Energy

A renewed interest for energy efficiency

According to the International Energy Agency many developing countries like India or China are increasing their energy efficiency efforts to slow down their oil consumption. This is great news for peak oil and climate change mitigation. Meanwhile, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair believes that energy efficiency is a faster solution than trading carbon-dioxide

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Can China increase tenfold its nuclear capacity ?

According to China Daily quoted by the Twitter page of the Green Leap Forward, China wants to increase tenfold its nuclear power capacity by 2020, from the current 9 GW to 86 GW by 2020. Is this feasible ? Such a move makes me wonder. Indeed, nuclear power plants require to operate safely specialized engineers

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USA: The high cost of fossil fuels

According to a recent report published by a US environmental organization, fossil fuels are due to cost the United States up to $23 trillion between 2010 and 2030. To TreeHugger, these energy sources cost one trillion in 2008 alone. 85 percent of US energy comes from coal, oil and natural gas. This leaves only 15

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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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The world is about to get a whole lot smaller

Recently I read two articles on a book about Peak Oil that seems most interesting. Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller by Jeff Rubin explores the consequences of the end of cheap oil and how it will affect us. The author – a former chief economist for CIBC World Markets

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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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