Solar

Towards sustainability: going solar

For the seventh part of this series – and after having tackled heating, electricity, water, transport, food and waste – I guess it is time for us to see how solar energies can benefit our lives. I mention solar energies as there are three possibilities : passive solar applications, which are the most basic, solar […]

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Is Desertec a sound idea ?

The fact has been known for years:  harvesting the energy provided by the sun to a tiny fraction of the Earth could supply all the energy Humankind needs without greenhouse gases emissions or pollution due to operation. This week many blogs and websites published articles on Desertec, a foundation that would like to install many

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Renewables due to boom in South America

Recently two Latin America countries unveiled large renewable energies plans. If those projects were to become reality, they would bring several gigawatts of clean energy to the continent. Argentina is very ambitious as it plans to build a wind farm that will amount for 600 to 900 MW as well as an impressive solar park that

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Cleantech investments quadrupled since 2004

The United Nations published this week a compelling report on the investments in the green energy / clean tech sector last year. This shows that a real green New Deal is under way. No less than $155 billion (110 billion €) have been invested last year in low carbon energy sources and efficiency. All this

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India’s great plan for solar energies

The most important news this weekend on energy and the environment was the draft of a plan from the Indian government that could literally change the world’s market for both solar thermal and photovoltaïc. To a local newspaper – The Hindu – the world’s largest democracy indeed would like to have 20 GW of solar

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A quarter of global electricity can be provided by solar thermal by 2050

I was writing in a comment that solar thermal could and even should provide electricity to the nations of  the Middle East and how it would much better than nuclear. It seems I was quite right. Published by an environmental NGO and various official bodies specialized in solar energy, a study notes that concentrated solar

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Solar PV to provide 300 MW to France by 2011

Last week Jean-Louis Borloo, the French energy and environment Minister, launched a plan that will quadruple the amount of electricity provided by solar photovoltaïc in order to reach 300 MW by 2011. This is great news as investing 1.5 billion euros ($2 billion) in solar PV is the right move for France to enable local

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China’s electricity will be 35% clean by 2020

It seems the arms race is continuing as the People’s Republic of China is willing to get 35 percent of its electricity by renewable energy sources by 2020. This will represent 570 gigawatts of capacity. It is worth noting that the country’s electricity demand is due to double by then and will reach 1,600 GW

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Two massive renewable energies projects

I never write about renewable energy projects who will bring only a few megawatts to the grids.  I prefer to focus on huge plants that will bring at least several hundreds megawatts which are more interesting in a global scope. This is the case of two projects I heard about this week. One will bring

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Spain is going green

By reading the French daily Le Monde, I came across an interesting interview [Fr] of the Spanish Prime Minister, M. Zapatero. There he stated that one of the solutions to get his country out of economic trouble is green growth. Several other countries including the United States, China and South Korea already did so and

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