Renewables

Over the past week, several states took action on the Clean Power Plan as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) urged governors to “wait and see” on the carbon rule, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) chief defended the rule. McConnell Urges Governors to Halt Compliance Work. In a March 21 letter to the National […]

Whether utilities, technology providers, or independent third-party upstarts are best suited to create a reliable recipe for microgrid development remains an open question.

Although new microgrid configurations, technologies, and business models are still evolving in the U.S., some lessons have been learned in the past few years. Aside from the fact that financing nontraditional/non-campus microgrids is hard, if there’s one overarching lesson, it’s that a microgrid designed to provide only one benefit or rely on only one generation source is unlikely to succeed.

On March 13, three of Germany’s 16 states held regional elections that were largely seen as a referendum on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s increasingly controversial refugee policies as well as the waning importance of energy and climate policies. Perhaps the biggest challenger and winner in this election was the far right, those against both the Energiewende […]

The Oregon Senate passed a bill on March 2 that will require electric companies in the state to eliminate coal-fired resources from their electrical supplies by January 1, 2030. The bill—which passed in the senate by a 17–12 vote—had already been passed by the Oregon House of Representatives (38–20). It now heads to Gov. Kate […]

Utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) generation has exploded over the past few years. From nearly nothing in the late 2000s, the U.S. now has more than 10 GW of utility-scale solar PV in operation according to the Energy Information Administration. That figure should continue to grow strongly because of the recent extension of the investment tax […]

Legal battles to stall the 11-GW Belo Monte hydroelectric dam—being built on the Xingu River in Amazon forest for one of the world’s largest power plants—are raging on in Brazil (Figure 1). In January

Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition) was adopted as policy beginning in September 2010, some six months before the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, and full legislative support was

Utility holding company Xcel Energy, headquartered in Minneapolis and with large electric and gas operations in eight states in the upper Midwest, the Rocky Mountain West, and Texas, has ambitions to be the

New reports released this week see big growth in renewables from the recently extended federal tax credits, but big uncertainty due to the possible end of the Clean Power Plan (CPP). New York-based consulting firm Rhodium Group says investment plans in the power sector will be radically different if the Clean Power Plan doesn’t happen. […]