Africa’s first grid-connected biogas plant will begin supplying power by March 1, according to Johnnie McMillan, managing director of Tropical Power Kenya Ltd.

For a lesson in global energy history, look no further than Stockholm’s oldest power plant. Since 1903, Fortum Oyj’s Vaerta harbor site has generated power using coal, oil, natural gas and even considered nuclear. Now it’s phasing out the last coal furnace and replacing it with the world’s largest combined heat and power generator that will burn just wood chips and timber scraps by next year.

Enel SpA is putting the final touches on a yieldco that would hold its U.S. renewable energy assets, making it the latest power-plant owner to opt for a structure that frees up capital.

India said cheaper credit along with foreign investment will help the world’s third-largest polluter fund an ambitious renewable energy program that would build green power plants faster than China.

U.K. subsidies for RWE AG’s Lynemouth power plant face a European Union probe amid concerns government aid would give the company too much to convert the site from coal to biomass and may hamper competition.

Actress Natalie Portman, environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and other high-profile Harvard University alumni are calling for demonstrations to urge divestment from fossil fuels.

Apple Inc. plans to spend 1.7 billion euros ($1.9 billion) building data centers in Ireland and Denmark in its biggest European investment, with the facilities set to run services such as iTunes and maps for users of its devices.

Japan is considering reducing the incentives for developers of solar power projects by as much as 16 percent to reflect lower operating and maintenance costs.

Policies favoring clean energy and increased competition would normally dim prospects for existing producers. Not in Chile, where foreign investors are driving a renewable boom at a time of surging returns by local utilities.

Global emissions were unchanged last year, the first time that’s happened amid economic growth in four decades, according to the International Energy Agency.

Sweden and Norway agreed to boost their target for renewable energy production amid concerns the additional capacity will exacerbate a power glut and strain the region’s electricity grid.

A land claim brought against South Africa’s largest sugar farmer threatens to stop a 1.1 billion rand ($90 million) renewable-energy project that will produce electricity by burning leftover cane leaves and tops.

President Barack Obama ordered the federal government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 2008 levels over the next 10 years by shifting to renewable energy sources such as solar power.

Beijing, where pollution averaged more than twice China’s national standard last year, will close the last of its four major coal-fired power plants next year.

U.K. electricity from low-carbon sources accounted for almost a quarter of the country’s generation in the fourth quarter as Drax Group Plc converted a second coal-power plant to burn wood.

Mexico has become the first developing nation to formally promise to cut its global-warming pollution, a potential milestone in efforts to reach a worldwide agreement on tackling climate change.

Investors have spent more than $2 trillion on clean-energy plants in the past decade and last year added more renewable capacity than ever before.

Jim Keffer is Republican state lawmaker in Texas with a permit to carry a concealed weapon and doubts about whether human activity is causing global warming.

Yale University police cited 19 students after they staged a sit-in outside President Peter Salovey’s office to push for divestment from fossil-fuel companies.

Global investment in clean energy slumped 15 percent in the first quarter to the lowest level in two years because of a decline in wind and utility-scale projects.

Political deadlock over Australia’s clean energy future is prompting companies such as Vestas Wind Systems A/S and Acciona SA to increasingly turn to rival markets for growth.

Australia’s largest electricity producer committed to close its coal-fired power plants within 35 years as part of an effort to cut the nation’s dependence on the fossil fuel.

Juha Sipila, who once converted his own Chevrolet to run on wood-gas, is counting on the abundant Finnish forests to provide the key to an economic revival.

A $2 trillion push in the U.S. to blend renewable energy into the power supply and fortify transmission lines against extreme weather means that Americans must act more like Europeans to keep their power costs down.

Japan anticipates that by 2030 clean energy such as solar and hydro will generate slightly more of the nation’s electricity than nuclear power plants.

European Union negotiators are endorsing an accelerated overhaul of the bloc’s carbon market after the price of emission rights fell to levels that fail to deter polluters.

The Obama administration is set to pledge $100 million Friday to expand the use of special fuel pumps that allow drivers to blend more ethanol into their gasoline, according to people briefed on the announcement.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has long championed these so-called blender pumps, may unveil the plan on the same day that the Environmental Protection Agency announces quotas for the use of renewable fuels. With ethanol makers facing a possible cut in their quota below the statutory level of 15 billion gallons, the grant program will let the administration of President Barack Obama demonstrate that it still supports the fuel, which in the U.S. is produced mostly from corn.

“Blender pumps are a huge part of the equation when it comes to the deployment of the second generation biofuels, because investors need a market to invest in,” said Brooke Coleman, the executive director of the Advanced Ethanol Council. “It allows the consumer to choose based on price.”

The grant program would be fast-tracked to states to help defray the cost of installing the pumps, which allow drivers to choose how much ethanol they want to mix with gasoline pumped into their tanks, said the people, who asked not to be identified before the formal announcement.

The USDA, which in 2011 said it wanted to get 10,000 blender pumps installed, has scheduled an announcement Friday on biofuels infrastructure. USDA spokesman Cullen Schwarz said he couldn’t comment on the announcement.

Quotas Overdue

The EPA is scheduled to issue renewable fuel quotas for 2014, 2015 and 2016 before June 1, and the two people said that announcement will also come Friday. The EPA abandoned its proposal for quotas last year, after ethanol makers bristled at the attempt to cut quotas based on the argument that more than 10 percent ethanol couldn’t be absorbed by the domestic market.

Separately, production of cellulosic ethanol -- a fuel made from wood, grass and other plant material -- is far below the 3 billion gallons set in the legislation for this year. Taken together EPA will have to propose some cuts, analysts say.

“The statutory volume targets of the RFS are now totally implausible, so something has to give,” Jeremy Martin, a senior scientist the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a report released Thursday. “Whatever they do will likely be challenged in court, so the final answer to these questions may take some time to shake out.”

--With assistance from Alan Bjerga in Washington.

Scientists and economists including BP Plc’s former chief executive officer, John Browne, are inviting governments to join a $150 billion program that aims to make clean energy cheaper than coal.

Sweden and Norway will probably exceed a joint target for renewable energy production by the end of the decade, industry consultant Nena AS said.

Bonds backing clean energy and other sustainable initiatives are booming. Investors are snapping up green bonds at the fastest pace on record, as big banks like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corp. pile in with new issuance to feed the growing appetite for socially responsible investments.

An Obama administration proposal last month to cut quotas for renewable fuels led to a rout in ethanol credits and handcuffed the industry’s growth, biofuel groups said Thursday.

The European Commission raised concern that the U.K. and France may not meet their 2020 renewable energy targets, saying the two countries should examine whether they’re doing enough to reach the goals.

In West Virginia, where workers have harvested coal seams for centuries, Pope Francis’ new warning about the risks of fossil fuels will find skepticism even among the faithful.

RWE AG, the German utility whose coal-fired plants make it Europe’s largest carbon emitter, officially started the company’s largest renewables project on Thursday: a wind farm in Liverpool Bay off Britain’s coast.

Trillions of dollars will be invested in renewable energy over the next 25 years, driving some of the most profound changes yet in how humans get their electricity. That's according to a new forecast by Bloomberg New Energy Finance that plots out global power markets to 2040. 

Renewable energy will draw almost two-thirds of the spending on new power plants over the next 25 years, dwarfing spending on fossil fuels, as plunging costs make solar the first choice for consumers and the poorest nations.

Stanford, Oxford and Georgetown universities have won praise for promising to purge their endowments of direct investments in coal, embracing the fight against climate change.

Long-frustrated wind and solar developers in Australia can now get to work on more than A$14 billion ($11 billion) in projects after a new renewable energy target passed parliament.

The secretary general of the United Nations is frustrated with the pace of negotiations for what’s intended to be a crucial agreement limiting global warming.

Climate change pledges submitted so far from the world’s leading economies won’t be enough to keep the planet from warming dangerously, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Monday in New York.

Proposals to reduce heat-trapping emissions need to be “a floor, not a ceiling,” he said.

The global increase in temperatures will exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) under the national pledges already submitted to UN, Ban said. That’s the goal scientists and the UN have set to avoid the worst effects due to global warming.

The proposals submitted to date “will not be enough to place us on a 2-degree pathway,” Ban said.

Without any changes to global emissions, the world is on track to warm by 4 degrees Celsius or more, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change Janos Pasztor said earlier this month.

World leaders have five months to go before a meeting of almost 200 nations in Paris that’s intended to seal a new global pact to cut planet-warming carbon emissions. If successful, the agreement would be the first ever to require both developed nations like the US and growing economies like China to address climate change.

“The pace of UN negotiations are far too slow,” Ban said. “It’s like a snail’s pace.”

The U.S., the world’s biggest historic source of greenhouse gases, pledged earlier this year to cut its emissions by as much as 28 percent by 2025. The European Union has promised a 40 percent cut by 2030. Several other major economies, including Australia and Japan, have yet to submit climate plans to the UN.

Stocks of clean-energy companies are proving to be better investments than those of companies that produce most of the Western Hemisphere's power, and are outperforming the rest of the stock market as well.

The evidence is found in the New York Stock Exchange Bloomberg Americas Clean Energy Index. Its 141 companies, all based in North and South America, returned 32.62 percent in the past two years. In contrast, the 40 conventional-energy companies in the Standard and Poor's 500 Energy Index returned 1.02 percent over the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Clean energy also is beating the rest of the stock market. The Clean Energy Index is up 6.02 percent so far this year. Lagging behind are both the S&P 500 and the Russell 3000 Index, which gained 3.12 percent and 3.86 percent respectively in 2015.

German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said 13 percent of power stations burning lignite, a cheap form of coal, would be phased out by 2021 under a program to cut power industry pollution. The government abandoned talks on proposals to impose a climate-change fee that the industry said would have forced mines and plants to close, threatening jobs.

Coal is having a hard time lately. U.S. power plants are switching to natural gas, environmental restrictions are kicking in, and the industry is being derided as the world's No. 1 climate criminal. Prices have crashed, sure, but for a real sense of coal's diminishing prospects, check out what's happening in the bond market.

Publicly, the United Nations climate-change talks look mired in disputes over everything from money to the length of the proposed agreement.

Executives from 13 major U.S. corporations are announcing at least $140 billion in new investments to decrease their carbon footprints as part of a White House initiative to recruit private commitments ahead of a United Nations climate-change summit later this year in Paris.

Companies including Apple Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Energy Co., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will join Secretary of State John Kerry and top administration officials at the White House for the announcement. In addition to pledges to cut emissions, provide financing to environmentally-focused companies, and reduce water consumption, the companies have said they will procure at least 1,600 MW of new, renewable energy. The White House said in a statement that it expects to announce a second round of similar pledges later this fall from additional companies.

The commitments are being announced as President Barack Obama is looking to build momentum toward a legacy-defining global climate accord in Paris. In addition to company-specific commitments, the corporate leaders on Monday will signal their support for a strong climate agreement out of the United Nations talks. They administration is using the pledges to set an example for companies to find ways to eliminate their carbon emissions.

Climate Talks

“As the world looks toward global climate negotiations in Paris this December, American leadership at all levels will be essential,” the White House said in a fact sheet detailing the announcement.

The administration’s actions are pushing the issue into the 2016 presidential debate. Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, released an energy strategy saying she would both defend and go beyond Obama’s efforts. Republican candidates have criticized the administration’s initiatives as costly to the economy and unnecessary.

Among the pledges, aluminum manufacturer Alcoa Inc. has agreed to reduce emissions by 50 percent from its 2005 levels, while agricultural giant Cargill Inc. says 18 percent of its total energy use will come from renewable sources.

Coca-Cola Co. said it would drive down the carbon footprint of its beverage production by 25 percent over the next five years, while Google says it plans to triple its purchases of renewable energy over the next decade. Berkshire Hathaway says it plans to invest up to an additional $15 billion in the construction and operation of renewable energy generators, while Bank of America Corp says it will increase its environmental business initiative by $75 billion over the next decade, according to the White House

Other participating firms include Wal-Mart, United Parcel Service Inc., PepsiCo Inc., Microsoft Corp., General Motors Inc.

The corporate commitments won’t be the administration’s only major climate announcement in the next few weeks. The Environmental Protection Agency is set to present final regulations that aim to reduce carbon emissions from power plants by 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 later this week.

While visiting Kenya over the weekend, Obama repeatedly praised the country for its efforts to address climate change, saying its efforts tor educe emissions “has put it in the position of being a leader on the continent.” And next month, the president will travel to Alaska for an international summit on Arctic climate issues.

©2015 Bloomberg News

For more, see Big Companies, Big Renewable Investments.

Germany has installed about one-third less onshore wind power capacity so far this year than during the same period in 2014, new analysis shows.

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The UK increased its power generation from on-site biogas plants by 40% in 2014, according to a survey by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.  

As a carbon-neutral energy source, biomass technology is helping organizations generate electricity and heat while reducing their carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions.

Clean, renewable energy is the single most needed technology by the millennial generation. Not only is it the key to slowing global warming and climate change, but it also solves a host of other problems, such as respiratory diseases and national security.

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