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.
The world’s first floating offshore wind farm, Hywind Scotland, has been in operation since 2017. On its fifth birthday, its operators shared how it’s going and what they’ve learned.
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Swedish multinational power company Vattenfall announced today that it has successfully conducted large-scale seabed surveys with uncrewed robotic boats at several of its offshore wind farms in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK.
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Japan’s first large-scale offshore wind farm started operation on December 22 – a major milestone in the country’s transition to renewables.
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Heating and cooling equipment multinational Johnson Controls has developed an air source heat pump prototype that can operate in temperatures below -20F (-29C) as part of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Residential Cold Climate Heat Pump Challenge.
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The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced this week that it wants to significantly raise the minimum common lightbulb efficiency level from 45 lumens per watt to over 120 lumens per watt.
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All three blades for the prototype of the Vestas V236-15.0 MW offshore wind turbine have arrived at their final destination, and they’ll now be installed and spinning soon.
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Researchers at the solar-cell technology institute Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB) have developed a tandem solar cell that converts 32.5% of incident solar radiation into electrical energy – a world record.
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Australia’s federal government has declared its first offshore wind farm zone. It’s off Victoria’s south coast, in the southeastern region of the country.
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The International Energy Agency (IEA) today released “Coal 2022,” its annual market report on the fossil fuel’s sector. Here’s where the world currently stands, according to the report, which is considered a global benchmark for the demand, supply, and trade of coal.
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GE Renewable Energy announced today that its Haliade-X wind turbine, the first 12 MW+ turbine built, has received a full type certificate for operations up to 14.7 MW from DNV, the world’s largest independent certification body.
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Tokyo’s local assembly today ruled that all new houses built by large-scale homebuilders in the Japanese capital must have solar panels installed from April 2025.
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First Solar, the largest solar panel maker in the US, announced today that it will supply clean energy company National Grid Renewables with 1.6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels – and that’s a very big deal.
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German manufacturer Kopp has launched a foldable, four-panel solar rooftop system that comes with everything it needs for installation in reusable transport boxes.
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A 90 megawatt (MW) solar farm will be built around the runway of an airport in Sweden, and it will be the largest solar power purchase agreement (PPA) contracted in Sweden to date.
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Erthos, an Arizona energy tech company that makes Earth Mount Solar PV, a mounting system that secures solar panels flat to the ground, signed an agreement with renewable energy developer Industrial Sun for a 100+ megawatt (MW) solar project in Texas. It will become the only utility-scale solar farm mounted flat on the ground to date.
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The US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced $8 million in research funding for six agrivoltaics projects – that is, pairing solar with farming.
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The first of 62 transition pieces to be manufactured for Vineyard Wind 1, the United States’ first utility-scale offshore wind farm, has just been moved to the port of Avilés, Spain, for shipment to Massachusetts.
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Wind and solar are set to account for over 90% of global electricity expansion over the next five years, overtaking coal to become the largest source of global electricity by early 2025, according to “Renewables 2022,” the latest edition of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) annual report on the renewable sector.
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The US Department of Commerce (DOC) has determined that four out of eight Chinese solar companies that it’s been investigating are “attempting to bypass US duties by doing minor processing in one of the Southeast Asian countries before shipping to the United States.” Here’s what it means for the US solar industry.
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The largest landfill solar project in North America, a 25.6 megawatt (MW) solar farm in Mount Olive, New Jersey, is online – which means yet another dumpsite has been turned into a revenue-generating, clean energy asset.
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Montgomery County, Maryland, will be the US East Coast’s first county to ban natural gas in new buildings.
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Hitachi Energy just launched wireless Spark Prevention Unit indicators that help prevent wildfires by enabling remote monitoring.
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France and Ireland signed contracts on Friday to advance the Celtic Interconnector, a subsea electricity link to allow the exchange of electricity between the two EU countries. It will be the first interconnector between continental Europe and Ireland.
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The US Interior Department today announced that an oil and gas lease sale for Alaska’s Cook Inlet will take place on December 30 – a concession made to Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) so that he’d vote for the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
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