Americas > Renewable energy

Renewable energy in Americas

  • Clean energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can do that

    WORLD, 2016/07/16 Before this year media outlets around the world announced that February had broken world temperature records by a shocking all. March broke all the records, too. In June our screens were covered with surreal images of Paris flooding, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the streets. In London, the floods sent water pouring into the tube system right in the heart of Covent Garden. Roads in south-east London became rivers two metres deep. With such extreme events becoming additional commonplace, few deny climate change any longer. Finally, a consensus is crystallising around one all-significant fact: fossil fuels are killing us. We need to switch to clean energy, and fast. But while this growing awareness about the dangers of fossil fuels represents a crucial shift in our consciousness, I can’t help but fear we’ve missed the point. As significant as clean energy may be, the science is clear: it won’t save us from climate change.
  • The high cost of electricity in the Caribbean is pushing many to install alternative energy sources

    FRANCE, 2015/11/27 Negotiators from the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are intent on striking a transaction to keep the world temperature rise at 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels, but a lot of fear that a 10-year-old agreement to buy cheap petroleum from Venezuela puts their discussions in jeopardy. Across the region, nations are rolling out their “1.5 to Remain Alive” Campaign to raise awareness about the effects of climate change, while building momentum for the region’s negotiating position ahead of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (UNCCC) in France in December. Some say the petroleum agreement could cause friction between member nations because of new incentives inclunding assistance with healthcare and agriculture through a Caribbean Economic Development Zone. President of the Venezuelan Republic Nicolas Maduro pledged to maintain the PetroCaribe transaction, a legacy of his late predecessor Hugo Chavez alive, while celebrating its 10th anniversary in Jamaica on September 9.
  • Quadrennial Energy Review (QER) recommending investments in energy transmission,

    UNITED STATES, 2015/11/24 Last week the White Home released its initial installment of the Quadrennial Energy Review (QER) recommending investments in energy transmission, storage and distribution infrastructure. While the U.S. is presently the major producer of oil and natural gas and is rapidly expanding renewable energy like wind and solar power, this energy must presently travel across millions of miles of outdated infrastructure. From presently on, the QER envisions ensuring resilience, reliability, safety and security of the transmission, storage and distribution infrastructure by funding various national grant programs. White Home officials tout the QER as a two-pronged tool: Assess the result of recent developments such as widespread hydraulic fracturing and the decreasing costs of renewable energy technologies like solar and wind. Recommend various policies that would improve the reliability of the electric grid, fasten domestic supplies of oil and gas, and drive the types of GHG reductions that will be necessary for the president’s in general climate goals.
  • US Commercial Solar Sector has Lagged, but Now Looks Cleared for Takeoff

    UNITED STATES, 2015/11/23 The commercial and industrial solar power sector has not from presently on taken flight in the same way that residential and utility-scale solar has in recent years. But to a lot of in the solar industry, that just screams opportunity. The C&I solar market is a strange animal for several reasons, but changing economics, regulations and technology appear to be creating new increase opportunities. In the US up to this point, solar developers and offtakers of the power have gravitated additional toward large, ground-based installations or smaller, individual household-level deals in the residential space. Corporate entities have been stuck in the middle, leaving acres of potentially power generating roof space vacant.
  • Obama makes a full-throated defense of renewable energy

    UNITED STATES, 2015/08/26 U.S. President Barack Obama made a full-throated defense of renewable energy Monday, hitting coal-championing critics as free market hypocrites. With one eye on a looming battle over power plant emissions limits, Obama took on fossil fuel supporters during a speech in the parched desert oasis of Las Vegas. Framing climate change as "one of the majority significant issues not just of our time, but of any time," Obama said renewable energy offered a viable solution.  He made the economic case for developing green industries that provide "a steady stream of well paying jobs."
  • Infrastructure, Exports, Cybersecurity to Be Key Energy Trends in 2015

    UNITED STATES, 2015/02/20 2014 was certainly a busy and productive year for the energy industry and energy policy. We saw a relaxation of crude export regulations for the initial time in decades, allowing the glut of condensate the United States is producing to be shipped overseas. We saw high profile political battles over greenhouse gas emissions, hydraulic fracturing, and other issues. At the ballot box, the Senate’s change in leadership will change the committee priorities of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee as the 114th Congress convenes in January. As with most issues, these are all harbingers of energy trends that remain to be seen in 2015 and beyond.
  • How To Make Solar Technology More Efficient

    EUROPE, 2013/04/15  How fitting for a German-born innovator and inventor to prove Albert Einstein’s opinion, true. Nothing, as a source of energy matches the sun. It out-powers anything that human ability, through technology could ever invent. Only a minuscule fraction of the sun’s power output reaches earth, but that which does, provides 10,000 times as much as all the commercial energy that humans use on the planet. Solar energy from the sun, accounts for more than the entire annual global supply of fossil produced energy.
  • Clean energy research fund

    UNITED STATES, 2013/03/17 US President Barack Obama has called for pumping $2bn (£1.3bn) from gas and oil royalties over a decade into clean energy research. In the prime energy speech of his second term, Mr Obama made the case for an energy security trust while visiting a Chicago research laboratory.
  • Solar energy, the largest component of clean energy trade

    UNITED STATES, 2013/03/11 The statement, Chance America: The U.S.-China Clean Energy Trade Relationship in 2011, found that the United States and China traded additional than 8.5 billion dollars worth of clean energy goods and services in 2011, the new year for which data are available. U.S. companies held 1.6 billion dollars of trade surplus in clean energy trade with China in 2011, said a statement released on Wednesday by the Pew Charitable Trust.
  • California solar energy systems top 1 gigawatt

    UNITED STATES, 2013/01/18 California's rebate program for businesses and homeowners who install solar panels has presently funded enough systems to generate 1 gigawatt of electricity - a level few nations and no other states have ever reached. California officials reported Thursday that national residents have installed 1,066 megawatts of solar systems using rebates from the $2.4 billion California Solar Initiative, launched in 2007 as a way to jump-start the industry.