If you want to see the future of urban transportation, Da Nang is a good place to start. IBM today said it has signed a deal with Vietnam’s fourth-largest city to install a high-tech traffic management system to help the rapidly growing seaport avoid the fate of Chinese cities choking on cars and pollution.
As bee populations plummet in the US and Europe, people have been urged to plant bee-friendly gardens to create safe havens for the endangered little pollinators. But a first-of-its-kind study released today found that flowers and vegetables bought from American nurseries are contaminated with the same agricultural pesticides linked to the mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate a third of the food on your dinner plate.
In another sign of the resurgent Chinese solar industry, Trina Solar said today it will supply 1.1 million photovoltaic panels for a 250-megawatt (MW) power plant to be built in the Nevada desert. It will not only be one of the world’s largest photovoltaic power stations, but also the biggest in the US to use Chinese-made solar panels.
The death of China’s solar industry appears to have been greatly exaggerated.
Just how explosive has the growth of solar energy been over the past 15 years? Consider this: In 1998, back when Bill Clinton was in the White House, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were tinkering with a new kind of search engine, and Steve Jobs still had a more-or-less full head of hair, there was a grand total of 34 photovoltaic installations connected to the power grid in the US. Those solar panels produced 200 kilowatts, or about a fifth of the electricity generated on the roof of your typical IKEA store these days.
Imagine getting a report that predicts weather conditions right outside your front door every 15 minutes. That’s happening in China, at least on wind farms where IBM is deploying technology that crunches gargantuan data flows from sensors, satellites and other sources to give granular forecasts for wind conditions at individual turbines.
As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.
There are more and more ways for the global elite to use going green as an excuse to splurge on luxury.
A study released today finds that big earthquakes around the world have triggered separate quakes in the US where wastewater resulting from natural gas production is injected underground.
With the defeat of hydraulic fracturing legislation in California, environmentalists have hit a dry well in what once had looked like a winning campaign to regulate fracking in the US state with the nation’s largest shale oil reserves.
With the European Union set to impose punishing tariffs on Chinese solar panels on June 5, you’d think companies like Yingli, the world’s largest photovoltaic manufacturer, would be concerned. After all, Germany and other European countries have long been the biggest market for Chinese solar panels.
Good news: when the zombie apocalypse comes, you’ll still be able to drive your Model S electric sports sedan coast to coast in the US, Tesla Motors chief executive Elon Musk said today in announcing a rapid expansion of Superchargers, the company’s network of battery charging stations.
There’s a place where a developer can propose, finance and build a big solar power project in a matter of months. That place is not California, Germany or China. It’s South Africa. And the country’s embrace of renewable energy has attracted investors like Google, which today said it is helping finance a 96 megawatt (MW) photovoltaic power plant in the Northern Cape province.
Just how bad were things at Better Place, the now-bankrupt electric car infrastructure company? In 2012, Better Place lost $454 million (with revenues of about $7 million), according to financial filings from Israel Corp., the company’s largest shareholder.
The American pika was to be the poster animal for combatting global warming (after the polar bear, of course). Environmentalists were going to use the US’s powerful endangered species laws to protect the pika and other wildlife threatened by climate change and thwart industrial development contributing to their demise. But greenies have lost a six-year fight to put the impossibly cute critter on the endangered species list, which shows just how difficult it is to repurpose twentieth century environmental laws to fight a twenty-first century catastrophe.
Are you one of those investors shorting Tesla Motors? Best to stay in bed today. The Silicon Valley electric carmaker’s shares zoomed past $100 this morning for the first time as Tesla rides a wave of good news.
Electric car infrastructure company Better Place’s move to file bankruptcy today marks the end of the road for a billion-dollar bet that Silicon Valley-style technological disruption could wean the world from fossil fuels.
“Governor Moonbeam” has definitely left the building.
When Tesla Motors paid off its $451.8 million US government loan four years early, the Silicon Valley company gave a boost to the Obama administration’s much-maligned program to jumpstart the electric car industry. But the payback comes with a financial cost to the US: The government gave up warrants to buy Tesla stock currently worth $270 million.
With a belligerent, nuclear-armed neighbor led by a messianic millennial on its border, you’d think that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would rank low on South Korea’s to-do list. Yet the country plans to launch the world’s most ambitious carbon-trading market in a bid to cut its planet-warming spew 30% by 2020.
The global solar industry may have hit the doldrums, but it could double again to a $155 billion business by 2018, according to Lux Research. The reason? As the Chinese manufacturers that supply most of the world’s solar panels struggle to avoid bankruptcy after expanding too fast, developers will use the resulting plunge in solar-panel prices to expand into new markets. That will soak up China’s excess capacity; so too will industry consolidation, as troubled manufacturers like Suntech and smaller companies go broke or are bought up.
A report released today by the US Geological Survey (USGS) today shows that Americans are sucking dry the aquifers that irrigate their crops and supply their drinking water. Between 1900 and 2008, the US lost 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of groundwater. That’s twice the volume of the water in Lake Erie.
Is the US wind boom over? It certainly looks that way. Wind energy installations plunged 80% in the first quarter to 384 megawatts (MW) from a year ago. That’s the lowest level in seven years and a massive drop from the record 13,329 MW that came online in the fourth quarter, according to a report from energy research firm SNL.
Corporate America loves the US’s shale gas boom—but when it comes to exporting the stuff, companies are divided. Fossil-fuel producers like ExxonMobil are all in favor of building liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals so they can sell the gas to more markets, but manufacturers (such as chemical giants) that have started building factories in the US again fear that exports will squeeze the domestic supply and make gas more expensive for them. And environmentalists also tend to oppose exports, since they oppose an expansion of fossil fuel production in general.
