Month: January 2014

India is building the world’s largest solar plant

According to Business Insider, India is building the world’s largest solar plant in the northwestern desert state of Rajasthan. The project is due to deliver 4,000 MW of capacity for a price of 280 billion rupee ($4.4 billion, 3.2 billion euros). Current installed capacity in India is at 2,000 MW. By 2022, 22 GW, or eleven times …

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Climate change’s influence in the Middle East

I particularly like Thomas L Friedman’s articles on climate and environmental issues. His book, Hot, Flat and Crowded is still one of my favorites. Now here comes a little gem of how climate change is wrecking even more the Middle East. His article starts with these words : ” In the 1970s, I got both my …

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A trillion dollar a year in cleantech is needed

A thousand billion dollars, this the kind of money we need to invest every year to keep the world from warming more than two degrees Celsius, according to the UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, quoting IEA figures. In an interview with the Guardian, she stated that investments in clean technologies have to at least triple …

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European Union to cut emissions by 40% by 2030

Here is my latest article for Cleantechies, this time focusing on the quite disappointing move from the European Union to cut its emissions by 40 percent by 2030 ( compared to 1990 levels). Here is the introduction : ” The European Union has long been regarded as a leader on climate change. Now it appears to …

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Water scarcity to hit half Mankind by 2050

According to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ” by 2050 more than half the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas and about a billion or more will not have sufficient water resources. “ ” (…) The researchers expect 5 billion of the world’s projected 9.7 billion people to live in water-stressed areas by …

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The energy transition already creates jobs

The energy transition from our model based on a huge majority of polluting fossil fuels to a model based on cleantech technologies such as energy efficiency and renewable energy sources will require a lot of money. Indeed, we have seen recently that up to a trillion dollar would be needed every year to do so. …

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Emissions in United States rebounded in 2013

This was a major setback for me last week, US greenhouse gases emissions related to energy rose two percent in 2013 compared to 2012. To the US EIA this is due to ” a small increase in coal consumption in the electric power sector. “ ” Coal has regained some market share from natural gas since a …

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Cleantech investments decreased again in 2013

I had noted last year that cleantech investments had decreased from their peak of  $317.9 billion in 2011 to reach $286.2 billion in 2012. 2013 was an even worse year as total investments reached only $254 billion. To Bloomberg New Energy Finance : ” The reduced volume of investment in 2013 reflected two influences, a continued sharp …

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Google invests $3.2 billion in Nest Labs

This was the big news of the week in the cleantech sphere, Google has bought Nest Labs for a massive $3.2 billion (2.34 billion euros). Nest is famous for its smart thermostat, which I wrote about in November 2011. Google is thus investing massively in the smart connected home market. As Cleantechies remarks, the company …

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United Kingdom got 10 % of its electricity from wind

We have seen in the previous years that the United Kingdom has been investing heavily on wind energy. In 2013 the country started the world’s largest offshore wind farms such as the London Array. It seems these efforts are paying off as no less than ten percent of the electricity demand in the country was …

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