Energy

President Obama embraces offshore drilling

I wrote as early as september 2008 that offshore drilling is not a sustainable solution as the added oil reserves won’t enable us to go much further and will keep feeding our global addiction for oil. To rally Republicans to his climate bill, President Obama decided to embrace this solution last month. This was a […]

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A third form of marine energy : OTEC

According to GreenTech Media, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion is after wave and tidal energies the third form of ocean power. Albeit it was discovered a century ago, there have been few attempts at tapping this energy source. To Wikipedia, OTEC ” uses the temperature difference that exists between deep and shallow waters to run a heat

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Morocco to build five solar plants by 2020

It is no news for you if you subscribed to this website : solar thermal alone could provide up to a quarter of global electricity by 2050. The use of molten salt could enable our civilization to store solar electricity for up to seven hours. Morocco is ideally located to harvest all this energy as

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Oil reserves are exaggerated by one third

According to the Telegraph : ” The world’s oil reserves have been exaggerated by up to a third, according to Sir David King, the Government’s former chief scientist, who has warned of shortages and price spikes within years.” ” The scientist and researchers from Oxford University argue that official figures are inflated because member countries of

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Who’s winning the clean energy race ?

The PEW environment group published a fantastic study on the cleantech investment in the G20 in 2009. The largest economies, both developped and developping are very different in this economic sector. China overtook the United States in cleantech investments with more than $34 billion while the latter dedicated less than $19 billion. The European Union

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Scotland to harness 1.2 GW of marine energy

Scotland announced last week that 1.2 GW of tidal and wave energy capacity would be built there by 2020. To achieve this, 10 projects will be started and will be the first commercial applications of these energy sources. Scotts are determine to have 31 percent of their electricity coming from renewables by 2011 and are willing

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Europe to meet its renewable energies goals

These are good news, to the European Commission : “The EU will surpass its target to consume 20 percent of its energy from renewable energy by 2020, according to national forecasts submitted to the European Commission.” Out of the 27 members, 12 may exceed their national targets domestically. But this isn’t the only good news

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Italy to build four nuclear reactors by 2020

There is something I totally overlooked while writing earlier this week my article on how Europe goes forward on energy. Indeed, last month Italy announced its intention to build nuclear reactors this decade. Italian electricity is both heavily reliant on foreign fossil sources (70 percent) and on imports (ten percent comes from France’s own reactors). Building

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Can Iraq quadruple its oil production ?

According to an article from The Economist, Iraq has plans to quadruple its oil production by the next seven years. This would increase the production from the current 2.5 million barrels per day to 12 million barrels. This would bring Iraq as the world’s first oil producer, putting Saudi Arabia in the second place. The

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Europe goes forward on energy

I found during the past few weeks news showing that Europe is investing more and more in solving the climate / energy equation by using various solutions : energy efficiency, smart grids and renewable energies. Here are some examples : Sweden pledged this week for the installation of 2,000 wind turbines by the year 2020

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