Wind

Colorado’s legislature approved one of the toughest renewable energy standards in the country on Monday.

Once the governor signs that legislation, utilities will be required to get 30 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020. That follows an agreement Gov. Bill Ritter signed last week with Colorado’s largest utility, Xcel, and a coalition of energy companies and lawmakers to reduce pollution and shift several coal-fired power plants to natural gas by 2017.

The state’s clear move toward renewable energy — and away from coal — stands in stark contrast to some of its neighbors in the West, where the best and some of the worst of clean energy policies are on display.

A report to be released in the first half of this year finds that Australia can use solar and wind power to produce 100 percent of its electricity in 10 years using technologies that are available now.

The study is being compiled by the Victoria–based advocacy group Beyond Zero Emissions and is based on the research of engineers and scientists.

"We have concluded that there are no technological impediments to transforming Australia’s stationary energy sector to zero emissions over the next 10 years," said Matthew Wright, executive director of Beyond Zero Emissions.

Read More

Bookmark/Search this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• Stacy Feldman's blog
• 14 comments

A new report claims the world can scale up eight clean technologies so massively and rapidly they could meet 60 percent of new energy demand and abate more CO2 than is necessary for climate stabilization in just 10 years.

Naturally, this scale-up won't come cheap. The report estimates that annual private investment worldwide would need to triple between now and 2020 to reach $500 billion to $800 billion per year:

At this scale, clean energy investments would be in line with fossil-fuel investments.

This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Current global investment plans for maintaining and expanding energy infrastructure are on the order of $13 trillion over the next 10 years. The United States alone has a planned investment of close to $1 trillion.

Shift a sizable chuck of that money into ready cleantech solutions, the authors argue, and the results would be world changing: climate mitigation, energy security and 5 million new jobs planetwide.

By the middle of next year, the nine campuses that make up the nation's largest community college system plan to be completely energy self-sufficient.

It's a huge step, and it will begin saving money immediately.

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) started down this path in 2001, the year voters approved the first part of $5.7 billion in bond funding to renovate the campuses.

The LACCD Board of Trustees was thinking about much-needed modernization work and its first new construction in 35 years, but it was also thinking ahead. It passed a sustainable building policy mandating that all new buildings that use 50% or more of bond funding be LEED certified. The board had previously developed a renewable energy plan that aimed for a minimum 10% renewable energy standard.

At the time, the trustees were afraid that anything beyond that would be too costly, says Larry Eisenberg, executive director of Facilities, Planning and Development for the LACCD.

The system's chancellor and the implementation team saw greater potential, though.

They looked at the campuses' energy costs – around $9 million a year, growing to $10 million by 2010 – and realized that ramping up renewable power would be a money-saving move. The chancellor at the time, Darroch “Rocky” Young, adopted the 100% renewable energy goal as a budgetary measure.

“What began as an environmental policy turned into a budget initiative,” Eisenberg says, “and that’s where it’s been ever since.”

Read More

Bookmark/Search this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• Leslie Berliant's blog
• 2 comments

As the renewable energy sector scrambles to sort out its share of the economic stimulus package, many voices within the wind and solar sector are pointing out a problem: The booming industry faces a startling lack of skilled professionals.

The stimulus bill's injection of about $50 billion for clean energy projects is certain to create tens of thousands of green jobs. But much of the clean energy field is still new and developing, and poor federal funding in education has left many colleges without the resources to develop innovative technical curricula. Only a handful of specialized programs currently exist on college campuses in fewer than two dozen states.

The question college administrators and industry officials are asking now is: Who will train the next generation for the new green economy?

Wind power's tiny footprints don't stop at carbon emissions. A new analysis of the impacts of various energy sources on human health and the environment finds that wind also has the smallest imprint on another, rarely considered but important aspect: land.

Wind power's ecological footprint is so small — a million times smaller than ethanol's — that if all the cars driven in the United States were battery-electric, they could be fueled by wind turbines whose total land footprint, not counting spacing in between, takes up less than 1.2 square miles, Stanford University environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson found.

To fuel the same number of battery-electric vehicles with cellulose ethanol would require an amount of land equivalent to eight Californias – literally a million times more land and equivalent to the amount of land harvested in the U.S. in 2003.

"The current federal investment and production tax credits are set to
expire at the end of 2008. If they are not extended soon, the
development and financing of most solar and wind projects in the U.S.
will grind to a halt about halfway through next year." That warning in a BusinessWeek viewpoint is a wake-up call to Congress to get moving on an important fix, one of many that can start making a difference in solving climate right away.