Sales of which electric car plunged the steepest leading into the U.S. pandemic slowdown? Which automaker reaffirmed its commitment to hydrogen fuel cells? This is our look back at the Week In Reverse—right here at Green Car Reports—for the week ending May 8, 2020. Our biggest combination of stories this week related to the most...

HydroVision International is the world’s largest hydropower industry event. 2015 attendance shattered all the conference’s records with nearly 3,800 registered attendees from 60 countries.

At last night’s PennWell Awards Ceremony, Kim Greene, a 24-year veteran of the power industry, was named the POWER-GEN 2015 Woman of the Year.

Greene began her career as an engineer with Southern Company in 1991 and ascended to leadership roles at Mirant and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), before returning to Southern Company Services in 2013 to become President and CEO. She was a keynote speaker at POWER-GEN International in 2014.

Today, she serves as chief operating officer of Southern Company and is responsible for overseeing system operations, which include generation, transmission, engineering and construction services, system planning, and research and environmental affairs, as well as the company’s competitive wholesale generation businesses.

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.

The idea of communities, cities, states, or countries being powered by 100 percent renewable energy used to be perceived as fantasy. Enter the Go 100% Renewable Energy Project, which aims to perpetuate the clean energy movement by creating a revolutionary online platform that showcases real-time 100 percent renewable energy progress. So far, the project has mapped 8 countries, 59 Cities, and 61 Regions/States, representing more than 62 million people who have set, reached, or surpassed official 100 percent renewable targets in at least one sector (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling). Discover what’s driving the shift to 100% RE, the common trends emerging, and learn more about the Go 100% project with Founding Director of the Renewables 100 Policy Institute Diane Moss!

Carbon Lighthouse, a San Francisco-based energy-efficiency company, raised $27 million to expand its engineering and marketing efforts. GRC SinoGreen Fund led the oversubscribed funding round and JCI Ventures, SV Tech Ventures and EBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Ulupono Initiative also participated, according to Carbon Lighthouse Chief Executive Officer Brenden Millstein. Other investors included Ekistic Ventures, Tom Steyer’s Radicle Impact Partners, former General Motors Co. Vice Chairman Steve Girsky and Tesla Inc. Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey B Straubel.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a total of $6.7 million in funding to six recipients, with the goal of developing innovative marine energy technologies "capable of generating reliable and cost-effective electricity from U.S. water resources."

In commemoration of Flag Day, PennWell Corp. is partnering with the Folds of Honor Foundation to raise money for military families. The effort is in conjunction with PennWell’s Wall of Honor, a traveling wall highlighting the names of our military service personnel (past and present) and displayed at all PennWell power generation events in North America. The wall displays the branch, the company and the name of each person honored.

US utility Dominion Energy has filed grid modernization plans with the Virginia State Corporation Commission.

Reparations for the worst-ever U.S. natural gas leak will involve cow-dung duty.

Green Mountain Power’s commitment to innovation delivered bigger savings to customers as New England recently hit a new yearly peak for power demand.

Earlier this week SIMEC ZEN Energy announced details of the first of many planned renewable energy projects for South Australia. The Cultana Solar Farm, a 280-MW solar power plant expected to generate 600 GW-hours of energy annually in Australia’s sunny climate is expected to begin construction in early 2019 according to details in a press release.

Continuing on U.S. President Trump’s campaign promise to revive the coal industry, on Tuesday, August 21, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced plans to significantly alter the Clean Power Plan (CPP), shrinking some of the emission reduction targets that were set in place under the CPP by former President Obama.

According to energy expert, Amory Lovins, CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the energy industry has vastly misunderstood the scope of the energy efficiency resource. Lovins claims that it’s design, not technology that can achieve incredibly energy efficiency gains. Using his own home in the Colorado Rocky Mountains as an example, Lovins shows how simple changes in design have allowed him to grow banana crops using only natural sunlight and reduce the amount of energy he uses significantly.

When innovators come up with the idea for the next great technological breakthrough, the first roadblocks to seeing that idea to fruition are typically funding. Among renewable energy inventions, this need is typically filled through wealthy private investors, venture capital firms, or government grants. But today, in the age of the Internet, budding entrepreneurs have taken their funding needs online through crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Integrated energy company E.ON and BNP Paribas Personal Finance are piloting a new energy efficiency financing scheme for UK consumers.

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.

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.

Digital solutions could revolutionize energy trading if they were adopted more widely across the market.

A 40-year-old law that’s been key to the growth of renewable energy in the U.S. may be due for an overhaul.

The California Energy Commission (CEC) is funding a study that it hopes will result in lower utility bills for customers and more control over electricity load for utilities. The project will involve 100 homeowners in Southern California who will install various types of distributed energy resources (DER) such as thermostats, load control switches, batteries, water heaters and eventually electric vehicle chargers.

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.

The European Union unveiled its long-term vision on combating climate change in a push for more ambitious action on the environment just days after U.S. President Donald Trump rejected his government’s warning on the economic costs of global warming.

This week, Electric Vehicle (EV) charging network provider, ChargePoint, announced that it has raised $240 Million in Series H funding, which is more capital than any other EV infrastructure company in the world, surmising in its press release that the move to electrify transportation is accelerating.

Exxon Mobil Corp. will use renewable energy to produce oil in West Texas.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Italy’s government is dragging its feet on incentives for geothermal power and one local politician has decided to take his protest to the extreme.

Findings in a recently published European Union report showed that the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia make up over 30 percent of the EU countries that have already met their 2020 renewable energy targets.

Trump's proposed budget severely cuts the EPA and DOE's efficiency and renewables offices, but allocates funding for R&D, clean coal and advanced nuclear.

Ameren is preparing to test a Canadian company’s software that could someday help usher in a radically different business model for the utility.

Seattle, WA-based LevelTen Energy helps corporate buyers of renewable energy find and purchase energy from solar and wind projects within North America through its procurement platform. The company says its solution reduces the cost, complexity, and risk of renewable energy power purchase agreements (PPAs), by incorporating analytics, aggregation, and process best practices.

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.

Global demand for air-conditioning is projected to triple over the next 30 years, as the planet warms and urban populations grow, particularly in emerging markets. Meeting that demand will call for significant investments in new cooling infrastructure and the electrical generating capacity necessary to power it. Although traditional cooling technologies are expected to become more efficient in coming years, countries will need to plan for these additional loads, which will be expensive. Emerging markets can also make use of district cooling, an approach that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which consists of six Middle Eastern countries — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman — have successfully adopted.

GE Renewable Energy announced at HydroVision that it has signed two hydropower contracts in the U.S. one for FirstLight’s Northfield Mountain project and one for PG&E’s Caribou One hydropower station.

Last week, Corvias announced that it had entered the final phase of its geothermal installation and energy upgrades effort at the U.S. Army’s Fort Polk in West-Central Louisiana, a milestone that once complete will not only modernize the aging infrastructure but save the Army significant money and benefit military families.

ENGIE Storage has announced it will supply and operate a 19 MW/38 MWh portfolio of six energy storage sites that will contribute to the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target Program and participate in ISO-New England wholesale markets.

The Boeing Company is set to design and build a large, military unmanned air vehicle (UAV) in Australia, with the first flight set for 2020. The Australian government will invest A$40 million in the project.

New York-based artificial intelligence (AI) specialist, Dataiku, is expanding in the Asia-Pacific region with a major new office in Sydney. The company will be hiring dozens of local employees, from customer-facing staff to data scientists.

A Chinese fund has invested A$45 million to accelerate the development and commercialisation of translational health and medical research outcomes from South Australia. The investment will enable researchers from the University of Adelaide, University of South Australia, the state’s hospitals and other institutions to develop proof of concept, undertake clinical trials, and bring new drugs and technologies to the global market.

Australian urban planning and design and economics consultancy Cistri is using its evidence-based insights to help Asian developers design and plan urban communities that enhance quality of life.

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.

The latest news on global small hydroelectric facilities from November-December 2014

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.

The secretary general of the United Nations is frustrated with the pace of negotiations for what’s intended to be a crucial agreement limiting global warming.

Climate change pledges submitted so far from the world’s leading economies won’t be enough to keep the planet from warming dangerously, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Monday in New York.

Proposals to reduce heat-trapping emissions need to be “a floor, not a ceiling,” he said.

The global increase in temperatures will exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) under the national pledges already submitted to UN, Ban said. That’s the goal scientists and the UN have set to avoid the worst effects due to global warming.

The proposals submitted to date “will not be enough to place us on a 2-degree pathway,” Ban said.

Without any changes to global emissions, the world is on track to warm by 4 degrees Celsius or more, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change Janos Pasztor said earlier this month.

World leaders have five months to go before a meeting of almost 200 nations in Paris that’s intended to seal a new global pact to cut planet-warming carbon emissions. If successful, the agreement would be the first ever to require both developed nations like the US and growing economies like China to address climate change.

“The pace of UN negotiations are far too slow,” Ban said. “It’s like a snail’s pace.”

The U.S., the world’s biggest historic source of greenhouse gases, pledged earlier this year to cut its emissions by as much as 28 percent by 2025. The European Union has promised a 40 percent cut by 2030. Several other major economies, including Australia and Japan, have yet to submit climate plans to the UN.

India's Union Cabinet has approved cost revisions for its intergovernmental agreement with the Royal Government of Bhutan to implement the 1,200-MW Punatsangchhu-1 hydroelectric project on Bhutan's Punatsangchhu River.