Renewable Energy

Renewable energy solutions are not only good for the environment. If done well, they can pay for themselves and reduce poverty around the world. This is the message of the 2012 Ashden Awards, which just recognized inspiring renewable energy programs from Afghanistan, Cambodia, East Africa, India and Indonesia.

It was a bright year for renewable energy in many parts of the world, despite the recession. Global investment in clean energy generation capacity reached a record high of $260 billion in 2011, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Investment in solar technology grew by a third over the previous year.

Pascua River, Chile According to a new report which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published today, the sky is the limit for the expansion of renewable energy. With an investment of slightly less than 1% of global GDP, renewable energy could contribute up to 43% of the world’s energy supply by 2030, and 77% by 2050. Such an increase could stabilize the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at 450 ppm and may be just enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. It would also boost energy access for the 1.4 billion people who currently live without access to electricity

The Amazon River meets the sea - potential site for future non-dam salinity-based hydro? Norman Kuring/NASA Battery-operated electric vehicles are cutting CO2 emissions and raising awareness of our transportation carbon footprint. Recent cutting edge research now shows that batteries can also be harnessed in rivers and estuaries as a non-dam and hopefully low-impact form of electricity generation. According to Stanford University, a team lead by Yi Cui (Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering), has developed a battery that takes advantage of the difference in salinity betwe

My recent blog comparing the global hydro industry’s stagnation with the rapid growth in the wind and solar sectors was based on preliminary data for wind and solar in 2009, and my guesstimate for that year’s hydro additions. Better statistics are now available for all three technologies. In my blog I stated that the wind industry had likely installed at least a quarter more generating capacity than big hydro in 2009. The new stats, from the “Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century,” or REN21, shows that large hydro lagged even further behind than I had guesstimated.

Annual capacity additions of dam-based hydro and new renewables I just blogged on the Huffington Post about how the global wind power industry is blowing big hydro right out of the water in terms of how many turbines it is installing every year. In 2002, new installations of wind power worldwide exceeded the capacity of new big hydro for the first time ever. Wind power engineers installed more megawatts than their big hydro competitors three times over the following six years. [While no hydro data are yet available for 2009] data on trends in new big hydro capacity from the last decade sug