Natural gas is still king when it comes to new, large scale utility scale power plants in the US — at least, for the next couple of years. However, there are some indications that wind and solar power are cutting into that turf. When you throw smaller utility scale power plants and distributed energy generation into the mix, the picture looks even better for renewables.

At the beginning of the Obama Administration, natural gas was widely touted as a cleaner “bridge” fuel that could accelerate the retirement of highly polluting coal power plants.

The retirement part certainly has happened, but not necessarily the cleaner part.

Researchers are beginning to take a closer look at the estimates of methane escaping from wellheads, pipelines and storage facilities.

Meanwhile, concern over the local impacts of natural gas fracking (short for hydrofracturing, a formerly “unconventional” method of oil and gas recovery) has already prompted several states to ban the practice outright.

Even Pennsylvania, which has been a fracking hotspot, has recently moved to tighten up its regulations.

In addition, the disposal of vast quantities of wastewater from fracking and conventional oil and […]

No Comments

Credit: Ford Motor Co.

Here’s an interesting development reported over at Cleantechnica last week: Apparently the European Union has just approved regulations demanding that all new and renovated homes come with an installed electric vehicle charger by 2019.

This could be a pretty big deal in terms of mass adoption of electric vehicles. One of the most interesting things I have found since I started driving a Nissan Leaf is how few people know how they operate, where to charge them, or even that they are a viable transportation option these days.

By installing EV chargers in homes during construction or renovation, this will not just make the installation process cheaper and more efficient—it will place a prominent advert for the viability of EVs in homes of people who had never considered them before. And the more people start using these chargers, the more their neighbors and friends will see the considerable advantages of electrified vehicles.

That said, I have some reservations too. As Lloyd has reported on the impending carmageddon, electric cars […]

No Comments

workers installing a wind turbine

As large corporations increasingly demand 100 percent renewable energy, many utilities are left in a bind: Add to their already excess capacity, or they can risk losing new customers to lower-priced third-party agreements.

“We have to figure out how to thread the needle with utilities,” said Letha Tawney who, as the director for utility innovation at the World Resources Institute, spends many of her waking and working hours trying to guide utilities into a new energy paradigm.

Many large power consumers have clearly demonstrated that, with or without their local utilities, they are moving towards a renewable future. That message was reiterated recently in Nevada when MGM Resorts International and Wynn Resorts paid a hefty upfront fee to Nevada Power to stop purchasing power from the utility and start buying it from other sources.

As of September, 62 of the country’s largest corporations had indicated their energy priorities by endorsing the Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers Principles. Other large institutions such as universities and military bases are moving in that direction as well.

Adam […]

No Comments

Credit: Tesla

Economists and reporters have been saying that electric cars could actually kill the oil industry for a little while now, but it hasn’t made a lot of real-world impact so far. But now Fitch, an enormously influential financial ratings agency, is issuing dire warnings over electric cars.

It actually seems impossible at this point to overstate just how screwed the oil industry as we know it appears to be by electric vehicles. “Resoundingly negative,” “serious threat,” and “investor death spiral” were all actual terms used by Fitch Ratings in a report detailing the future of oil in a world of electricity, the Financial Times says:

“An acceleration of the electrification of transport infrastructure would be resoundingly negative for the oil sector’s credit profile,” says the Fitch report.

“In an extreme scenario where electric cars gained a 50 per cent market share over 10 years about a quarter of European gasoline demand could disappear.”

The “death spiral” scenario entails a situation in which nervous investors start selling all of their […]

No Comments

Credit: Shutterstock

For millions of people across the world, access to clean water so they can drink, cook and wash, is a daily struggle. In many rural, impoverished communities, fetching water is an arduous task that falls upon women and children.

In Africa and Asia, women and children must walk 3.7 miles on average to get their water. Collectively, women spend over 200 million hours every day just collecting water. That’s more than just a major inconvenience, it’s an incredible amount of lost economic potential.

This time-consuming, physically exhausting endeavor prevents women from working at jobs and keeps children away from school, impacts that continue a cycle of poverty and socioeconomic exclusion. For the women and children who live in one small village in Kenya, their walk to water is more than five miles. And the water they gather isn’t even clean; it comes from a dirty river containing harmful bacteria.

These villagers are not alone. Around 783 million people—11 percent of the world’s population—don’t have access to clean water, which can […]

No Comments