ty

China adds 5.2 GW of photovoltaic capacity in Q1 2019

In the first quarter of this year, China added 5.2 gigawatts (GW) of installed photovoltaic (PV) capacity, according to the National Energy Administration. The figure is a drop from the 9.65 GW in the same period of 2018, due to the new policy on the construction of PV facilities for 2019 having been issued later in the year than similar policies issued in earlier years.




ty

FERC's data shows US renewable generating capacity has surpassed coal

According to an analysis by the SUN DAY Campaign of data just released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), U.S. electrical generating capacity by renewable energy sources (i.e., biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, wind) has now - for the first time - surpassed that of coal.




ty

New White Paper explores grid parity and the solar renaissance

Today, solar power has become cheaper than the production cost of any other existing conventional power generation technology. The arrival of grid parity heralds a milestone in the history of energy production. It means solar energy being commercially viable without any subsidies or state support; producing energy with the lowest possible environmental impact.




ty

November fest: POWERGEN University offerings now on tap

POWERGEN International Week truly begins Monday, Nov. 18 with POWERGEN University. This year’s set of three, four and eight-hour PGU classes include detail educations on crucial power generation topics such as effective project management, gas turbine long-term service agreements, safety processes, digitalization, business plans for emerging markets, microgrids, cogeneration, machine learning, boiler technologies, building the generation fleet of the future and the consideration of natural gas vs. diesel for on-site power gen-sets.




ty

Utility partners with climate experts on new carbon emission goals

Community stakeholders and climate experts from the University of Arizona are helping Tucson Electric Power to build an energy portfolio that supports reliable, affordable and increasingly sustainable service over the next 15 years.




ty

75 MW of community solar coming to Illinois in Ameren, ComEd territories

Arlington, VA based Summit Ridge Energy (SRE) announced that it will acquire 11 projects from Pivot Energy in Illinois totaling 29 MWs, increasing SRE’s portfolio of community solar projects in the state to more than 20.




ty

Small Missouri utility proposes big pivot to clean energy in latest resource plan

Missouri’s smallest investor-owned utility is charting a dramatically different course two years after being acquired by new owners.




ty

Sunverge raises $11 million for utility distributed energy resource controls

The round was led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund with participation from Equinor Energy Ventures and Evergy Ventures




ty

Renewable energy takes center stage at POWERGEN ASIA and Asian Utility Week

In a region of the world where coal is still king, there is room for renewables. This was a takeaway from the Ministerial Address and Joint Opening Keynote at POWERGEN Asia and Asian Utility Week. The two annual events kicked off Tuesday, Sept. 3, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.




ty

Sustainable Women Series: How to Build a 75 Percent Net Zero Community

What does it take to build a 75 percent net zero community and the “largest Emerald-rated community” in the world? Tabitha Crawford explains how her team combined solar, HVAC, and sustainable building practices to build 250 net zero homes while keeping construction costs at a 3 percent premium.




ty

City Utility Trials Voltage Optimization in First for Western Canada

The city utility for Lethbridge, Alberta is starting a voltage optimization trial that is expected to deliver energy savings for customers while reducing overall energy usage in the city’s electricity distribution system.




ty

Tesla Plans China Plant With 500,000 Vehicle Capacity

Tesla Inc. is planning a factory in China with a capacity for 500,000 vehicles a year, its biggest step beyond the U.S. so far, according to people familiar with the matter. Tesla is due to sign a memorandum of understanding with local entities in Shanghai, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk was to be in the city for an event with the government on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported earlier. A Tesla representative in China didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.




ty

Global Investments in Electricity Beat Investments in Oil and Gas for Second Year in a Row

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.





ty

Midwest Utility Turning to Cows, Landfills for a Gas Alternative

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.




ty

German Utility Secures Consumer Management of Smart Home Data

German-headquartered integrated energy company, Innogy, has selected distributed computing solutions provider, Intertrust, to help smart home consumers to securely manage data.




ty

Someday Soon Your Utility Will Help You Select Your Next Car

Utilities are — and have been for a long time — seeking better ways through which they can engage with their customers. According to Jeff Hamel, director of energy and housing partnerships at Google, the Nest smart thermostat, which is part of the hardware product line that Google provides, is a good example of a simple way that utilities are partnering with their customers.




ty

IRENA: Egypt Could Meet Up to 53 Percent of Electricity Demand with Renewables

Egypt has the potential to meet up to 53 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, according to a new report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). The Egypt Renewable Energy Outlook, released in Cairo last week in the presence of Egyptian government officials and regional decision makers, found that pursuing higher shares of renewable energy could reduce the country’s energy bill by up to $900 million annually in 2030.






ty

Opportunity, Or What Happens When Utilities and Regulators Get Serious about Decarbonization

Utilities across the country are increasingly taking a proactive role on initiatives to advance clean energy and grid modernization. But to hear a utility CEO like Kipp focus unequivocally on one of the most critical drivers for the growth of solar and storage was striking — and yet another sign of the sector’s ongoing transformation.




ty

DigiKoo: A German Solution to the Utility Data Sharing Conundrum

For most of their history, in North America, electrical utilities have been centralized distribution networks. Utility operated generation resources are the hub of the network and electricity flows one-way via distribution networks largely controlled by the same utilities. In this model, there has been little reason for utilities to share anything but a small slice of data about their operations with anyone else other than themselves.





ty

Electricity is the ‘New Fuel of Choice’ Says IEA

According to the International Energy Agency, “2018 is the year of electricity” and global electricity supply “is being transformed by the rise of renewables”.




ty

University Spin-off’s Small Packets Are a Big Deal for Energy Industry

It’s been a whirlwind year for Packetized Energy, the Vermont-based clean energy sector start-up spun off from a U.S. Department of Energy project in 2016 by three University of Vermont electrical engineering faculty, Paul Hines, Mads Almassalkhi and Jeff Frolik.




ty

Forecasting the Energy Community: Open Call for the Inaugural Season of a Fantasy Energy League

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!




ty

Nevada National Security Site Installs Solar, Begins Era of Net-zero Energy Buildings

The Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) inaugurated the Mercury Solar Project late last month and moved it further down the path of sustainability, giving NNSA its first net-zero-energy building.




ty

Report: Smart Grid Upgrades Offer Less Risk, More Flexibility than Power Lines

A decade ago, Maine regulators faced dueling proposals to meet projected load growth north of Portland: upgrade a long-distance transmission line to carry more power, or strategically install batteries and distributed generation.




ty

Crowdfunding Sites That Allow True Investment in Renewable Energy and Sustainability: Alternatives to Kickstarter & Indiegogo

Crowdfunding has become a popular tool for people and organizations to use to test out their new ideas for green products while securing funds to begin operations. The most well-known crowdfunding websites, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, have helped a significant amount of projects in renewable energy and sustainability get off the ground, projects that have been the focus of previous installments in my ongoing articles series about crowdfunding in energy.




ty

A Study in Emissionality: Why Boston University Looked Beyond New England for Its First Wind Power Purchase

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.




ty

Energy Storage Outlook for 2019: E-Mobility, Clean Energy Technologies and Lithium Batteries

2018 was another defining year for the lithium supply chain as the global population continued to make remarkable strides towards the implementation of clean energy and transportation. Although the clean energy and transportation industries are only in their early days, it has become apparent that renewables and electrification of transportation are an irreversible trend, one that has begun to disrupt many established industries.




ty

Treadmills That Generate Electricity May Be Headed For Your Gym

As scientists seek more ways to harness nature’s power to produce renewable energy, there’s one energy source burned naturally every day that isn’t being harnessed: calories.




ty

California municipal utility will phase out three natural gas power plants in favor of renewables

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.




ty

New York utility installing battery to reduce peaks in non-wires alternative plan

This week, ConEdison subsidiary, Orange & Rockland Utilities (O&R) and Key Capture Energy (KCE) announced that O&R has selected KCE, an Albany-based, independent developer of utility-scale battery storage projects, will plan, design, install and operate O&R’s new battery storage project in Pomona.




ty

World’s largest utility joins EWF’s energy blockchain ecosystem

Last week, the Energy Web Foundation (EWF) announced it had officially signed more than 100 affiliates in an effort to become the world’s largest blockchain ecosystem.





ty

FERC's data shows US renewable generating capacity has surpassed coal

According to an analysis by the SUN DAY Campaign of data just released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), U.S. electrical generating capacity by renewable energy sources (i.e., biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, wind) has now - for the first time - surpassed that of coal.




ty

Sweden's EV boom under threat as electricity demand outstrips capacity

Sweden’s ambitious plan to drastically cut emissions from transport by bringing millions of electric cars onto the road could be derailed by a lack of power capacity for new charging stations in major cities.




ty

Massachusetts incentivizes energy storage systems for commercial property owners

Commercial property owners with existing energy storage systems, or owners considering implementing an energy storage system, may be able to benefit from a recent order by the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities (DPU) allowing utility companies to pay customers who agree to rely upon their energy storage systems and dispatch the energy during peak events.




ty

Utility partners with climate experts on new carbon emission goals

Community stakeholders and climate experts from the University of Arizona are helping Tucson Electric Power to build an energy portfolio that supports reliable, affordable and increasingly sustainable service over the next 15 years.




ty

Small Missouri utility proposes big pivot to clean energy in latest resource plan

Missouri’s smallest investor-owned utility is charting a dramatically different course two years after being acquired by new owners.




ty

Utility device and data management technologies revenue could exceed $22 billion by 2027edit

A new report from Navigant Research released this week says that revenue from device and data management technologies could grow from approximately $14.8 billion in 2018 to more than $22.1 billion in 2027 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.6%.




ty

Norway Utility Plans to Invest as Much as $8.1 Billion in Renewables

Statkraft AS, Norway’s state-owned power company, said it plans to plow as much as 60 billion kroner ($8.1 billion) into renewable energy around the world in the coming years after the government boosted its funding.




ty

Dam safety, dam monitoring, dam repair news and more

Collection of articles covering safety and security of dams and civil structures




ty

Utility GDF Suez Plans to Double European Renewable Capacity by 2025

GDF Suez SA plans to double renewable power production capacity in Europe over the next decade as the utility shifts its focus away from developing more historic natural gas and nuclear energy sources in the region.




ty

German Utility's Race for Renewables Seen as Too Little, Too Late

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.




ty

The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change Forever

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. 




ty

Solar power growth impacting UK electricity sector

Q2 of 2015 saw a large increase in the generation of electricity from solar PV in the UK, with the growth having a significant impact on electricity market prices and other supply factors.




ty

WavePOD MHK Prototype Receives US$3.1 Million in New Funding

According to a press release from Aquamarine Power, the marine hydrokinetic (MHK) Wave Power Offtake Device (WavePOD) 10th-scale prototype, a project run jointly by Aquamarine Power, Bosch Rexroth and Carnegie Wave Energy, has received US$3.1 million in new funding. 




ty

Seattle City Light evacuates 711-MW Skagit hydropower project amidst wildfire

Safety concerns raised by wildfires have forced utility Seattle City Light to evacuate employees from the town of Diablo, the nearby 711-MW Skagit hydropower complex and the North Cascades Institute's Environmental Learning Center.