Monthly Archives: February 2010
In Portland, Growing Vertical
Scott Baumberger/SERA Architects Urban gardening used to seem subversive. People planted tomatoes in public parks, strung their hops to rooftops to make homebrew and reclaimed empty lots as community farms, never mind the property owner. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Scott Baumberger/SERA Architects An architectural rendering of the trellises designed to shade the […]
A Utility Will Help Homeowners Go Solar
TXU Energy, a Texas utility with two million customers, is making it possible for homeowners in the Dallas area to lease or buy rooftop solar-power systems in one of the first programs of its kind. The energy provider said Wednesday that it had signed a deal with SolarCity, a Silicon Valley start-up that finances and […]
Wal-Mart’s Green Mandate to Suppliers
Wal-Mart has announced an initiative that aims to achieve major reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions from its supply chain. As Stephanie Rosenbloom reports for The New York Times, the company said it would cut 20 million metric tons of emissions by the end of 2015 by focusing on popular product categories with the highest embedded carbon […]
A Secretive Start-Up Raises the Curtain
K.R. Sridhar, co-founder and chief executive of the Silicon Valley start-up Bloom Energy, holds up a stack of fuel cells in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday. The company’s first product is a huge box of fuel cells that it hopes will allow homes and businesses to generate their own electricity. In The New York Times […]
Putting In a Good Word for Algae
A European lobbying group weighed in Tuesday on a fierce debate over the environmental value of using algae to produce biofuels for vehicles. The group, the European Algae Biomass Association, said members of its scientific committee were “confident that the commercial production of algae biofuels can be achieved with a positive carbon footprint and will […]
Loan Guarantee for a Big Solar Power Plant
The United States Energy Department on Monday offered a $1.37 billion loan guarantee to a company planning to build a large-scale solar power plant in the Southern California desert. The loan guarantee, for BrightSource Energy of Oakland, Calif., is the largest given for a solar project. BrightSource’s 392-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is the […]
America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate
The amount of wind power that theoretically could be generated in the United States tripled in the newest assessment of the nation’s wind resources. Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm […]
U.N. Report to Quantify the Environmental Impact of Major Companies
A United Nations report to be released this spring finds that the world’s top 3,000 companies cause $2.2 trillion in environmental damage per year, according to the consulting company commissioned to write the report. The report is being compiled by the United Kingdom-based environmental consulting firm Trucost, and is based on eight years of research […]
Three Firms Quit Climate Lobby
Three influential multinational corporations have decamped from the United States Climate Action Partnership, a 3-year-old lobbying group. They cited mounting concerns over the direction of climate change legislation, particularly concessions to the politically influential coal sector. In separate statements, BP America, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar all announced they were discontinuing their membership in the group, which […]
California Solar Startup and German Industrial Giant Forge Partnership
The German industrial giant Ferrostaal will use solar technology from the California startup eSolar in power plants to be built in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa. The partnership, announced on Thursday, comes a month after eSolar, which is backed by Google and other investors, signed an agreement with a Chinese industrial company […]
Energy 