In view of the stalemate on climate legislation in the Senate President Obama has  instructed the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) to prepare executive regulations for capping green house gas emissions from automobiles, trucks, refineries, power plants and major industrial emitters. These measures are designed to enter into force in early 2011 if no legislation has [...]

The decision by Areva, the French engineering company with a turn-over of some € 12 billion and employing 75 000 people around the world, to buy Ausra, a tiny US start-up company with less than 100 employees, is likely to give a further boost solar thermal power generation, after the launch of DESERTEC by a [...]

In December 2008 the EU has decided onto providing at least 20 percent of its energy needs - the equivalent of 30 percent of its electricity consumption - supply from renewable sources by 2020 latest. To that end, it will need to generate about one third of its electricity from renewables.
This is anything but easy! [...]

As of January 1st, the new Brazilian climate legislation (“National Policy on Climate Change Act”) has entered into force. It fixes ambitious targets. By 2020 green house gas emissions should be 39 percent lower than “business as usual”, which should bring back Brazil‘s emissions back to 1994 levels.
To reach this objective, Brazil must first and [...]

“Political pressure on governments and utilities to refrain from building new coal-fired power plants is rising across Europe. Citizens no longer want to have them in their neighbourhood. As a result as many as seven projects have been abandoned in Germany only in the course of 2009, the last most recentlymost recently in Lubmin in [...]

The international discussion on climate change policy has unduly focused on alternatives to fossil energies. As wind, solar, biomass, heat pumps geothermal etc continue to be substantially more expensive than oil or coal, politicians have been made to believe that fighting climate change is an expensive undertaking.
Whatever the outcome from Copenhagen the priority for the [...]

At their last preparatory meeting for the Copenhagen Climate Conference the EU environment ministers, October 20-21, have agreed to offer a 95 percent reduction of their green house gas emissions until 2050. This is praiseworthy; but it remains void of meaning unless the EU comes up with answers on three critical questions:
What concrete steps ought [...]

The European Commission has given green light to making available € 1 billion for funding six “clean” power stations trying different technologies for capturing and underground storing of C02 emissions (CCS) across Europe.
It is to be hoped that the European Parliament will rapidly approve the funding proposal despite objections from green NG0s.
In order be able [...]

The answer is: yes, though wind power is still far ahead. It  will therefore take 20 years or more before the globally installed solar capacity will exceed that of wind power.
At the end of 2008, the global capacity of wind energy exceeded 100 GW, about half of which installed in Western and Northern Europe, the [...]

The generation of electricity has traditionally been in the hands of municipalities, in Europe, or small private companies, in the USA.
This business model belongs to the past. In the future power generation – and separately transmission – will be concentrated in the hands of big transnational companies operating globally.
European companies have been the front-runners. As [...]