Renewables

Solar energy, a panacea for Africa

Solar energy is to me the panacea for Africa, a continent where 550 million people still lack electricity. With molten salts, concentrating solar could bring light to these populations during important parts of the night. Solar cookers could also help fighting deforestation by removing the need for fuelwood. Now an experiment run in Benin (West Africa) shows […]

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A massive wind energy plan for UK

The United Kingdom has a most ambitious climate change mitigation plan as it is willing to cuts its emissions by 34 percent by 2020. This is further than the European Union which is willing to go as far as 30 percent. This week, Gordon Brown is due to unveil a £100 billion (110 billion euros

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World Bank funds solar projects in North Africa

The World Bank via its Clean Technology Fund is investing $750 million (522 million euros) in eleven concentrating solar plants in the Middle East and North Africa region. This is due to spur additional investments worth $4.85 billion. These projects are due to add nearly a gigawatt of capacity to local grids within three to

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Green economy: 90,000 new green jobs in France

Here is my latest post for CleanTechies : According to a new report [Fr] from the ADEME ( the French Environment and Energy Management Agency ) 90,000 jobs have been created in the French green growth sectors between 2006 and 2008. These jobs have been created mostly in energy conservation and the development of renewable

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The Cleantech arms race continues

Earlier this year I was wondering if cleantech is the new arms race. I noted at the time that America, Europe and China are beginning to compete in such an important economic sector. A US study released last month shows that not only there is an arms race between the United States and Asian nations,

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Can we stop relying on fossil fuels by 2030 ?

Scientific American published in this month’s issue an article on how the world could completely stop relying on fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear) by 2030 and use only solar, wind and water energies. To make a long story short and after reading the various critics this is completely impossible. We can go

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Spain to add 8.8 GW of green electricity by 2012

According to Reuters Spain will add up to 8.8 GW of renewable energies by 2012. As GreenUnivers [Fr] points out this would increase by 37 percent the current renewable electricity capacity in just three years. This occurs as now wind energy has more installed capacity than nuclear in Spain and even supplied the country more

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IEA publishes its World Energy Outlook 2009

The International Energy Agency published today it’s annual World Energy Outlook. The 2009 version is even more urging action on climate change than the previous version. As Reuters noted in its article : ” The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a

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Storing solar electricity with molten salt

One of the main hindrances of solar energy is that when there is no more sun, there is no more electricity as well. This problem is being solved with the molten salt technology which stores energy for seven hours. A Californian company is willing to build a 150 Megawatt plant – The Rice Solar Energy

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A brilliant video on electric cars and Better Place

At first I wasn’t that convinced that electric vehicles were the solution to end our oil addiction and decreasing carbon dioxide emissions. But reading Sustainable Energy – Without the hot air changed that. Before proposing you a series of articles on electric vehicles (it will begin after my series on nuclear) I would like to

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