Estimated traffic fatalities decreased in 2019 despite an increase in driving, according to a report from the NHTSA released on Wednesday. There were projected to be 36,120 traffic fatalities in 2019, which is a 1.2% decrease from 2018. It marks the third consecutive year of declines from a post-recession high point of 37,806 traffic fatalities in...

The IIHS reported Thursday that the new Jeep Wrangler, which was last comprehensively updated for the 2018 model year, tipped over onto its passenger side during its driver-side small overlap crash test. The insurance industry-funded safety watchdog said the Wrangler was tested three times, twice by the agency and once by the automaker. The...

After 11 seasons and more than 80 episodes, it looks like funny man and avid car nut Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee" is finally running out of gas. During a press conference to discuss his new Netflix special “Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill,” Seinfeld said he feels like there's nothing left to achieve with...

Many car buyers aspire to own a Mercedes-Benz. The cars are a symbol of quality, bulletproof German engineering, and, yes, status. But if you can’t get the lord to buy you a Mercedes-Benz, you have to do it yourself, and that can really stretch the budget. Mercedes answers that issue with its two lowest-priced cars, the A-Class and...

Fully electric delivery trucks, cargo vans, shuttle vehicles, and transit and school buses are all due to become increasingly common as fleets go green and diesels are retired. That’s where a recent surge of interest in mobile-charging solutions comes in. As a backup plan for the times when charge points and infrastructure won’t quite...

2020 Mercedes-Benz A-Class vs 2020 Mercedes-Benz CLA-Class: Compare Cars If you can’t get the lord to buy you a Mercedes-Benz, you have to do it yourself, and that can really stretch the budget. Mercedes answers that issue with its two lowest-priced cars, the A-Class and CLA-Class. IIHS reports that new Jeep Wrangler SUV rolled over on its...

Nissan’s Leaf-based van for Europe gets larger. More mobile charging is on the way for bigger electric trucks. And could the pandemic pinch material supply for EV makers and the clean energy sector? This and more, here at Green Car Reports. The coronavirus pandemic could tighten the supply of some materials needed for the creation of...

Sales of which electric car plunged the steepest leading into the U.S. pandemic slowdown? Which automaker reaffirmed its commitment to hydrogen fuel cells? This is our look back at the Week In Reverse—right here at Green Car Reports—for the week ending May 8, 2020. Our biggest combination of stories this week related to the most...

DOE released a final programmatic environmental impact statement for Hawaii to provide federal, state and county governments as well as the public and developers with a reference document for project-specific environmental reviews.

Update: On March 2, 2017, U.S. Senators confirmed Rick Perry as the new Secretary of Energy of the United States. The vote was 62-37 with nine democratic senators casting "yes" votes. 

The nation’s energy sector employed 6.5 million Americans in 2017, up 133,000 jobs from the year prior, according to a comprehensive report released today from the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI) and the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO). This two percent growth rate exceeded the national average of 1.7 percent.

A report that examines statements about rolling blackouts made by regional grid operator ISO-New England, shows that sustained growth of renewables, and not more gas, will boost reliability of New England’s electric power system.

Utilities and independent power producers (IPPs) plan to invest $110 billion through 2025 to build new, natural gas-fired power plants. They, their shareholders and society would be better served were that capital invested in new, distributed, renewable power generation and distributed energy resources (DERs), including utility-customer demand response and energy efficiency programs, the Rocky Mountain Institute says.

About a month ago, legislators for the District of Columbia introduced a bill that, if passed, could revolutionize how utilities deliver power to customers. The bill is known as the Distributed Energy Resources Authority Act. It would establish an independent body that ensures DC utilities look at non-wires alternatives whenever they propose to spend more than $25M on construction to expand capacity or enhance reliability. The independent body would determine if any of the capacity or reliability requirements could be met with energy efficiency, demand response or distributed energy resources (DERs) like solar and storage.

In 2017, Massachusetts was ranked No. 1 in energy efficiency by ACEEE for the seventh consecutive year. On the other side of the country, California was ranked a close second after tying with Massachusetts for the top spot in 2016.

IEA report reveals that more than US $750 billion went to the electricity sector while US $715 billion was spent on oil and gas supply globally as the world continues on the path to electrification.

According to Martin Lim, COO of Electrify.Asia, a company facilitating peer-to-peer energy trading across the distribution grid, blockchain technology doesn’t take utilities out of the equation, but rather it adds another layer of potential revenue for them and helps reduce the cost of delivering energy to homes and businesses.

Reparations for the worst-ever U.S. natural gas leak will involve cow-dung duty.

In an Australian first, Origin will install a 4-MW/4-MWh grid scale battery at its Mt Stuart Power Station in Townsville. Mt Stuart Power Station is a 414-MW open cycle gas power station, designed to supply electricity at times of peak demand and is the largest such facility in North Queensland. In the U.S., these plants are called “peakers.”

CenterPoint Energy Inc. wants to introduce a pilot program in Minnesota offering customers access to a renewable form of natural gas recovered from dairy farms and landfills.

This week Autogrid announced that it entered into a partnership with Swell Energy to provide software for managing Swell’s growing fleet of distributed energy resources (DER).

Last month, Delaware Governor John Carney signed Senate Bill 113 into law, enabling Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) financing in Delaware. Once implemented, PACE will offer a new method for financing commercial energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

This week, EVgo, a provider of public electric vehicle (EV) fast-charging stations in the U.S., said it was accelerating the pace at which it is constructing fast chargers and will add hundreds of EVgo fast chargers in California before the end of 2018.

Has the environment for electricity generation changed dramatically since the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan began its slow exit from public and regulatory consciousness several months ago? Not really!

The world must invest $2.4 trillion in clean energy every year through 2035 and cut the use of coal-fired power to almost nothing by 2050 to avoid catastrophic damage from climate change, according to scientists convened by the United Nations.

After wallowing in limbo for the first part of 2018 awaiting re-authorization, the Loan Program Office (LPO) at the Department of Energy is back in business with about $40 billion burning a hole in its proverbial pocket. Mike Reed, Director and Chief Engineer of the Technical and Project Management Division of the LPO and his team are planning to hit POWER-GEN 2018 in Orlando, Florida in December to identify people and projects that might need financing.

The UK could meet a significant slice of carbon emissions’ target if it more widely deployed distributed energy technologies.

Experts from Rocky Mountain Institute, the Advanced Energy Economy Institute and America’s Power Plan have released a new report that shows why new utility business models are key to the energy transition.

This week, Electric Vehicle (EV) charging network provider, ChargePoint, announced that it has raised $240 Million in Series H funding, which is more capital than any other EV infrastructure company in the world, surmising in its press release that the move to electrify transportation is accelerating.

In October of this year, the European Parliament voted in favor of a ban of the ten most notorious single-use plastics that harm our planet and marine life, including straws, plastic cutlery and cotton buds. The vote also committed to a move towards a circular economy – recognizing the inherent value of the 2.12 billion tonnes of waste that is dumped globally each year. Yet questions remain about how we deal with the items not on the list, the ones where there are no obvious alternatives; the fruit trays, the ice cream tubs, the burger boxes. With waste generation expected to double by 2025 we must continue to act on this growing crisis and be more innovative with waste.

Fantasy sports and the energy industry might not have much in common on the surface, but I’ve always personally approached these two passions of mine in similar ways: obsessively reading the breaking news, following my favorite experts in the community on social media, and diving deep into the available statistics to create graphs and try to come up with hot takes. I think the fantasy sports model can be used to encourage an academic and educational exercise in the energy industry, so it struck me—I should establish the first fantasy league for the energy sector!

Two big trends are converging in the world of power generation -- Combined Heat & Power (CHP) and biomass. CHP is gaining ground in many areas of the world due to the fact that its superior efficiency often results in major economic gains (CHP takes the waste heat from a turbine and uses it to generate steam which is often uses in district heating, or in industrial processes).

Italy’s Five Star Movement used to rave about towns like Montieri, a village in the verdant Tuscan foothills that burns little coal or natural gas. Instead, the local power plant harnesses steam rising naturally from hot springs deep underground to generate electricity.

Biogas is a resource that has enormous potential in Spain and beyond. Biogas technologies convert organic wastes into renewable energy, clean transport fuel, and nutrient-rich natural fertiliser, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving energy and food security and air quality. A recent study commissioned by Naturgy, Spain’s largest natural gas distributor, showed a potential for 26,684 gigawatt hours (GWh) of biogas in the country, enough to cover the energy demand of 40% of Spain’s households.

While it’s well known that corporations were some of the earliest trailblazers of large-scale renewable energy purchasing — they’ve closed over 14 gigawatts of deals in the past six years, according to tracking by Rocky Mountain Institute’s Business Renewables Center — higher education has also made impressive strides. In fact, a report released last fall showed that the top 30 renewable energy-buying universities are using around 3 billion kilowatt-hours of green power annually. That’s enough to power 276,000 homes.

Arizona State University researchers have set a new record for solar efficiency, 25.4 percent. Working with tandem photovoltaics, or stacking different materials in a solar cell, the ASU team has continued to improve solar efficiency and lower costs.

As part of its acquisition of Maximum Solar, Ameresco said, it will further develop in-house services to operate and maintain solar facilities. Maximum Solar currently manages about 150 MW of solar throughout the northeastern U.S.

Utilities and renewable-energy advocates have long had a complicated relationship. Yet the prospect of PG&E Corp. tipping into bankruptcy by the end of January has sent shivers through the solar-and-wind sector.

In early December, I put out a call to the online energy professionals community to find participants for the world’s first Fantasy Energy League. Perhaps I saw the pending end of the 2018 fantasy football season and I wanted something to fill the coming void, or maybe I was just curious to see who else wanted to approach energy projections from a gamified lens. Either way, I put out my energy-industry bat signal for the Fantasy Energy League only to see my email inbox and my Twitter feed blow up.

The power industry is facing a nuclear power dilemma, according to a report published by The Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS assessed the economic viability and performance of nuclear power plants operating in the United States and concluded that the retirement of these plants will likely result in the adoption of coal and natural gas for baseload power generation, two energy sources that contribute to carbon dioxide emissions.

GE announced today that it sees a future in housing its renewable generation businesses (onshore and offshore wind, hydropower) alongside its grid businesses which include substations and transformers plus solar, storage and distributed energy resource (DER) control software. GE Renewable Energy CEO Jerome Pecresse said in a press conference that the move will simplify the lives of GE’s customers by giving them one point of contact for all of their renewable energy power needs.

Federal energy regulatory commissioner Cheryl LaFleur announced on Twitter on January 31 that she will not be seeking a third term and will be leaving the commission later in 2019. She said in the tweet that this is not the outcome she had hoped for but that she felt very lucky to have served on FERC for more than 8 years. She said she plans to serve out the rest of her term, which is up at the end of June.

This week, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that rather than investing in the Haynes, Harbor and Scattergood natural gas power plants to meet the requirements of a 2010 law related to a practice known as once through cooling, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) will phase them out in favor of renewable energy.

Last week, Sunrun announced that its bid to supply 20 MW of residential solar + storage capacity into the New England ISO Forward Capacity Market for 2022-2023 was approved. According to Chris Rauscher, Director of Policy and Storage Market Strategy for Sunrun, this is not a pilot project or an experiment in any way.

Thailand plans to build the world’s largest floating solar farms to power Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy and to boost the country’s share of clean energy.

Instead of a wall, build a first-of-its-kind energy park that spans the 1,954 miles of the border between the United States and Mexico to bring energy, water, jobs and border security to the region.

Today, Smithfield Foods and Roeslein Alternative Energy (RAE) announced that they have formed a joint venture called Monarch Bioenergy to produce renewable natural gas (RNG) across Smithfield’s hog farms in Missouri.

This week, diversified real estate acquisition and development firm Commercial Development Company and transmission developer Anbaric said they plan to build a renewable energy center at Brayton Point Commerce Center in Somerset, Massachusetts. The site is the former home of the Brayton Point Coal Plant, the cooling towers for which were demolished two weeks ago. (video of demolition at the end of article at this link).

United Parcel Service Inc. has agreed to buy the equivalent of 170 million gallons of renewable natural gas from Clean Energy Fuels Corp. over the next seven years in what the company described as the biggest-ever deal involving the alternative fuel.