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.

Global funding for clean-energy projects sagged in 2018 after China’s decision to curb subsidies dragged down installations in the world’s biggest solar market.

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.

PG&E Corp.’s woes are spreading to the East Coast.

EIA expects non-hydroelectric renewable energy resources such as solar and wind will be the fastest growing source of U.S. electricity generation for at least the next two years. EIA’s January 2019 Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) forecasts that electricity generation from utility-scale solar generating units will grow by 10 percent in 2019 and by 17 percent in 2020. According to the January STEO, wind generation will grow by 12 percent and 14 percent during the next two years. EIA forecasts total U.S. electricity generation across all fuels will fall by 2 percent this year and then show very little growth in 2020.

A California incubator that houses and nurtures clean-energy startups is expanding into venture capital.

Tata Power Co. is seeking to set up electric vehicle chargers in the Indian capital, a company official said, as one of the most polluted cities on earth plans an ambitious push toward cleaner vehicles.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is set to hold more auctions for offshore wind power, plugging a current gap in tenders for the next three years that the industry has said would harm turbine makers and hamper green targets.

Corporations signing PPAs with renewable energy power producers have been on the rise for quite some time but in 2018, the group as a whole purchased more than double the clean energy they purchased in 2017.

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.

PG&E Corp. is seeking court protection to amend or cancel power purchase agreements with suppliers as part of its bankruptcy proceedings.

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.

Fortune 500 brands and a range of other non-utility entities are catalyzing America’s growing demand for renewable energy by purchasing a record amount of wind power in 2018, according to a recent report by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). Consumer demand combined with policy stability and low, stable prices helped wind power capacity installations rise to the third strongest quarter in the industry’s history.

Over the past year, U.S. Wind got calls “every day” to sell a lease the energy company bought for $1 million in 2015 in its push to build a wind farm off the New Jersey coast.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released a sweeping package of environmental measures Thursday that has pitted progressives in the House Democratic caucus against moderates over how far to go in pursuit of resetting the climate change debate.

Australian hydrogen infrastructure developer H2U confirmed today that it will use Baker Hughes NovaLT gas turbine generators at its South Australian Renewable Hydrogen and Ammonia Supply Chain Demonstrator in Port Lincoln.

Details on the solar and battery storage components are still up in the air, but the wind farm itself was comfirmed to include 120 turbines manufactured by GE Renewable Energy Inc.

Opponents of the U.S. congressional Democrats’ Green New Deal point to Germany as an example of a country where similar policies have backfired. They should take a closer look; the U.S. could do well to imitate Europe’s largest economy.

The Jackson Smart Energy District aims to achieve the parent firm’s 2040 clean energy goals some 15 to 20 years earlier. Those goals include producing 40 percent of the district’s energy needs from on-site renewable sources.

This week ComEd said that it’s furthering innovation in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood with the installation of renewable energy powered lights along the walkway to the Beethoven Elementary School. Bronzeville is home to the first “microgrid cluster” in the United States.

As renewable energy proliferates, major players like Hitachi, ABB and GE are seeing value in combining grid and generation business units.

Pennsylvania is promoting a new roadmap to electrify transportation by designing policies and setting targets to get more electric vehicles on the roads.

A new paper is being launched today at the House of Lords in London that challenges government, regulators and companies working on clean energy to make gender diversity a key priority. The paper has been produced by the EWiRE network, set up by Regen to provide a vibrant network for women working in clean energy.

New Hampshire is preparing to follow the lead of other New England states and create a system for procuring renewable energy on behalf of residents.

When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, it cut short nearly 3,000 lives, displaced thousands of families, and subjected the commonwealth to the longest energy blackout in U.S. history. This tragedy invited a new vision for Puerto Rico’s battered electric grid, and I hoped that a central tenet of the rebuilding effort would be an aggressive move toward safe, abundant and resilient clean energy.

RenewableUK highlighted last week that Great Britain’s onshore and offshore wind farms generated more electricity than any other source of power last week.

The U.S Jones Act affects the construction of U.S. offshore wind farms by limiting certain activities in U.S. waters to U.S.-registered vessels owned and operated by qualified U.S. citizens. Much of the expertise in the construction of offshore wind farms is European based. The logical mechanism for marrying European expertise with U.S. firms qualified to operate where the U.S. Jones Act applies are joint ventures. Such joint ventures must take into account the stringent U.S. citizenship requirements applicable to the ownership and operation of Jones Act vessels.

In order for wind energy power purchase agreements (PPAs) to see sustained uptake in central Europe, sellers need to take a lead in managing long-term risks including power price forecasting, covenant strength and buyer inexperience.

The offshore wind market in the is lagging behind other areas of the energy sector when it comes to embracing – and understanding – the potential of digital technologies.

Tucson Electric Power (TEP) is building a 247-MW wind farm that will help the company more than double its use of renewable energy by 2021. The company hired EDF Renewables North America to construct it in a Build and Transfer Agreement (BTA) worth approximately $370 million.

It was a milestone deal, not for its size but for the number of parties. In January, five big companies, each with differing energy requirements and renewable strategies, agreed to pool their investment and collectively purchase 42.5 megawatts from a North Carolina solar project.

Over the past week, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced multiple funding opportunities to renewable energy research including $130M for early-stage solar and $28M for wind. Further, the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium announced up to $7M in funding for offshore wind.

Yesterday, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) unveiled the 14th edition of its Global Wind Report, which it says has been completely revamped.

MAN Energy Solutions, VERBUND and New Brunswick Power are all experimenting with zero-carbon hydrogen as a future fuel source. Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems is also considering the alternative.

Amazon.com announced today that it plans to purchase the energy produced by three new renewable energy projects as part of its long-term goal to power all Amazon Web Services (AWS) global infrastructure with renewable energy. These projects – a 91.2-MW wind farm in Donegal Ireland, a 91-MW wind farm in Bäckhammar, Sweden, and a 47-MW wind farm in Tehachapi, California – will deliver an expected 670,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually.

Two years after Britain had its first coal-free day since the Industrial Revolution, the nation’s network operator is readying itself for life without any fossil fuels.

Enel Foundation has signed a landmark agreement to become the exclusive Global Knowledge Partner of the 2019 Clarion Power and Energy series of events.

Cities and renewable electricity have, respectively, become the habitat and energy of choice globally. The two are increasingly inseparable. Urbanization and electrification trends have turned cities and the grid into leading platforms for human activity, presenting unique opportunities for today’s utilities to partner with municipalities to achieve their smart city goals.

The Redford Center, a California-based non-profit co-founded in 2005 by Robert Redford and his son, James, announced that every morning, from April 15-22, 2019, the organization will post an episode a day of "Renewable Therapy for Climate Anxiety," a conversational mini-series featuring Filmmaker, James Redford, and Matthew Nordan, clean energy investor and managing partner at MNL Partners. In each two-minute installment, the pair explores questions that nag environmentalists when it comes to renewable energy. Watch the first episode below.

This weekend at its “Earth Day Every Day Fair,” Green Mountain Power announced an energy vision to have a 100 percent carbon free energy supply by 2025 and 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. The utility said the move is among the most aggressive carbon targets for a utility of GMP’s size in the country.

As plans for wind farms across New England’s waters progress, fishermen continue to express concerns about the impact of the burgeoning offshore wind industry on their livelihoods.

Building solar and wind energy projects on potentially contaminated lands can be a golden opportunity, both effective and cost-effective, for developers. The 120-acre Reilly Tar & Chemical Corporation Superfund site was recently redeveloped with a utility-scale solar farm and is a prime example of the reuse potential inherent in thousands of Superfund sites, brownfields, retired power plants, and landfills.

Last week, LM Wind Power said it had successfully manufactured the world’s first wind turbine blade to surpass 100 meters in length.

This week global energy and infrastructure group, Eversheds Sutherland, announced that it helped Ball Corporation secure two virtual power purchase agreements (VPPAs) – one wind and one solar – for a total of 388 MW of new renewable energy. According to Ball, these agreements will allow the company to power 100 percent of its corporate, packaging and aerospace operations electricity load in North America with renewable energy by the end of 2021.

Buildings account for nearly four-tenths of U.S. energy consumption through heating, cooling and other electricity use, according to the Energy Information Administration. And if that energy comes from fossil fuels, it releases more greenhouse gases that drive human-caused climate change.

Developing carbon capture and storage technology and low-carbon hydrogen is “a necessity not an option” for the UK to achieve a net zero carbon economy by 2050.

British people need to fly less, drive electric cars, eat little meat and turn their home thermostats down to 19 degrees Celsius (66 Fahrenheit) in order to rein in greenhouse gases damaging the planet.

Even though there is only one small existing offshore wind farm in the Northeast, the 30-MW Block Island wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island, two announcements this week highlight the growing economic importance of the region's burgeoning offshore wind industry.

ComEd sees a significant role for energy storage on Illinois’ electric grid as the state works toward realizing its ambitious renewable goals.