Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Officially launched in January after years of development, a new CLEAN (feed-in tariff) program from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (the city’s municipal electric utility) promises 100 MW of new local renewable energy by 2016. In absolute...
Solar cells are unusual in that they were cost-competitive from the get-go. From the Apollo space program to highway signs to lighting for buoys, solar could replace highly expensive power from batteries or other sources and eliminate the need for the...
A friend at Fresh Energy generously called me the “architect” of Minnesota’s new solar energy standard (signed last week), and although that may be a bit generous, I’d like to provide a detailed description of the nation’s newest solar energy standard....
The process started in 2003 when Boulder resumed studying the option to create a municipal utility. With a climate-action plan already in place, and a local carbon tax already financing conservation and clean energy, the once nascent issue became a serious...
A conference committee is resolving differences between House and (much weaker) Senate versions of a solar energy standard in Minnesota today. Here's eight graphic reasons why the state should go for solar as aggressively as it can. This post originally...
Last week, a solar energy standard moved one step closer to passage in the Minnesota state legislature, with an innovative new approach to financing solar power. It’s a powerful first step for what would be one of the more robust policies to support...
Iowa ranks third in installed wind power capacity in the U.S., it's 5,500 megawatts behind only Texas and California (and much higher per capita). But like many windy places, the turbines sprouting from the Iowa prairie are often owned by multinational...
Earth Day highlights the need for a sustainable energy future, and experience suggests that there are only three meaningful choices for communities trying to increase local control of a greener energy future. But the three policies – deregulation (“customer...
Just north of Delavan, Wisconsin, is Dan Osborne’s nursery farm. Where there was once a bean field now sit 80 solar panels on 100 tracking towers, generating renewable power for over 125 homes. It’s a small, but successful community-owned energy harvest....
Hawai’an solar advocates are celebrating after the island state’s largest utility, Hawai’ian Electric (HECO) filed a plan with the public utility commission to take a “proactive approach” to adding more distributed solar to their grid system. Utilities...
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