Shinsei Bank Ltd., a lender for Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s clean-energy projects in Japan, plans to provide as much as 200 billion yen (US $2 billion) in loans for renewable developments.

The European Commission approved the U.K. government’s renewable energy contracts and so-called capacity payments, saying the program that benefits power plants complies with state-aid rules.

Australia is frightening developers away from renewable energy even before the government decides whether to overhaul targets for the industry’s growth.

South African Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson said her department wants to address weaknesses in the process of commissioning renewable-power projects.

Chevron Corp.’s attempts to turn plants into alternative fuels for profitable, large-scale production have failed.

Abengoa SA, a Spanish energy and environment company, plans to issue its first green bond to raise 500 million euros ($642 million) to finance projects.

The threat of climate change is driving China and the U.S. — frequent rivals and the world’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters — to collaborate on dozens of potential clean-energy breakthroughs.

Kyushu Electric Power Co. will suspend responding to applications from renewable-energy producers applying to access its grid while it reviews how much more clean energy it’s capable of handling.

California and Quebec, which together created the largest carbon market in North America this year, may come away empty-handed as they woo northeastern U.S. states to join their system.

German electricity consumers will for the first time see a drop in the fee added to their bills to fund renewables, a boost for Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has pledged to curb the cost for voters.

Peru’s government is set to announce plans for a renewable-energy auction during a global climate conference to be held next month in Lima.

President Barack Obama will pledge $3 billion to a United Nations climate-change fund that’s intended to help poor nations boost renewable energy and counter the ill effects of global warming.

Warren Buffett wants to tell you the best time to wash your clothes. Or at least his energy company in the U.K does. Buffett’s Northern Powergrid Holdings Co. is working with Siemens AG to test a so-called smart grid that has the ability to control when consumer appliances will be used in the home.

Japan’s trade ministry is setting stricter rules for production and sales of renewable energy in what it says is a drive to speed up development of projects and ensure stable power supply.

The top hydroelectric power news for December 2014

California Governor Jerry Brown proposed spending $59 billion to fix crumbling roads and raising the state’s renewable energy mandate to 50 percent.

The Brazilian bank Itau Unibanco Holding SA raised 1.05 billion reais ($408 million) to finance renewable energy and water treatment projects.

The Obama administration is proposing a $4 billion fund to reward states that exceed cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, and wants Congress to back steeper royalty rates for oil, gas and coal extraction from public land.

California’s bet on green energy is paying off, with clean technology companies creating more jobs and investing more money than competitors in any other state.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Less than two weeks after 175 nations signed the pivotal Paris Agreement on climate change, a question lingers: What happens now?

It was a gamble that went spectacularly wrong for Tory Prime Minister David Cameron: Allow the UK to decide through a national referendum on their future participation in the EU and hope that they choose to remain.

The G20 meeting in Hangzhou, China, this September brings together leaders of the world’s largest economies for the first such gathering since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate. G20 Leaders Summits traditionally focus on economic growth and financial stability, but since more than 190 countries collectively agreed to greatly enhance mitigation of the causes and impacts of climate change, the need to tackle a changing climate and foster clean energy has become a clear economic and business reality.

It’s never been more important to put powerful AI tools in the hands of the world’s leading medical researchers. That’s why we’re introducing MONAI, our latest initiative with King’s College London. This open-source AI framework for healthcare builds on the best practices from existing tools, including NVIDIA Clara, NiftyNet, DLTK and DeepNeuro. MONAI is user-friendly, Read article >

The post NVIDIA and King’s College London Announce MONAI Open Source AI Framework for Healthcare Research appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

Sometimes it takes an elevated view to appreciate the big picture. NASA’s iconic “Blue Marble,” taken in 1972, helped inspire the modern environmental movement by capturing the finite and fragile nature of Earth for the first time. Today, aerial imagery from satellites and drones powers a range of efforts to monitor and protect our planet Read article >

The post Earth to AI: Three Startups Using Deep Learning for Environmental Monitoring appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

When it comes to teaching autonomous vehicles, you can never have too much training data. That’s where Nikita Jaipuria and Rohan Bhasin come in. Jaipuria, a research scientist in computer vision and machine learning, and Bhasin, a research engineer, spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about their roles at Ford Motor Company, as well Read article >

The post The Driving Force: How Ford Uses AI to Create Diverse Driving Data appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

Professional pyrotechnician Zack James is lighting his next fuse under the tractor market. The founder of Rabbit Tractors develops autonomous farm robots intended for multiple tasks and to be scaled up in number as needed, challenging traditional tractors. Based in northwest Indiana, Rabbit Tractors is a so-called swarm farming startup among a field of like-minded Read article >

The post Field Day: AI Startup Cultivates Robo Tractors for ‘Swarm Farming’ Disruption appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

Get Amped for Latest Platform Breakthroughs in AI, Deep Learning, Autonomous Vehicles, Robotics and Professional Graphics

NVIDIA today announced the completion of its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., for a transaction value of $7 billion. The acquisition, initially...

For decades, car owners looking for the latest technology features have had to wait for the arrival of a new model year. Now, their daily ride can always be state of the art. The Xpeng P7 is an all-electric sports sedan developed from the ground up for an intelligent driving future. Introduced this week in Read article >

The post Beyond Horsepower: Xpeng P7 Shows What’s Next for Intelligent Transportation appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

Two chance encounters propelled remote direct memory access from a good but obscure idea for fast networks into the jet fuel for the world’s more powerful supercomputers. The lucky breaks launched the fortunes of an Israel-based startup that staked its fortunes on InfiniBand, a network based on RDMA. Later, that startup, Mellanox Technologies, helped steer Read article >

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NVIDIA will host a conference call on Thursday, May 21, at 2:30 p.m. PT (5:30 p.m. ...

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.