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.

Though likely impossible to find anyone in the climate justice or environmental community to say that any sitting U.S. senator — Republican or Democrat — has been an adequate leader on the issue of global warming, 28 Democrats (and two Independents) were garnering soft applause for their overnight effort on Monday into Tuesday as they pulled an all night session focused exclusively on climate change.

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.

From David and Goliath to Luke Skywalker and the Death Star, the human race has been reminded again and again that big things have their vulnerable points. The U.S. power grid, sometimes called the world’s largest machine, is no exception.

For many years, and particularly since the Energy Policy Act of 2005, U.S. federal income tax policy has served a dual function as both tax and renewable energy policy. However, last month House Ways and Means Chairman David Camp (R-MI) released an expansive tax reform proposal in which a number of credits and deductions for renewable energy technology were recommended for repeal, effectively rewriting renewable energy policy by a proposed elimination of renewable energy from the federal tax code.

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.

In December, I asked my panel of professional green money managers for their top three stock picks for 2014. You can find the full list and descriptions of the companies here.

Hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV) were the belles of the ball at recent auto shows in Los Angeles and Tokyo, and researchers at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) continue to play a key part in improving performance and durability while driving down costs.

UPDATE: The U.K. government yesterday launched its Domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (d-RHI), which pays households that generate heat and hot water using renewable energy systems such as solar hot water, geothermal heat pumps and biomass heating.

China, the world’s biggest investor in renewable energy, reiterated plans to boost construction of solar and wind power plants along with projects to transmit electricity from the clean sources.

The Americans and the French have been getting on well of late. President Francois Hollande’s successful visit to the White House in February is a case in point — despite the backdrop of his high-profile sex scandal.

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.

Today, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its renewable electricity generation projections as part of its "Annual Energy Outlook — 2014" (AEO2014).

The clean energy economy of the Empire State has just received a serious booster shot, thanks to the newly opened Battery and Energy Storage Technology (BEST) Testing and Commercialization Center in Rochester, New York. Made possible by state seed funding and a public-private partnership between the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST) and DNV GL, the center will serve to address two of the greatest challenges facing New York-based energy storage companies: access to technology and cost.

The combination of rooftop solar and electric vehicles (EVs) is the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of the renewable industry. Although EVs started off slowly the second time around (the first time was in the early 1900s), in some areas EVs are becoming ubiquitous. Whether it's a combination of tax credits, car pool lane preferences, expensive gas or concern about the environment, the trend seems unstoppable.

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.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns the world must triple its use of renewable energy AND develop nuclear power to avoid the worst ravages of climate change. OK. But what’s the optimal percentage of each to develop?

The Obama administration is considering cutting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants by reaching beyond the plants themselves — an unusual approach that could run afoul of anti-pollution laws.

Does nuclear energy deserve a seat at the table alongside renewable energy technologies in weaning us off of fossil fuels and transitioning into a cleaner energy world? A new report published yesterday suggests not only will newer small modular reactor (SMR) technology be at least as expensive as larger reactors, it won't fit the needs of a more flexible grid system, and its development will siphon away funding from the truly renewable energy options that need it.

Bracing for greenhouse-gas rules from the Obama administration, two industries are staking out different positions. Coal companies are pledging to sue. Electric utilities are ready to talk.

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.

Fossil fuel-funded front groups repeatedly spread disinformation on renewable energy standard and net metering policies in an effort to overturn pro-clean energy laws in 2013 and 2014.

The Obama administration has taken a lot of heat for creating climate change rules that bypass Congress. But recent court decisions are bolstering the president’s clean air agenda – and they come at a crucial time.

Iceland is moving closer to plugging European homes into the volcanic island nation’s geothermal and hydropower reserves via what would be the world’s longest power cable, according to the country’s largest energy producer.

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.

Nuclear power, which accounts for 19 percent of the nation's electricity generation, is facing some serious challenges. Not only did its hoped-for renaissance fizzle out, four reactors shut down last year, another is closing this fall, and the nuclear giant Exelon says it will announce plant closings by the end of this year if market conditions don't improve.

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.

Power infrastructure in the East African countries of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda is inherently connected to their economic growth. As urbanisation and industrialisation fuel the need for electricity in cities, the demand for electricity in East Africa is expected to grow at approximately 5.3 percent per year until 2020. To meet these requirements, generation capacity would have to increase by 37.7 percent in Uganda, 96.4 percent in Kenya, 75.3 percent in Tanzania and 115 percent in Rwanda. The government, in conjunction with development partners, must build a more favourable business environment to facilitate growth.

The U.S. National Climate Assessment report states bluntly that streets in coastal cities are flooding more readily, that hotter and drier weather in the West means earlier starts to wildfire seasons, and that every region of the nation already is seeing real effects of climate change.

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.

An observer of Sir Richard Branson over say 20 years might have remarked how much older he looked as the keynote speaker at the BIO convention this week in San Diego. He struggled for words at times and was visibly tired by the end of his hour on stage; but he had lost nothing of his charm, nor had he varied in his iconoclastic approach to building great enterprises or his views on technology in the face of climate change.

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.

"Big data" is playing an increasingly big role in the renewable energy industry and the transformation of the nation's electrical grid, and no single entity provides a better tool for such data than the Energy Department's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) located on the campus of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Imagined by NREL leaders who foresaw the possibilities for high performance computing (HPC), the ESIF's HPC data center is fulfilling the goal of handling large and complex datasets that exceed traditional database processes.

China is mandating that electric cars make up at least 30 percent of government vehicle purchases by 2016, the latest measure to fight pollution and cut energy use after exempting the autos from a purchase tax.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government plans to spend 15 billion rupees ($250 million) on programs to boost solar power and reform electricity supply to farmers to end blackouts in India.

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.

Energy use in the U.S. can be split into two large (very, very large) pies. One is electricity for use in homes, buildings, and industry, and the other is transportation, which is powered primarily by liquid fuels (gasoline and diesel) from oil. There are some exceptions, and small overlapping fuel uses — direct industrial use of liquid fuel (a fairly significant quantity), some liquids burned to make electricity (this used to be a significant amount, but is now only a very small amount), and now a very small amount of electricity used to power electric vehicles (EVs).

Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, the world’s biggest maker of luxury vehicles, is offering drivers of the i3 city car speedier and smaller auto-battery chargers in an effort to make driving electric vehicles more practical.

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?

People speak reverentially about the electricity grid, and rightly so. The U.S.’ electricity grid is an awesome technical, operational, and public policy accomplishment. Who can deny the matchless service it delivers, occasional weather-related breakdowns notwithstanding? In fact, acts of Mother Nature — Hurricane Sandy, say — only highlight its otherwise stellar reliability. And rural electrification, like rural telephony, is a triumph of public policy with foresight.

Buyers of Volkswagen or Audi hybrids will find themselves getting yet another sales pitch as they leave a U.S. dealership next year -- to buy a home power network that allows them to charge their new cars using only solar power.

July was a hard month for the stock market and clean energy stocks in particular. My broad market benchmark of small cap stocks, IWM, fell 7 percent and is down 2.7 percent for the year, while my clean energy benchmark PBW fell 9% and has slid into the red for the first time. It is down 0.1 percent for the year to date.

It's the environmentalist's third rail question: "Should we promote nuclear power as an expedient way to reduce CO2 emissions?" On the one hand, nuclear power generates electricity with almost negligible CO2 emissions — potentially a good way for our society to reverse the current global warming trends. On the other hand, nuclear power is...well...nuclear. Problems related to waste disposal, proliferation and high costs have not been solved, and we still have the occasional disaster.

More than a fifth of the world's electrical power production now comes from renewable sources and in 2013 renewables accounted for more than 56 percent of all net additions to global power capacity. These remarkable conclusions come from this year’s Renewables Global Status Report (GSR) from REN21. This highly-regarded annual analysis — the 2014 edition was released this summer — concludes that renewable electricity capacity jumped by more than 8 percent overall in 2013, to produce some 22 percent of all global power production. Total global installed renewable electricity capacity reached a staggering 1,560 GW in 2013.

The new report from the Taxpayers for Common Sense shows that oil companies paid just 11.7 percent of their U.S. income in federal taxes over the last five years, and the “smaller” companies included in the study that reported positive earnings only paid 3.7 percent. To achieve such a low tax rate, oil companies were able to take advantage of special tax breaks and loopholes that allowed them to defer more than $17 billion in taxes they would have otherwise owed.