European Union leaders intend next month to agree on a timeline for developing energy and climate targets for 2030, delaying a final decision on the polices, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Tesla Motors Inc.’s plan to build what co-founder Elon Musk bills as the world’s largest battery factory could shake up the power industry and trigger a bidding contest between states eager for the 6,500 jobs the $5 billion investment could create.

The idea of a “smart grid” has taken center stage — an evolution of advanced technologies that make the availability of a smarter, more efficient electrical power grid possible. These technologies aim to address the complex challenges facing grid systems today, which stem largely from its aging infrastructure and a use case model that has evolved over the years. With power systems over a century old, the field instrumentation on the grid is quickly reaching its life cycle limit, which adversely affects overall grid reliability and efficiency.

Offshore wind development is being pushed further out into deeper waters, emphasizing longer, higher-capacity transmission systems. Most newer offshore wind farms from Europe to the U.S. are looking at hundreds of kilometers of transmission lines: the U.K. Crown Estate's Round 3 allocations, interconnection systems from Germany's North Sea to the U.K.'s National Grid Western Link, and the proposed Atlantic Wind Connector in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic.

More than two dozen legislators are pulling an all-nighter tonight (Monday March 10) on the Senate floor to talk about climate change and what actions must be taken.

Most talk of "energy efficiency" and “sustainability” is insidious or naïve, or even misdirected. We all should switch off the lights when we leave a room, use efficient, gas-fired tankless water heaters (even when they are uneconomical), and work in LEED certified buildings. Intelligent thermostats — Nest, for instance — may regulate our air-conditioning to assure comfort while generating savings, and shaving “peak” load on the electricity grid. Using LED lamps and star rated appliances is admirable too. These solutions and behaviors, while praiseworthy, are beside the point; we should rather favor “supply action” before demand response.

Talks between Germany and Norway about how to boost the trading of electricity from renewable sources are being held up by concerns that the power cable running under the North Sea won’t ever make money.

Solar Wind Energy Tower Inc. won approval from an Arizona city to develop a $1.5 billion project that would use ambient desert heat to create a draft to generate electricity, in a concrete colossus that would be the tallest structure in North America.

New York State is pushing its utility industry to shift away from a century-old business model into a system that can accommodate more power from solar and wind.

Ohio is debating the sharpest break from a three-decade campaign by 29 U.S. states to reduce reliance on fossil fuels by promoting power from renewable sources.

Electric utilities seeking the renewal of their franchises, and politicians seeking municipalization, both ignore the transformative possibilities of the microgrid. Microgrids represent a promising new business opportunity for both existing utilities and new entrants in the electricity business. Microgrid deployment will also provide the same public benefits as municipal control, likely more.

Meeting the world’s energy supply needs by 2035 will require $40 trillion of investment, as demand grows and production and processing facilities have to be replaced, the International Energy Agency said.

On what effect the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan will have on transmission development in the country, including potentially a need for more transmission to transport added renewable energy, Frank Poirot, senior media specialist of transmission with Northeast Utilities (NYSE:NU) told TransmissionHub that increasing the grid's capacity to transmit power is one way to meet the growing need and enable renewable generation.

On the heels of the EPA’s new carbon rules proposed by President Obama on June 2, I wanted to take a closer look at a potential disruptive technological breakthrough: taking CO2 waste streams and turning them into saleable, value-added feedstocks. Certainly, the deployment of renewables, energy efficiency, smart grid, and energy storage technologies offer some of the most cost-effective options for dramatically reducing emissions. But if you believe that fossil fuel power plants (along with other large-source emitters like steel and cement producers) will remain a part of our industrial ecosystem for some time to come, then capturing and utilizing C02 from these emitters is an important and critical piece of the carbon-management equation.

The European Union needs an ambitious emissions-reduction goal, targets for energy- efficiency and renewables as well as tools to foster investment under its planned 2030 policies, an advisory panel to 14 ministers said.

Utilities, get ready: Massachusetts is in revolutionary mode again. No one is throwing tea into Boston Harbor, but the state is trying to sink outmoded ways of moving around electrons.

The argument industrial polluters and their friends in Congress are making against the new Environmental Protection Agency plan to curb power plant carbon emissions should sound familiar. After all, it's the same scare tactic they trot out every time the government proposes stricter emission controls: exaggerate the cost, overstate job losses, and completely ignore the benefits.

For most people, the best way to build a green or fossil-free portfolio will be to use mutual funds or an investment advisor. The exceptions are those who like to do things for themselves, and understand the significant advantage that saving just a fraction of a percent in annual fees can make to the long term performance of a portfolio.

The U.K. will keep a target to cut greenhouse gases by half through 2025, Energy Secretary Ed Davey said, foiling the Treasury’s effort to weaken the target.

If all energy production channels were employed, the United States has sufficient resources to eliminate all coal, gasoline and diesel combustion in all demand sectors and replace them with natural gas, wind and solar electricity firmed and shaped with both grid-scale and distributed energy storage. I believe that we can reach a zero-air-pollution, coal-free, crude-import free, all-electric low-cost energy future. We have energy rhetoric and technology to get there; do we have leadership and will?

China is considering providing as much as 100 billion yuan ($16 billion) in government funding to build more charging facilities and spur demand for electric vehicles, according to two people familiar with the matter.

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.

More than 100 world leaders converged upon New York City today to discuss international efforts to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change. The list of speakers at the UN Climate Summit included U.S. President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, French President François Hollande, and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli.

Four energy companies are proposing an $8 billion renewable energy project that would supply Los Angeles with more than twice the power generated by the Hoover Dam.

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.

The European Union is seeking to speed up the creation of a common energy market to help its shift to a low-carbon economy and boost security of energy supplies amid a natural-gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine.

The green revolution and, in particular, renewable energy products such as solar power, wind turbines, geothermal and algae-based fuels are not waiting for viable technology — it already exists in many forms. What they are waiting for is a massive sea change in our antiquated financial accounting systems.

European Union leaders backed the most-ambitious carbon emissions goals of any major economy, in a bid to crank up pressure on the U.S. and China ahead of climate talks in December.

U.S. electricity markets face years of higher prices as clean-air regulations shut more coal-fired power plants than earlier forecast, cutting supply and forcing producers to rely more on natural gas.

As more intermittent renewable capacity is added to grid networks around the world, the need for greater system flexibility in order to cope with the variable supply is growing. In parts of the Europe, grid operators complain that balancing the system is becoming more and more difficult as new renewable sources are added, requiring ever more complex management techniques, as well as repeated use of polluting and inefficient standby capacity. Surges of solar and wind power are often not fully utilised, causing some to question the wisdom of adding further variable renewable capacity.

Every time the U.S. holds midyear elections, the country almost always goes against the incumbent President’s party, which is always sobering to whomever holds The White House. And this week’s elections were no exception.

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.

This year’s Project of the Year Award finalists truly represent the evolving energy landscape and exciting global efforts to transition to a cleaner, renewable future. The five projects vying for the Renewable Energy Project of the Year crown include a wide range of innovative technologies from coal-to-biomass conversion to concentrating solar power.

The news about the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to limit carbon pollution from existing power plants just got even better: the proposed Clean Power Plan (CPP) can save the power industry and its customers — us — as much as $2 to $4 billion in 2020 and $6 to 9 billion in 2030, while cleaning our air and modernizing the electricity sector.

The Brazilian government is seeking to award contracts in an auction tomorrow for natural gas- and coal-fueled power plants, reversing a drive that previously favored renewable-energy projects. It would lead to the first new thermal plants in three years, after the government scaled back such projects and awarded wind contracts starting in 2009 and solar energy earlier this year.

The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) — whose members include Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, BP, and others — was caught red-handed late last month when a leaked internal presentation revealed a coordinated campaign to stomp out climate and clean energy progress in California, Oregon and Washington by propping up over 15 front groups that purport to represent the views of concerned citizens and the broader business community.

Shinzo Abe’s re-election as prime minister risks undercutting Japan’s commitment to clean energy at a time when incentives are under review and the nation’s utilities say they can’t accommodate capacity already planned.

Renewable energy stakeholders are well aware that clean energy is slowly but steadily transforming the energy landscape and that message couldn’t have been more clear at the recently concluded Power-Gen International, the largest show for the traditional power generation industry. Since all forms of power generation are represented at the show through the four co-located conferences, PennWell calls the second week in December "Power Generation Week."

Earlier this month, when EPA proposed a new health-protective air quality standard for the pollutants that form “ozone,” some critics predictably pounced on it as another example of a long string of “job-killing EPA regulations.” Yet last week, we learned that the U.S. economy created about 320,000 new jobs in November, and average wages are starting to rise as the labor market tightens.

The online community of readers who visit RenewableEnergyWorld.com is an important aspect of the news and information that we offer renewable energy stakeholders. We often post news that we feel will get people to view important topics from new angles, offering insights and opinions about technology, policy and more. Often that leads to engaging and informative discussions that add even more value to the article that we have posted.

In May of 2014, Speaker of the House John Boehner responded to a climate change question with, “listen, I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change. I am astute to understand that every proposal that has come out of this administration to deal with climate change involves hurting our economy and killing American jobs. That can’t be the prescription for dealing with changes to our climate.” Speaker Boehner is not the only one reluctant to enter into the debate on climate change. In a March interview Mitch McConnell responded to a climate change remark with, “For everybody who thinks it's warming, I can find somebody who thinks it isn't…”

In June, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a rule to restrict the amount of carbon dioxide released from power plants. The rule calls for reducing carbon 30 percent by 2030 over 2005 levels. Many have praised the aggressive proposal, while others are less favorable.

Hybrid car sales have taken off in recent years, with a fuel-sipping combination of electric- and gas-powered technologies that simultaneously deliver energy efficiency, low emissions, and strong performance. The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) — which played a pivotal role in putting hybrids on the road — has applied a similar strategy to its talent base and partnerships, bringing together the best minds from the worlds of research and industry.

Clean energy investments in India increased to $7.9 billion last year and are expected to surpass $10 billion in 2015.

The UN climate conference in Lima set the stage for Paris in 2015. Next year’s accord is to provide a working, albeit not a final, answer to the question: Is it possible to keep global warming at or below the 2 degree Celsius limit? This limit is considered the boundary beyond which the negative climatic, economic and social consequences of climate change are thought to become intolerably severe and potentially irreversible.

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

In a previous article, I had a conversation with former-CIA chief Jim Woolsey to discuss one of America’s greatest national security vulnerabilities, its power grid. The issues that Woolsey has been concerned with for over a decade has been the ease in which a terrorist group or other actor (think North Korea for example) could attack the grid and plunge the country into darkness for months, if not years. And if that seems far-fetched, just recall how a tree limb fell in Ohio in 2003 and blacked out the entire Northeast and part of Canada for several days.

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.

When I worked at the New York Attorney General's Office, we sued coal-fired power plants because their air pollution was making people sick. But in some towns, I saw that the reliance on coal really had people in a bind. The coal plant was making them sick, but it was also a major tax generator for the town. If the plant closed, the town might have to lay off teachers and cops, in addition to losing the plant jobs.

The renewable energy industry has come a long way in relatively little time. The costs of renewable technologies continue to go down, while renewable capacities at many utilities continue to go up. Although, in many cases, renewable technology is mature and ready for utility-scale deployment, state and federal production and investment tax policies appear less evolved.