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.
A federal appeals court yesterday ruled that Arizona utility Salt River Project, which services most of the Phoenix metropolitan area, can be held liable for violating antitrust laws because it charged customers who own rooftop solar panels higher electricity rates.
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Homeowners who buy rooftop solar can track both the installation process and PV panel performance once their system is online with a free app from three-year-old software technology startup, Bodhi. The app makes buying into rooftop solar much more user-friendly.
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The British government today announced that it will provide £31.6 million ($42.5 million) to fund the development of floating offshore wind projects in order to reduce the UK’s dependency on increasingly expensive natural gas.
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US big-box retail and grocery stores have enough rooftop solar potential to power more than 7.9 million homes – utilizing all that unused space for clean energy is a no-brainer.
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The US Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management today gave final permitting approval to South Fork – New York’s first offshore wind farm. It’s now the second US offshore wind project authorized by the US government to begin construction.
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The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has forecast in its January Short-Term Energy Outlook that rising electricity generation from clean energy such as solar and wind will reduce generation from fossil fuel-fired power plants over the next two years.
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Crown Estate Scotland, which held Scotland’s largest-ever auction of offshore wind permits, today announced that it has selected 17 projects out of 74 applications in its ScotWind Leasing round.
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Houston-headquartered renewables company EDP Renewables North America has completed a 200-megawatt (MW) solar farm in Randolph County, Indiana, northeast of Indianapolis. It’s now the largest-capacity solar farm in Indiana.
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The Department of Energy (DOE) yesterday launched the Better Grid Initiative to develop new and upgraded high-capacity electric transmission lines, which is great news for electric vehicles, charging infrastructure rollout, and clean energy in the US.
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US electricity generator operators have scheduled 14.9 gigawatts (GW) of electric generating capacity to retire during 2022, and the vast majority of those scheduled retirements – 85% – are coal-fired power plants, reports the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) today.
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Offshore wind power needs energy storage and power regulation, and Ocean Grazer has invented an offshore energy storage system that will sit at the bottom of the sea and manage the flow of electricity through the power grid. The Dutch startup showcased their new product, Ocean Battery, at CES in Las Vegas last week.
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Clean energy made up 46% of Germany’s net public power generation in 2021. That was down from 50% in 2020, according to Fraunhofer ISE, the largest solar energy research institute in Europe.
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In 2011, Scotland set a target of reaching 100% clean electricity consumption in 2020. And last year, the country almost reached its target – 98.6% of gross electricity consumption came from renewable sources, according to the Scottish government’s December energy statement.
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Stockholm-headquartered Hexicon, which develops floating offshore wind farms and designs patented dual turbine floating wind power platforms, has formed a 50-50 joint venture with Bologna-based clean energy developer Avapa Energy to develop offshore floating wind farms for Italy.
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More wind power capacity was installed in the US than any other generating technology in both 2019 and 2020, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).
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Hawaii is going to get a 30 megawatt (MW) solar farm in 2022 – one of the first utility-scale solar farms on the Big Island.
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China’s largest offshore wind farm was connected to the grid at full capacity on Saturday, December 25. It transmitted power through undersea cables.
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Clean energy sources generated a record 834 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity, or about 21% of all electricity generated in the US in 2020, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported yesterday. That includes wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, and geothermal.
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The US Department of the Interior announced on Tuesday that it has approved two solar farms, with a third nearing final approval, on public lands.
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The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the largest coal mining union in the US, issued a statement yesterday that said they were “disappointed” in Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) announcement on Sunday that he would not vote in favor of the Build Back Better (BBB) legislation. UMWA International president Cecil E. Roberts urged Manchin to “pass something that will help keep coal miners working, and have a meaningful impact on our members, their families, and their communities.”
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Coal production is forecast to reach an all-time high in 2022, and then after a couple of years, plateau as demand flattens, according to the latest annual market report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), released today.
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The UK’s Hornsea Two offshore wind farm, soon to be the world’s largest when it’s completed in 2022, will produce its first power before December 31 of this year.
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Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed paper-thin biodegradable zinc batteries. Once the batteries are expended, they break down in soil within weeks.
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Spanish-German wind giant Siemens Gamesa’s SG 14-222 DD prototype offshore wind turbine has produced its first electricity and delivered it to the grid at the test center in Østerild, Denmark.
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