Welcome to the Electrek Green Energy Brief. Put together by our Electrek authors, the Energy Brief is a daily technical, financial, and political review of important green energy news.
Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island is the United States’ first offshore wind farm. The 30-megawatt, five-turbine offshore wind farm began commercial operations in December 2016 and generates enough energy to power 17,000 homes. And it turns out, it’s perfectly safe, and sometimes even beneficial, for fish.
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GE Renewable Energy announced yesterday on Twitter that the first GE Haliade 150-6 megawatt (MW) wind turbine has now been installed at St. Nazaire, France’s first offshore wind farm.
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First Solar, the largest US-owned solar panel manufacturer, today announced that it’s going to provide 260 megawatts (MW)DC of Ohio-made solar modules to Nevada Gold Mines, the single largest gold-producing complex in the world.
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Boston-based solar company ClearPath Energy and Maitland, Florida-based Castillo Engineering, a solar engineering firm, are building six community bifacial solar farms in New York State.
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Eco Wave Power, which produces clean electricity from ocean and sea waves, today announced that it has entered an official agreement with Port Adriano, Spain, to build Spain’s first wave-energy power plant.
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Danish wind giant Ørsted and Danish offshore wind service and support company ESVAGT announced on Friday that they will invest in the world’s first service operation vessel (SOV) that can operate on green fuels.
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West Virginia’s largest solar farm will sit on the site of the 5,800-acre Hobet Mine, one of the state’s largest former coal mines, which went bankrupt in 2015.
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Germany’s economy and climate ministry today announced a more ambitious target of clean energy making up 80% of its power mix by 2030 – a bump up from its previous target of 65%. Currently, 40.9% of Germany’s power mix consists of clean energy.
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Portugal’s new Socialist Party-majority government has moved its target of reaching 80% clean energy in electricity production forward to 2026, four years earlier than previously planned.
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Spanish-German wind giant Siemens Gamesa has started production of its first B115 blades at its facility in Aalborg, Denmark. The blades will be used on its SG 14-236 DD offshore wind turbine, which will have an output of 14 megawatts (MW) and a rotor diameter of 236 meters (774 feet).
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President Joe Biden will today authorize the use of Title III of the Korean War-era Defense Production Act (DPA) to rapidly step up US production of minerals for electric vehicle and storage batteries.
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Wind and solar, the fastest-growing sources of electricity, reached a record 10% of global electricity in 50 countries in 2021, according to a report released today by independent energy think tank Ember. Overall, clean sources generated 38% of the world’s electricity in 2021, beating coal, at 36%.
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As UK prime minister Boris Johnson is due to unveil his energy plan this week, a British cabinet minister made a suggestion yesterday on a news program that he thinks would win the support of communities who live near onshore wind farms. Could it work?
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The US Department of the Interior today announced that it has now completed its environmental review and will hold its first offshore wind energy lease sale off the Carolinas on May 11.
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Columbus, Ohio, headquartered American Electric Power’s 998-megawatt (MW) Traverse Wind Energy Center in Oklahoma is now online. It’s the largest single wind farm built at one time in North America.
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As the global energy crunch deepens, thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, new analysis from the nonprofit think tank Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) looks at how home insulation and heat pumps could reduce the UK’s need for Russian gas. The approach could certainly be applied in other countries, too.
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The UK’s total pipeline of offshore wind projects has now reached 86 gigawatts (GW), according to new research published today by not-for-profit renewable energy trade association RenewableUK.
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Dust on solar panels reduces their output significantly, so they need to be kept clean. But what’s the best way to do that? Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they have a solution.
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Environmentalist, author, and journalist Bill McKibben wrote about an innovative idea that would help curb Europe’s dependency on Russian fossil fuels, and the Biden administration might actually implement the plan.
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Power plant developers and operators are expected to add 51 gigawatts (GW) of new solar and battery storage projects to the US power grid from 2022 to 2023, which will make up 60% of new generating capacity, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).
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Norwegian energy giant Equinor and UK-headquartered bp announced yesterday that they have made an agreement with New York City to transform the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal into a major offshore wind operations and staging hub.
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2021 was a record-breaking year for investment in and deployment of clean energy, battery storage, and EVs in the US, according to the “2022 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook” published today by BloombergNEF (BNEF) and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE).
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On January 12, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) would hold an offshore wind energy auction for more than 488,000 acres in the New York Bight. It’s now complete, and the auction achieved $4.37 billion in high bids. It’s a huge leap forward for the fledgling US offshore wind industry
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