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.

DBL Partners, the same venture capital fund that supported SolarCity for many years, has led the largest venture capital funding for distributed energy in Africa. Off Grid Electric announced today that it raised $25 million in a Series C investment.

Off Grid Electric, based in California and Tanzania, is installing solar in over 10,000 homes and businesses per month with what it calls “its radically affordable solar leasing platform.” The company designs, manufactures, sells, installs and services solar home units in Tanzania and is announcing today that it will be entering

Can a home be beautiful, powered entirely by solar energy, use sustainable heating and cooling systems and save it’s owners roughly $3,500 a year? Why, yes it can. Just ask Joanne Coons, who built her award winning, single-family, Net Zero Energy Home in 2010. Sustainable Woman Joanne talks Net Zero standards, efficient appliances and goods, her 10kW solar panels and more.

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.

Today’s topics include the impact of section 201 tariffs on module supply and prices. Will they go up? We’ll also talk about developing the next generation solar workforce based on a new report about energy jobs in the U.S.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This week Autogrid announced that it entered into a partnership with Swell Energy to provide software for managing Swell’s growing fleet of distributed energy resources (DER).

It’s lighter, abundant and finally ready to take on Tesla. Hydrogen-powered vehicles are gearing up to challenge electric vehicles again in the race for mass-market clean cars. This week, a much larger group of companies signed on to a global coalition aimed at drumming up government support for the technology that Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has derided as “ mind-bogglingly stupid” for cars. The firms also pledged to find a cleaner way to produce the gas.

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.

A new roadmap for the future of Ohio’s electric grid can benefit all types of interest groups, but the next few years will be critical for the plan to achieve its goals.

Has the environment for electricity generation changed dramatically since the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan began its slow exit from public and regulatory consciousness several months ago? Not really!

The Gentleman coal plant was once the linchpin of Nebraska’s electricity grid, its twin smokestacks visible for miles across the prairie. Now, the state’s biggest power source is routinely pushed aside to make room for more wind and solar energy.

After wallowing in limbo for the first part of 2018 awaiting re-authorization, the Loan Program Office (LPO) at the Department of Energy is back in business with about $40 billion burning a hole in its proverbial pocket. Mike Reed, Director and Chief Engineer of the Technical and Project Management Division of the LPO and his team are planning to hit POWER-GEN 2018 in Orlando, Florida in December to identify people and projects that might need financing.

When California voted to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045, it sent a signal to the market about which types of power generation technologies will remain competitive into the future. And according to Mike Ferguson, Director, North America Energy Infrastructure and Sustainable Finance with S&P Global Ratings, what California does, other states may soon follow.

Two big trends are converging in the world of power generation -- Combined Heat & Power (CHP) and biomass. CHP is gaining ground in many areas of the world due to the fact that its superior efficiency often results in major economic gains (CHP takes the waste heat from a turbine and uses it to generate steam which is often uses in district heating, or in industrial processes).

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.

Italy’s Five Star Movement used to rave about towns like Montieri, a village in the verdant Tuscan foothills that burns little coal or natural gas. Instead, the local power plant harnesses steam rising naturally from hot springs deep underground to generate electricity.

Renewable energy muscled out coal to become Germany’s biggest source of electricity for the first time last year, helped by a surge in solar panel installations and coal-plant closures.

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.

The power industry is facing a nuclear power dilemma, according to a report published by The Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS assessed the economic viability and performance of nuclear power plants operating in the United States and concluded that the retirement of these plants will likely result in the adoption of coal and natural gas for baseload power generation, two energy sources that contribute to carbon dioxide emissions.

On January 31, 2019, Georgia Power, the largest utility in the state submitted its newest integrated resource plan (IRP) to the state utility commission for approval.

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.

Thailand plans to build the world’s largest floating solar farms to power Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy and to boost the country’s share of clean energy.

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.

Annual solar energy production in North Carolina jumped 36 percent in 2018, according to the latest government data – firmly placing North Carolina as the No. 2 solar-producing state in the nation.

Yesterday, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) announced the launch of the Access Clean Energy Savings (ACES) initiative. ACES provides technical assistance to help rural electric cooperatives and public power utilities apply for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Rural Electric Savings Program (RESP), which provides zero-interest 20-year loans for improving energy efficiency.

Big Oil wants to put a box in your hall closet that works like a human brain, can cut the lights, stop the refrigerator and will know how you move about in the privacy of your home better than you do.

As the world responds to the challenges of climate change, energy systems are evolving, and evolving fast. The past 10 years have seen the rise (and dramatic cost reduction) of renewable energy such as wind and solar, to the extent that they are no longer considered alternative energy. They have become mainstream energy sources. Now, what will be the “next big thing” as the world shifts to a low carbon future?

“Recognizing leaders in the power and energy industry not only gives us the opportunity to celebrate them and the projects that they are involved in, it also enables us to learn vital business and life lessons from these often exceptional individuals. We find out what makes them tick, what frustrates them and the processes they follow to address challenges – this is often inspiring, eye-opening stuff and cannot but contribute to the growth of the sector.“

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.

Wind or solar now represent the least expensive option for adding new power generation capacity in approximately two-thirds of the world.

The Kariba Dam has towered over one of Africa’s mightiest rivers for 60 years, forming the world’s largest reservoir and providing reliable electricity to Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Here’s the latest wrinkle in the battery boom: National Grid Plc is paying consumers to tap electricity from their power-storage systems.

This week artificial intelligence (AI)-driven energy storage services provider Stem said that it had formed a partnership with New York-based private equity company Syncarpha Capital to build 28.2 megawatt-hours (MWh) of large-scale storage projects co-sited with solar in Massachusetts.

Clarion Energy & iTEN Media announce the launch of POWERGEN India 2020 co-located with Indian Utility Week & DISTRIBUTECH India

On Tuesday, July 23 at the HydroVision International keynote, Vice President Marla Barnes asked the audience to close their eyes and envision their next vacation. “Are you sitting on a beach? Are you packing your family into the car for a wild adventure? What do you see,” she asked.

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, California’s Glendale Water & Power (GWP) received approval from the Glendale City Council to move forward with a plan to repower the aging Grayson Power Plant with a combination of renewable energy resources, energy storage and a limited amount of thermal generation.

The latest crop of utility participants includes NRG Energy, Cleco Corp., Entergy, Louisville Gas & Electric/Kentucky Utilities, AEP’s distributed energy ventures group AEP OnSite Partners and Hindustan Power from India.

It may be time to start building power plants in Texas again.

British Columbia plans to proceed with construction of the Site C hydroelectric dam on the Peace River in the Canadian province’s northeast.

With the potential for disaster at hydropower projects around the world, the lack of organized training programs becomes a prominent consideration in how companies manage their assets.

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