On NPR’s Morning Edition program today, Jeff Brady interviewed hedge fund veteran Eric Janszen. For about the past year, Janszen has been telling anone who will listen that renewable energy is the next great investment bubble, following in the tradition of the real estate and dot-com bubbles. Then Brady talked to Boone Pickens, who explained, in effect, that renewable investments are tied to the price of energy in general. The unstated implication: y ou’d have to believe that energy is a [...]

Last summer, Michael Totten wrote a couple of columns in SOLAR TODAY about Google’s sustainable energy projects. A flurry of letters (July/August 08) followed, proposing ways in which Google’s software products — in particular, Google Earth — might be adapted to solar energy planning.

We’ve seen a number of these mash-ups recently. The slickest and most appealing was put together by CH2MHill Enterprise Spatial Solutions for the City of Berkeley, and linked through the Community [...]

Pres. Barack Obama, in a speech today to the National Academy of Sciences, committed the United States to spend at least 3% of GDP on research and development, including a major commitment to energy projects.

The initiative includes doubling the budgets for the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, among other agencies, plus about $400 million to launch ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy.

A major administratio [...]

Non-fossil liquid fuels got a boost yesterday when the California Air Resources Board called for a 10% cut in the carbon emissions of motor fuels by 2020.

On the face of it, the rule is good news for the ethanol and biodiesel industries. To limit land-conversion and food-competition problems, CARB favors low-carbon fuels with high energy content per acre. The board has published complex rules that are seen to promote sugar cane over corn ethanol, for instance. In response to protests fr [...]

Obama on energy: “The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy. America can be that nation.”

Fight shapes up over climate-and-energy bills

Mojave CSP plants would use too much water: Park Service officer

Colorado enacts state financing plan to support distributed renewal installs

California launches $176 million investment program in renewable fuels

Ontario a [...]

It’s Earth Day. Companies and agencies large and small use the occasion to announce green initiatives. Some of these are trivial greenwash, but some mark real progress in mainstreaming renewable energy. Here are a few of today’s winners:

Bright Automotive, an Indiana start-up with backing from the Rocky Mountain Institute, Alcoa, Google, Johnson Controls and the Turner Foundation, announced its Idea PHEV delivery van, meant to dramatically reduce the fuel use of large delivery fleets. [...]

Nevada is shaping up to be a test case for the success of solar power.

The good news, reported on Friday, is that the state’s electric utilities met their 9% RPS requirement in 2008. A number of questions remain going forward, all centered on the issue of how they’ll meet their 12% requirement this year and 15% by 2015.

The utility companies want to continue building central power plants, based on concentrating solar and geothermal stations, photovoltaic arrays and wind farms. [...]

Two stories came through this week that made me blink:

Pacific Gas & Electric signed a preliminary agreement to buy power generated in space,  and the Vatican announced plans to build a 100 MW solar power plant — the largest in Europe — and export electricity to Italy.

In the March issue of SOLAR TODAY I wrote a skeptical piece about the chances anyone will ever launch a satellite that can beam utility-scale power to Earth (see page 18).

But I’m glad the Pope has fait [...]

Following on to Monday’s story about the rising fortunes of thin-film PV relative to silicon, today’s Wall Street Journal reports that FirstSolar will sell 48 MW of PV modules to Sempra Generation, of San Diego, for installation at a solar farm in southern Nevada. Sempra doesn’t have a customer for the power yet, but the company is confident it will sell to one of the many utility companies scrambling to meet an RPS goal.

Sempra already has 10 MW of FirstSolar panels at the site, [...]

Schuco Designs a Cooler Module

Schuco has redesigned its photovoltaic modules to help them stay cool. As they heat up in the sun, today’s silicon PV cells lose about one half percent of their power for every degree Celsius. Schuco engineers used the Flomerics FloVENT computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to model energy absorption and reflection, and to simulate heat flow out to the aluminum frame and surrounding air. By optimizing heat flow, Schuco gets a cooler, more powerf [...]