The CleanTech Series: Renewable Energy 101. The class for people interested in green careers, but have limited understanding about them. The 30 minute seminar is designed to help you learn about the past, present and future implications of renewable energy.
Last week, at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas, Energy Secretary Chu called for a revolution, “a second industrial revolution.” The first industrial revolution came with a “carbon dioxide cost” but “in the next industrial revolution, we must develop technologies that will enable us to get the energy the world needs to grow and prosper but “essentially reducing and eliminating the carbon dioxide,” he said. Chu said the United States has the greatest research and development centers in the world in universities, national labs and the private sector. “Once we get this great invention machine geared and going we’d be invincible. But the only trouble is, let’s get it going.”
